Centre Court at Wimbledon is noisy on match day, very noisy. Even when the ball is in play and the crowds are expected to remain silent, there are plenty of goings on to distract players from the game – flash photography, coughing, glare from a spectator’s watch.

Yet, among all the hoodoo, the top players remain focused and are even able to serve a few aces.

Serving an ace is one of the great spectacles in tennis. But they require extreme precision and a deep understanding of one’s opponent.

There’s a lot that we marketers can learn from the great servers in tennis. Regular acers know that key to serving an ace that wows the crowds and their opponent, is knowledge of their opponent’s strengths, weaknesses, swing preferences etc.

This enables them to deliver their serve exactly where they need to in order to win the point. In the same vein, B2B marketers should always try to understand the decision-makers they want to target in as much depth as possible before making a move. The problem is that this still isn’t happening enough in the modern B2B marketing game.

While 92% of B2B marketers segment their market data, just 38% carry out needs-based segmentation to make true personalisation possible – B2B Marketing

No longer is it sufficient to simply use a first name and company name in the body copy of an email, or to create ebooks that cover generic topics. No, now you need to think like a tennis star.

Before serving any content, including emails and infographics, you have to have an in-depth understanding of your prospective decision-makers.

• What are their likes and dislikes?
• When are they likely to be in the office?
• Are they most likely to read your email on a mobile device?
• If they could solve one pain point today, what would it be?

All of this information and more should go into personalising every piece of marketing material you produce.

But how do we find this information? That’s where persona documents come in.

Persona documents are fictional representations of your typical decision-maker. By carrying out in-depth research into your target market you can use the data to build the most likely profile of that demographic.

Sure, this requires some time and effort but it’ll be worth it when you start serving personalised aces that wow prospects, exactly at a time that best suits them. ROI and other metrics will dramatically improve.

This information should be made available to your entire organisation. Doing so will ensure that sales and marketing have a common focus when it comes to understanding prospects, generating leads and converting sales.

With an aligned sales and marketing team that knows their prospects inside and out, you’ll be serving aces that wow your prospects in no time.

If you’re looking for more information about creating informative buyer personas that increase conversion rates and ROI, download our free B2B Buyer Personas: A Marketer’s How-to Guide.