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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 enablement software.

To effectively manage this challenge:

1. Understand Leadership Priorities: It's essential to align with leadership on prioritization between the new product and existing solutions in both short-term and long-term.

2. Generate Excitement Around the New Product:

   • Persona Mapping: Begin by mapping out the roles, needs, and interactions of both current and new personas in the buying process.

   • Clear Communication: Develop targeted messaging that addresses specific pain points and goals of the new persona.

   • Engagement Tactics: Conduct webinars, workshops, and demos tailored to the new persona as training is critical. Consider leveraging customer-facing collateral that worked well in previous GTM launches with the inclusion of use cases and case studies to showcase the impact of the new product.
     

3. Continue Enablement on Core Capabilities:

   • Prioritization and Alignment: Balance sales enablement efforts between the new product and core capabilities based on alignment with leadership.

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 them a baseline understanding of this different persona (job responsibilities, goals, key challenges, tech stack / incumbent tools). Starting small now helps you build repeatability and momentum, so you can go big later on.

I'm a big fan of The Challenger Sale and Insight Selling and both methodologies offer great guidance on how to craft sales messaging that works in this type of scenario. By framing the market context and customer problem differently from category incumbents and encouraging a new way of thinking (i.e. a reframe), you can carve out an early niche for your new product and also stand out from the crowd in the mind of the persona you're now targeting.

Here's how I try to focus sales messaging for this type of scenario:

• Name a big change in the world – This is the market context in which your customers live, and you want to establish credibility and demonstrate empathy by showing that you understand their world, the challenges they face, the goals they have, and that you can anticipate how this change may impact them in the future.

• Identify the problem that change creates, the impact on that problem to this different persona, and the consequence of not solving it.  Companies that frame the problem most persuasively are the ones that win. They’re the ones that get customers to buy into their vision for solving it.

• De-position the status quo – Next, you want to show why traditional approaches won't cut it and why a better way is needed. This helps reinforce the need to explore new ideas and new ways of thinking, while de-positioning the old way and the companies you displace. Super important if you're trying to catch the attention of a new persona.

• Describe the promised land – This is the ideal state or customer desired outcome your new product will help unlock. It's the overarching need created by the problem you identified.

• Set the rules – lay out how the new persona you're targeting can get to the promised land. Specifically, your differentiated approach to solving the problem (i.e. what makes you different from incumbents).

If you can apply this messaging construct to your pitch (i.e. first call deck) as well as your enablement materials and training, you'll start to level-up your sales team's understanding of the market in which this new product fits, the buyer, and how to confidently engage them. This will help break the cycle of sales reps defaulting to selling what they're most comfortable with (existing products).

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!