How do you enable your sales team when the product teams decide to introduce a new product that targets a different persona, from your traditional buyer?

If your sales team is like any sales team I've been privileged enough to work with, your team is full of highly savvy individuals who know what needs to get done to hit their numbers.  As a result, anything you want your sale team to sell must first be sold to them as a way that they can, in the end, meet and exceed their targets.  Your job is to create that excitement. Perhaps this new persona influences the traditional buyer, and selling them the product will help not only net new sales but al ...Read More

Expanding into an adjacent market (whether via new product introduction, acquisition, or a GTM strategy change) is one of the most fun and challenging resume builders for a PMM. Like with an early-stage startup seeking to establish product-market fit, focus is so important. Don't try to boil the entire ocean all at once. You want to focus your positioning, your messaging, and your sales team's attention on a specific market problem that your new product solves really well, in addition to giving ...Read More

In this case, you would first want to enable your sales teams on the new persona, including what this persona generally "looks like", relevant pain points, and other information to help sales successfully reach these personas. You will have more a heavy lift in educating sales on how to successfully sell this product compared to a product that's built for the personas that your sales team is already used to targeting. Beyond sales enablement, new target personas will sometimes require a broader ...Read More

Oh this is fun! Adding new features and or functions to grow into a new market or persona is a great way to grow. The sales team on the other hand may not get excited for it, this is new things to learn, new messaging, new persona when they might have gotten used to the last one. I position this as a new market and new sales goals that will increase their effectiveness and they get to make more money off commissions. So I usually show them the size of the new market or how many of these persona' ...Read More

This is a very exciting challenge to have as a product marketer. In partnership with product and sales leadership, it's crucial to understand the relationship between the new and current buyer personas. For example, if the IT administrator is the current buyer persona and the new buyer persona is the head of a revenue-generating business unit, such as sales, there is likely a synergy since they are both part of the collective buying group for decision-making, especially if focusing on sales enab ...Read More