The key thing at the close phase is: Thou shall segment. 

Segmentation is critical in the closing stage of the buyer’s journey. If you try to use the same message to talk to everyone, it is not going to resonate. The CEO cares about different issues than the CTO, and the CTO cares about different issues than the compliance officer; this means you need to be dialed in and segmenting in a way that makes you hyper-relevant. 

Lead generation begins with buyer personas and the buyer’s journey. 

Let’s say you are trying to attract a CTO, a leader of compliance, and a CEO--these would be your buyer personas. Early on in their sales cycle, the personas are in the early stages of their buying process. Towards the middle, the personas are considering different options before making their way to the end--where they make a purchase decision. This process is called the buyer’s journey, the active process that someone goes through leading up to a purchase. 

To help your prospects and clients better understand your identity management solutions and what they specifically do, it is all about educating and building trust at scale.

Educating and building trust with your prospects/clients must be done in the Consideration and Decision stages of the buyer’s journey. These are not issues you will be able to tackle in the awareness stage--where someone is just starting to research a broad-based problem. 

There are tons of assets you can offer to educate your prospects on your solutions. 

It would be easy for your board members, investors, and C-Level executives to say you have the disruptive technology. However, if the marketplace does not perceive it to be disruptive, is it disruptive? 

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional depiction of an ideal client. Personas are based on real data and light educated speculation. Buyer personas are not just demographics and behaviors. Buyer personas are the aggregation of everything. 

Your brand is no longer about what you say it is. Branding is the collective wisdom and aggregation of what others say about your brand on search and social media. 

The way to elevate and position your brand as different, helpful, educational, thought-leaders and world-class communicators is by publishing helpful, educational content. 

Accelerating revenue is an enormous leverage opportunity if you can get it done correctly, and a lot of it comes down to product/market fit.

When evaluating whether your company has product/market fit, ask yourself:

• Do you know who your company’s ideal buyer is?
• Do you know their job title? 

To get more exposure for identity management and new leads, the key thing is to differentiate. 

Differentiating requires considering things like who your company is, what makes your company special, and what will make your business stand out from other businesses. Content is one-way businesses can stand out. Using educational, relevant, thought-leadership content helps to attract leads to your business. 

When it comes to finding more prospects for identity management providers, the key thing is to dig deep. 

Observe and analyze your prospects and buyer personas to determine:

• Their watering holes
• Where they hang out online/offline
• What conferences they go to
• What associations they belong to
• The channel programs they belong to
• What social media platforms they are active on
• Specific hashtags they use on their profiles
• The LinkedIn groups they belong to
• The influencers they follow on social media
• The podcasts they listen to
• The analysts they follow 

Differentiation comes down to your identity management firm making it a priority to invest in creating remarkable, educational content. 

Remarkable content means it is so good that people just have to remark on it—whether it is at the water cooler in the office or on social media. You are looking deep visceral emotional reactions:

• “Holy crap! This stuff is awesome! It is so helpful and valuable! I have been looking for something like this for hours, days, or weeks. I cannot believe I finally found it!”
• “What else do they have to say?”

With reactions like these, someone is hanging out on your website, falling in love with your content, and by extension, starting to fall in love with your brand--even though they do not know much about your brand quite yet.

In these scenarios, someone sticks around long enough to realize  “Oh! They have an eBook that goes into a lot more detail on this topic (or a related white paper, special report, planning guide, template, or webinar recording). I have to get that and see what else they have to say.”

That is what allows you to begin a relationship with this stranger/visitor and convert them from a visitor into a lead, which is supercritical for an identity management company that has a sales cycle outside of impulse buys. 

Are you an identity management provider struggling with time management? Do you find yourself wasting time on prospects who turn out to be cold leads? Read this article to learn tactics and strategies to help your identity management business better manage its time.