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?

Question

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?

Aaron Brennan · Accepted Answer

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's there are in the industries we are going after. Once they realize how big the growth opportunities are and the impact on their commissions that is when we start doing fun programs like Q & A's with these persona's where the sales team gets to really know this type of users, Trivia with prizes that allow them to compete for amazon gift cards or a dinner out, we also offer first call help where product marketing will jump on their first call with the new persona to help them sell! This all makes sales jobs so much easier and gets them super excited for the opportunities to make more money!

Madeline Ng · Answer

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 also grow existing customers. Or perhaps this new persona is an entirely new market full of greenfield accounts that your rep can now prospect. In any case, you need to figure out how to sell your sales people on how this new product aligns with their incentives. And if it doesn't, you need to solve that problem or else you really should not expect much interest or action from your sales team.

Harsha Kalapala · Answer

Go back to the basics and develop the buyer persona assets for this new buyer. You can’t effectively sell to someone you don’t understand. Training and workshops for the sales team to fully internalize this new buyer persona, and ask questions in a group setting or 1-1 is important to get the team ready to sell to a new persona. You should be demanding the time necessary to make this happen if a new product class is introduced to address a new persona.

Sarah Din · Answer

I have never worked at a company where the sales team did not get excited about a new product or persona - this typically means a larger market for them to sell to.

The goal with any enablement is to make sure you are clearly defining why this is important, and how it will help them sell more to hit their numbers.

Charlene Wang · Answer

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 rethink of the go-to-market strategy. Is your messaging and content properly targeted to this audience? Has your Growth Marketing / Demand Gen team adequately generated leads from this new pool of buyers? Does the new target persona require additional aircover from brand and PR? Will targeting multiple personas create conflict within sales and are there ways to segment sales and/or sales channels to better manage this conflict? These are important questions that Product Marketing and Marketing more generally should consider as part of the new product launch.

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