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.
Fire means Action and Excitement
Fire signifies purity and divinity. It comprises bright and vibrant colours like red and orange. Similarly, natives with prominent fire element are ethical and straight shooters. Diplomacy is their weakest link; however, they are full of energy and zeal.
Fire signifies charisma and brilliance, and it removes the darkness by brightening our surroundings. Similarly, these natives attract others and enlighten them with their brilliance and action. They are persuasive and convince others easily with their thoughts and vision. These natives love to have an audience, like how Fire brings people together during the evenings in winter. For instance, in aboriginal culture, a Sacred Fire is lit before a gathering; similarly, the Holy Fire is lit for a Hindu marriage ceremony. In sales, these natives attract buyers with their charisma and energy. They prefer to use an audience to position their offering.
Fire rules the heart, small intestine, and pericardium. The key function of these organs is to regulate the internal body temperature, and together these organs are known as triple heater or burner. The heart is the source of expression, joy, and excitement, and it is reflected in these natives' persona. They are expressive, joyful, and enthusiastic. Their eyes are bright with a shining sparkle in them. As Fire shows us the path in darkness, similarly fiery natives bright eyes become the vehicle to see this world and remove the darkness of ignorance.
Fire needs fresh Air (agile) as fuel to ignite or spread. It is extinguished when the air supply has ceased. Similarly, prominent fiery natives are constantly looking for new experiences. They are always exploring to meet and mingle with different types of people. Meeting people or trying new things keeps them energetic. Fiery natives need a constant feed of new challenges in life to keep them going, or else they stagnate and become hopeless.
In sales, a fiery seller will reach out to multiple stakeholders within an organisation to position an offering. Since Fire moves quickly and rises upwards only, these sellers' inherent approach is top-down because they prefer to close a deal quickly. They don't have the appetite to build consensus from the bottom up. These natives use their charisma and data insights to impress upon sponsors and executives to position their offerings and let them cascade to their respective stakeholders. In short fiery sellers like the spotlight, visibility, and engagement at the top serves that intent.
In everyday industrial life, Fire is sharp and is used for cutting or moulding glass or metal to give it a new shape or meaning. Similarly, in sales, these natives share new insights to enlighten others and build their arguments by slicing and dicing the data. A Fiery buyer or seller will underpin their business case or position an offering using data and analytics. Selling to a fiery buyer means you need to develop new data-centric insights, else there is likely to be no mindshare or further engagement.
In Nature, Fire is bold, and during high wind, it can be ferocious. It burns everything in its path, and it's not scared or worried about any consequences. Therefore, these natives are bold, adventurous (risk-takers), and impulsive. They are prone to making mistakes because they often don't anticipate the aftereffects before starting any activity.
Fire's inherent energy is to rise in the upward direction and move quickly. Therefore, these natives are swift movers and are always aiming for higher positions or growth in life. Their desire to win in life is high. Consequently, they put their heart and soul into every task assigned to them.
Fire represents heat, which implies that these natives are anger prone. They lose their cool quickly and panic under pressure because losing or finger-pointing in life is something they can't comprehend. It's advisable not to pick fights with these natives because they retaliate or rebel strongly without thinking of any potential consequences. In sales, their desire to win and risk appetite is high because not only do they want to proliferate, but it's the feeling of accomplishment and winning which keeps their spirits alight. Having said that, when a deal is lost, these natives lose their cool quickly and can become hopeless.
Fire represents the future, and it controls the firing of neurons in the brain. These neurons trigger new thoughts and the ability to think ahead in fiery individuals. These natives are visionary because they are hungry, courageous, and can think ahead to the future. Fiery sellers are regarded as rainmakers in sales because inherently, they are hunters, bold and action-oriented. They ensure that the organisation's top line is in black. In terms of potential deal duration, they prefer short term deals because they can't sustain their enthusiasm and energy levels for a longer duration. Multi-year deals with a longer sales cycle are best suited for an earthly seller.
Fire and Water cannot be together because Water extinguishes Fire and becomes a barrier between the Fire and its fuel (Air). Similarly, in price negotiations, a prominent watery buyer cherishes price peddling, whereas a fiery buyer struggles with price negotiations' back and forth nature. They lack patience like a watery buyer and often let others talk on dollars or end up with an overpriced deal.
Generally, fiery natives have medium height sized bodies with slim hips.
Fire's inherent sharpness is reflected in these natives' facial features, like pointed eyebrows, eyes, nose, chin, ears, and sharp teeth. Since Fire moves rapidly, these natives speak and walk quickly and have an easy laugh. Fire is bright and vibrant; hence, these natives prefer bright and colourful clothes to wear.
In Astrology, Fire represents the South direction and is owned by Mars. Mars represents a soldier and the commander of the army. The Martian person is brave, confident, action-centric and follows the order of the King Sun religiously. He is anger prone and hunts on his own like a lone Wolf. Being the King's army commander, he governs and commands his troops by applying the top-down approach.
