Marketing and product should not be creating personas for sales. Here's why...
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Marketing is great at 1:many communication:
- Content
- Conversion (website, landing pages, etc.)
- Paid campaigns
But sales is all about 1:1 conversations:
- Outbound emails & calls
- Discovery conversations
- Demos
- Negotiations
etc.
1:many language doesn't translate well into sales conversions.
If you rely on marketing-created personas in sales, you'll run into these problems:
⛔️ Low reply rates to cold emails
⛔️ Low-performing sequences
⛔️ Trouble getting access to power in deals
⛔️ Generic, boring sales decks
⛔️ Long ramp times for new reps (especially young SDRs)
My suggestion?
Use what marketing creates as a starting point. And then take it to the next level.
Every persona should have the following:
✅ Priorities
Common priorities you would align the solution to. Speak to the most typical executive priorities your customers have across specific products.
✅ Current solutions
Common solutions to those problems. The people, process, tech they use to get the job done.
✅ Problems
How the current solutions get in the way of the priority. Speak to the impact and "so what?"
✅ Desired future state
What the prospect ultimately hopes to accomplish.
✅ Segmented by industry or company size
On an enterprise level, you might go even deeper and create messaging like this across specific industry verticals and company sizes.
Example: A CFO at a F500 manufacturer is different from the CFO of a bank.
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As the sales org, it's your responsibility to take marketing personas a layer or two deeper.
Do this and you'll see much better results from your outbound and selling efforts.
