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?

I've found it to be critical in the organizations I've worked in, which have mostly had multiple personas. However, I've never been a fan of Marketing Mary or Annie the Analyst :) That may be a personal bias but I find it cheesy. But a basic persona framework and messaging has always been asked by sellers in organizations I've been at. It's extremely needed for new sellers but even senior ones who need sometimes need a quick reference / cheat sheet when context switching. A seller asked me TODAY ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 i ...Read More

Yes, sales definitely appreciates customer persona research in my experience, but it has to be actionable. This means that, no matter what type of research or how much good stuff you have in there, PMM has to package it up in ways that is digestible and relevant to sales. I’ve often seen great and thoughtful research get glossed over just because of the way it was presented. It’s tempting for PMM to package up research with an executive summary/tl,dr on Slack, and then hope that sales will click ...Read More

Indy Sen's point about packaging is exactly right. The research can be great, but the delivery kills it. Sales appreciates personas when they are built for action, not for admiration. At Tableau, we found that persona decks over ten slides got skimmed once and forgotten. We shifted to one-page "who am I selling to today" cheat sheets. Each one had the buyer's core job-to-be-done, their typical objections, and the one stat that landed every time in that conversation. Reps kept them open during ca ...Read More