Effective Product Marketing Rule #12

This is the twelfth (and final) in a series of posts on Pragmatic Marketing’s Effective Product Marketing Rules.

Effective Product Marketing Rule #12: Tell your sales people about buyer personas and they will listen to you. Build tools by buyer persona and they will use them.

Over the years, I’ve come to believe that there is an inevitable and natural enmity between sales and marketing. Sales is more tactically driven, more short term. They’re focused on the here and now: what they’ve got to do to make their quarter/their year/their bonus. They’re coin operated - and that’s the way it’s supposed to be. (There’s a reason why they stand to make more money than you do: it’s their work that directly and clearly makes it possible for the rest of us to have things like jobs.) Marketing is - or should be - more strategic and longer term, focused on building a solid brand, products, and customer base that will last. Sure, we have to be tactical, too, but those tactics should be serve the strategy, not just the sales demand-of-the moment.

But if marketing wants to lay out the strategic direction by defining the markets, the positioning, the product direction, they also have to make sure that their sales people are equipped to execute the strategy. Why else would they listen to you? You who is not knocking on doors only to hear someone shout “Go away!”  You who does not have the regional VP breathing down your neck for the status of the Big Deal that’s just got to be signed by Friday. You who is not out there having to sell around all those product and marketing deficiencies.

I can think of few things that are more critical to the success of a sales person involved in complex, big ticket technology sales than having an understanding of the folks who are going to be involved the most closely (and influentially) in the buying decision - and having tools the sales person can use to communicate with those folks.

Now, I’ve got to admit that I’m too much of a literalist to be wild about the use of the word “persona”, with its dramatic and psychological connotations, but I can’t really think of a better one. But it’s the word that Pragmatic has chosen, so I thought I’d borrow from their Adele Revella to describe it:

A persona is a short biography of the typical customer; not just a job description but a person description. It comments on the buyer’s background, daily activities, and how they deal with their current set of problems. The more experience you have in your market, the more obvious the personas become….The [persona] profile includes the words that buyer would use to describe their most urgent problems and the way that buyer wants to measure the success of the investment. Your personas are built by job title, by industry, and by size of company—a few of the characteristics that typically affect the buyer persona details.

Think about it for a moment.

Your sales guy is at the point in the buying cycle where his sponsor has to get finance approval of the purchase. The sponsor asks him for some help, and all your sales guy has to provide him is a sheaf of data sheets listing all the cool techie features, a high level brochure extolling some airy, generic benefits, and a hastily cobbled-together ROI calculator that (surprise, surprise!) always comes up with the same answer: you’d be a fool not to buy our product.

Wouldn’t it be better if you could offer the sales guy some insight on just what might be on the CFO’s mind. How about: I’m worried about the impact on share price if we miss our profit target for the quarter. I have to listen to every competing group in the company telling me why I should allocate more money to them (and complaining that I play favorites). I’ve heard it all before: all those promises about productivity that never seem to pan out. Etc.

And that etc. goes for all the levels who can impact the buying decision.

If you have these personas, it’s a fairly easy and logical step to craft tools that address the persona concerns you’ve identified. Maybe it’s a piece about the way that your new software as a service model eliminates the need for a hefty, upfront purchase - you can pay as you go. Maybe it’s a paper outlining the linkages between your product and benefits to other groups, up and down the line. Maybe it’s an honest ROI approach, backed up by proof of the direct ties between your user productivity (with customer testimonials verifying such wonders).

Wouldn’t you rather have these sorts of finely tuned tools in your sales person’s hand that 20 pounds of collateral written for somebody else (or nobody at all).

I will confess that, when it comes to these sorts of tools, I’ve fallen down plenty of times. I usually become so enamored of the product features, and the thrill of tying them to user benefits, that I forget all about the other people who have a say in whether those users ever get their hands on those features.

I’m currently in the throes of a Win-Loss Analysis project for a client, and one of the things we’re asking is about the how our sponsor handled the different steps of the purchase process. Just what did he tell the CFO to get him to open those purse strings - and what could we do better in the future to make sure that nobody has to make this stuff up as they go along.

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