I've heard mixed opinions on sharing customer personas with Sales. Some say it's useless information that Sales tends to ignore. Have you found that Sales appreciates customers personas? What's your approach there?

• The answer depends a bit on the situation. Here are two scenarios/examples. 
• Scenario 1: Sometimes sales has a ton of institutional knowledge around their target customers. This might be because of the history they’ve had around this sales motion/target audience and how long the company has been focused on selling a particular type of product or solution. Using a Visa example, our sales team has had years of experience working on selling our core products to heads of card programs at financial institutions. In this scenario, customer personas may not be super beneficial to Sales (although they can be very beneficial to Marketing, in order to develop great creative/content)!  
• Scenario 2: If you’re working at a company that is focused on engaging with a new audience or new types of buyers, in these cases there is not a lot of institutional knowledge or insight into who these buyers are. Using another Visa example, over the past few years we’ve been developing new products that target new verticals (to us) – such as insurance companies. In these instances, customer personas can be invaluable for Sales!

I think this is a symptom of bad persona guidance more than anything else. I have seen a lot of persona guides created by marketing teams that get too cute – with whimsical fake names, esoteric archetypes, information that isn't actionable for sellers (like how prospects feel and how they want to be engaged with), and guidance that's too high level (for example, stating goals like "they want to grow their business" or "they want to save money" are not at the right altitude to be useful for sales rep).

Putting yourself in the shoes of a sales rep, you need to understand things like:

1. What are the characteristics of companies that determine good fit from bad fit, so I can spend my time working the right types of opportunities that are likeliest to convert?

2. What are my prospect's critical business priorities/initiatives?

3. How do I navigate their org chart and find the right person/people to engage?

4. What questions should I ask in a discovery conversation, and what should I listen for?

5. How do I uncover challenges and align those to the right solution (use cases, required capabilities)?

When designing a persona guide, I like to include the following things:

• Ideal customer profiles & qualification criteria to determine good fit / bad fit

• Sample org chart

• Key personas (real job roles; not fake names or random archetypes like "the bold risk-taker")

• Sample job titles (this is essential to help your sellers prospect effectively on LinkedIn)

• Their key responsibilities (what they do)

• Their tech stack (what tools they use today to get their job done; mostly relevant for B2B)

• What they care about (their goals)

• Their challenges

• An elevator pitch that gets their attention

The most important thing you can do when building a persona guide is to validate it with real sales reps and sales engineers (SEs). Get feedback from a range of folks – early-career BDRs, long-tenured enterprise account execs, sales leaders, and SEs. This will ensure that the guidance you are creating is credible, useful, and meeting the needs of different constituents in your sales org.

Another pro tip to help you create effective persona guides: go find actual job descriptions for the personas you're targeting via their careers page or LinkedIn. They are a gold mine of insight on a prospect's key business priorities/initiatives/projects, their tech stack, and the key responsibilities for the role – all written in the customer's words.

With any content, you have to be clear on why sales should care. How is it going to help them close a deal faster, increase the size of that deal, retain or grow the account quickly? To do this, you have to know what KPIs your sales team is measured on. So if you are going to deliver persona content to sales, help them see why it'll help them with their goals.