In the world of business-to-business (B2B) sales, the buyer and seller relationship plays a significant role in winning or losing a transaction. Creating and nurturing these relationships across multiple stakeholders is a challenging, lengthy, and time-consuming process.
One of the critical activities and constituents of a sales plan is to build the buyer's stakeholder persona that will assist in the relationship-building process. Mapping of these stakeholder personas reveals the type of levers that can be used to develop and nurture long-term relationships with the intent of winning and expanding the sales pipeline. Without the intelligence of the buyer's persona, the sales execution effort will be challenging and profoundly inefficient and ineffective.
Besides, it addresses the risk of losing a sales representative because by capturing and documenting the buyers' persona, you can ensure that gathered intelligence and levers applied in building relationships and influencing negotiations are not lost with a change in guard at the sellers' end.
The framework for creating and destroying five elements is applied to overcome the challenging task of mapping and building the persona. The inherent attributes of each element are used to map and develop the personality of each stakeholder at the buyer's and seller's end in different scenarios.
Let us explore how these elemental attributes assist in building persona maps.
Earth means Nurture, Calmness, and Stability
Earth is the most stable element among the five elements. Like a mother, it provides resources to all living beings to live and grow since the inception and evolution of humankind. Similarly, earthly natives are like a mother who provides resources for her children to live and grow. They provide unflinching and unconditional support to others. Their inherent ability to guide and nurture makes them good mentors and trusted advisors.
The bond between mother and child is everlasting; similarly, these natives are regarded as bondsmen for their friends and family members. People can count on them for their support during challenging times. In sales, these people protect their team members when a deal is lost.
The Earth primarily remains peaceful, except when rare volcanoes erupt or earthquakes or cyclones occur, causing grief to those affected. Similarly, earthly natives stay calm and stable in their day-to-day life. They lose their cool and calmness rarely, like earthquakes or volcanic eruptions.
A mother raises her children with patience, determination and works hard to ensure that they get a good life. Similarly, earthly natives are determined, hardworking, and patient to achieve better outcomes. They are relentless in their effort.
Earth represents the late summer season when fruits are ripe, days are longer with higher temperatures, forcing people to stay indoors, and take rest, and life appears to move lazily. Furthermore, Earth signifies the afternoon when people tend to be sluggish after having their lunch. Similarly, earthly natives are less active and cherish sitting in one place like a couch or an armrest chair. Besides this, the Earth is the heaviest and slowest mover among the five elements. Thus, earthly natives move at the turtle's pace, speak slowly with gravitas, and have a deep voice. These natives communicate and respond at their own pace. So, if you send an email to them, then don't expect an immediate response. Their ability to listen calmly like the slow-moving Earth makes them good listeners.
Earth represents the stomach, spleen, and pancreas because, like a mother, these organs nurture and feed other body organs with nutrients and power to perform their respective function.
The stomach is responsible for the digestive system of the body, whereby food is digested and absorbed. This signifies that these people are open to new thoughts and ideas. On the contrary, if they binge, then it leads to obesity and laziness. Consequently, they struggle to appreciate and comprehend new ideas and initiatives. Moreover, the Earth's inherent energy movement is in the downward direction towards the core due to its gravitational pull. Thus, these natives often have protruding bellies falling downwards.
The spleen's primary function is to filter our blood by removing old, malformed, or damaged red blood cells. Similarly, earthly natives like the spleen can transform slowly with time; they can discard old habits and adapt to new ways of life. In sales, selling half-hearted ideas or window-dressed old ideas to an earthly buyer will be caught and discarded. These buyers keep their 'crap' filter active and switched on.
Like a mother, the Earth generally represents relationships, harmony, and patience. This allows these natives to be good at building and maintaining relationships with friends and family members. Furthermore, the constant churning underneath the Earth is carried out slowly and calmly by amalgamating many layers and items. This implies that earthly natives are collaborative and gel with others easily.
In sales, these sellers prefer bottom-up engagement, underpinned by their ability to build and maintain relationships. In terms of approaching a sales territory, they prefer farming because their risk appetite is low, and slow churning or status quo is their mantra. The rapid and cutthroat environment is overwhelming for them.
Earth represents fear, fixation, and relentless effort because any imbalance in the stomach and spleen causes the mind to be unstable and wander from one thought to another, leading to obsessive thinking and constant worry. Besides that, any imbalance in these organs disrupts their continuous effort in supplying energy and nutrients to other organs. In sales, fear of failing haunts earthly sellers. So, to overcome that, they put relentless effort to win a deal. Their fixation on not failing at any cost gives them a higher desire to succeed. When a deal is lost after putting in enormous effort, they start worrying about the future and drive them to a state where they get overwhelmed by it and become indecisive. Earthly buyers prefer long-term instead of short-term contracts because they are sluggish, and the status quo gives them comfort and security. Moreover, they don't cherish rapid changes in their environment like an airy or a fiery buyer. Positioning a short-term deal to an earthly buyer is futile.
Earthly natives are deceptive because the Earth represents the stomach, which needs a constant food supply. To gather resources like food or money, often these natives will employ deception and cheating. This trait is primarily prominent in earthly natives and to a lesser extent in metal and airy natives.
Earthly natives have well-built body with thick calves and large muscles in men and breasts in women. They have a thick nose bridge, eyes are wide apart, the nose tip is round, and the stomach is round. In general, they have roundness and plumpness to their facial features.
Applying the Astrological lens, Earth represents the South-West direction. This direction is owned by the North Node of the Moon (Rahu in sidereal astrology), which signifies a tendency to evade and win without principles. Besides, earthen attributes like cold, calm, laziness, service for masses driven by a bottom-up approach, planning, and relentless effort are signified by Saturn.
Note: Earth moves slowly around the Sun compared to Venus and Mercury. Earth, Mercury and Venus take 365.26, 87.97 and 224.7 days to complete one revolution around the Sun. Saturn is the farthest and the coldest planet in sidereal astrology and takes 29.4 years to revolve around the Sun. In Sidereal Astrology, Uranus, Pluto, and Neptune are not considered for this analysis.
