Marketing and product should not be creating personas for sales. Here's why…

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.