How and where do you store your buyer personas, messaging and positioning? What is the format that you use?

A product source or truth deck that points to your personas, messaging and positioning is a sound format for this. We use this as a model for hero products.

Another approach that we're using for a new product that hasn't yet launched but we have user research, personas, and positioning around is a product onboarding deck. Same concept as the source of truth or "bible", but being used as the intro deliverable for all of those joining the project as the first touchpoint they should read.

An outline to consider for the source of truth deck could be:

• Marketing goals

  • Key marketing moments to plan around

• Market context

• User personas

• Messaging and positioning

  • message framework/narrative

  • style/tone guide

• Product overview

  • key features

  • mocks/screens

• sales strategy (if b2b)

  • call scripts

  • key questions to ask

  • playbook to navigate from stakeholder to decision maker

• branding

• use cases/case studies
  

When you join a new organization, always invest in some anthropology work to figure out what works best for the culture and don't assume that whatever has worked for you in the past will translate to new teams. And I might suggest re-framing the question from "storing" to "displaying". How can you merchandise these foundational ideas so that they stay top of mind in every conversation you're having with product, sales or other teams? Consider:

• Putting them in the header on the agenda for regular GTM check-ins

• Asking someone on the xfn team to name them before you kick off roadmap discussions

• Finding ways to bring them to life in posts that describe real-world interactions with personas and how the messaging and positioning spoke to solutions they needed

Developing these ideas is critical and difficult work. Keeping them vital and actionable inside an organization is often harder. Experimenting with ways to make them the basis for decision making and ideation might lead you to promising results.

This is a great question. It’s crucial to have a centralized source of truth, such as a messaging wiki or a playbook for each one of your products. For the messaging wiki, implement a dedicated hub (e.g., SharePoint) to house all key documents relevant to persona profiles, messaging frameworks, and positioning statements. Having a centralized knowledge hub makes it easily searchable and editable for relevant team members.

In parallel, for each product, you can create a playbook that includes a high-level overview document summarizing key audience segments, messaging pillars, and value propositions. In this document, you might include links to the detailed sources you’ve stored in your wiki.

Format Options:

• Buyer personas: The format could be Google Docs/Sheets, slides, or any structured documents that outline the demographics, goals, pain points, and preferences of your ideal customers.

• Messaging: It could be Google Docs/Sheets, messaging tools like GrokSpark, slide decks, or guidelines that outline the tone, style, and key talking points for various channels.

• Positioning: Similar to buyer personas and messaging, this could be documents, presentations, or structured guides that clearly define your positioning statements, competitive alternatives, unique attributes, value propositions, key market segments, relevant trends, etc.

Given your recent arrival at the company, I suggest collaborating with various team members to understand their preferred formats and potential gaps in existing resources for buyer personas, messaging frameworks, and any other relevant materials. This way, you can develop a pilot wiki for one of the products, allowing for feedback and iteration before creating your wider wiki.