99% of marketing built personas will NOT help you sell better.

99% of marketing-built personas will NOT help you sell better.

It's not useful to know their:

⛔️ Age
⛔️ Salary
⛔️ Gender
⛔️ Education
⛔️ Coffee preferences

Seriously, that information doesn't help you land a meeting or sell a deal.

But you know what does? Knowing their:

✅ Priorities
✅ Challenges
✅ Status Quo

Now here's the cool part.

Download transcripts of recorded sales calls, marketing personas, content, and anything else you can find.

Upload and then drop this prompt into ChatGPT

✅ Create Persona-Based Messaging

Take the attached messaging and turn this into an Outbound Squad Messaging Matrix. The messaging should be written using the customer’s voice.

This messaging matrix should be formatted into a table with these four columns:

1) Priorities

Format this into a statement like this: [headline]. [outcome] + [avoid problem].

Here's how to come up with the information for the headline, outcome, and avoid problem boxes.

- Headline: What is top of mind for your prospect’s peers? Imagine you have a dozen of your prospects gathered in a room.

What is top of mind for that entire group right now?
What trends are they worried about or focused on?
What do they want your help with?

- Outcome: What outcomes do they want?

What are the specific outcomes, metrics, or KPIs they want to improve?

- Avoid problem:

What problem do they want to avoid?
What problem are they hoping to address or solve?

Here's an example for different personas:

Skill gaps & staffing. Find and attract the right talent to accomplish our IT business goals—while avoiding unnecessary costs and project delays.

2) Current solutions

Now think about how the prospect is getting the job done. This is their status quo.

“Solutions” doesn’t necessarily mean “technology.” There are many methods your prospects use to make progress on their priority:

People: Are they hiring, reducing headcount, etc?
Process: Are they implementing a specific process?
Technology: Are they using technology? A competitor?

3) Problems

Problems are what get in the way of priorities. This is what your prospect hopes their current solution will help with. It’s important to understand the difference between pain and problems.

Pain: Inconveniences and frustrations.

This sounds like: “Manually processing payroll is labor intensive and frustrating for me.”

Problems: The impact on the business.

This sounds like: “Our team is manually processing payroll across multiple systems. We need to hire extra employees just to handle the manual work, and we can’t hire as quickly as we need to. We won’t hit our hiring targets this year.”

Help me define the problem in the customer's voice.

4) Aspirations

This is your prospect’s desired future state. These should be similar to the outcomes your solution provides to your customers.

This is for: [company name] who sells [solution] to [persona]. Example clients of theirs are [insert examples]

~~~

Voila! Persona-based messaging to write emails and create talk tracks.