CHAPTER

3

Crafting Ideal Prospect Personas

The Predictable Prospecting method is all about flooding sales pipelines with the best opportunities in the most efficient way. Even when approaching the ideal segment of companies, sales professionals often fail to engage the right people at the beginning of the process. In this chapter, we will explore the techniques for leveraging an Ideal Prospect Persona (IPP) that will result in higher quality lead generation and greater deal velocity. Moreover, finding and selling to the right person to begin with is the most important renewal driver for a recurring revenue business.

Sales (and marketing) professionals often roll their eyes the first time they hear the word persona because they think of a persona as an obvious or excessively detailed caricature of a customer. In too many cases, this jaded perception of the word persona is correct. And it is precisely for this reason that our persona development approach is designed with the goal of achieving actionable insight that (a) facilitates messaging prospects in the most effective way and (b) ensures a shared understanding across a salesperson’s company about the profile of the ideal buyer. Being able to achieve actionable insight on message depends on knowing who the buyers are, what they care about, and how they communicate. Having a shared understanding, for example, is critical for the marketing organization so that it is able to strategically cast its net to catch the right contacts.

In addition, our experience tells us that another major mistake organizations make is defining too many personas. While writing this chapter, we engaged a new client with 15 personas! The problem with too many personas is that it violates the rule of having actionable insight that ensures a shared understanding. An organization might target a large number of personas; however, a sales team or individual salesperson cannot and should not be responsible for keeping more than 3 personas in mind. Any more than 3 and persona building becomes another forgotten part of a sales training workshop. While many individuals may be involved in any one buying decision, prospecting personas needs to focus exclusively on those individuals most likely to accept a first meeting. While the ultimate decision maker must be one of the personas, key influencers should also be considered as well as those in a position to provide a warm referral.

Job Title

There is a significant difference between familiar business-to-consumer demographics and the business-to-business demographics that are relevant to our approach. In the B2C world, prospecting personas includes researching personal information such as age, gender, education, marital status, number of dependents in the household, religion, political persuasion, hobbies, household income, and so on. These are precisely the characteristics that induce B2B sales professionals to roll their eyes. While we do not recommend including personal demographics in an Ideal Prospect Persona, since it is used for general targeting, we do support gathering semipersonal information—such as that found on LinkedIn—to help build rapport during specific opportunities. Just be sure to tread lightly when engaging new professional contacts because divulging too much of what you know of their personal background can be off-putting.

A job title is the most commonly leveraged piece of B2B buyer demographic information because it encapsulates both job level and job function. In addition, a job title implies additional information such as specialized knowledge and skills. But there is no benefit in cluttering a persona definition with baseline skills that nearly all individuals in a target population share. The only knowledge and skills worth outlining are those that strongly differentiate the target persona from similar but less attractive professionals. For example, Marylou partners with heads of sales to improve the processes that drive the productivity of their teams. Therefore, she is in a position to assume that a vice president of sales has a strong working knowledge of selling skills, territory management, sales automation tools, and so on. However, it would be in her best interest to segment a population of sales leaders based on their sales development process expertise, especially if that was a deciding factor to enable closing a deal. The problem is that a person’s knowledge and skill information are not readily accessible so Marylou needs to discover this during qualification, a topic we explore in Chapter 6.

With respect to job function, it is particularly valuable if you are familiar with the language and the common variations of job titles that prospects use to describe or differentiate themselves. For example, Jeremey engaged heads of learning and development when he worked for the American Management Association. There he found that this single persona could hold any of the following titles: chief learning officer, vice president of talent development, and director of training, as well as other permutations. Critically, titles included in a persona should align with the data sources used by sales professionals to make finding prospects that much easier.

Professional Objectives

Professional objectives are even more valuable and nearly as common as job titles in persona definitions. Objectives go by many names, including goals, critical initiatives, and key performance indicators (KPIs). Sales professionals, even beyond the context of their solutions, need to be aware of every major activity that consumes their prospects’ time, money, and effort. In addition, a well-defined persona includes the prospect’s primary challenges in achieving those objectives, independent of what the salesperson is selling.

Parsing job postings is the most efficient and effective way to develop a holistic picture of the objectives included in an Ideal Prospect Persona. It is important that the jobs chosen to parse are the ones posted by the companies that match the ideal customer profile and are for positions matching the target job title.

Imagine a sales development representative, let’s call her Linda, from ValueSelling Associates, one of the top 20 sales training companies,¹ is targeting heads of sales training in the media and entertainment industry. A quick search on LinkedIn reveals a job posting for Spotify, a popular music and video Internet streaming service. Below we have reproduced the company’s posting for a head of global ad sales training. Though fairly typical, it is on the long side, even though it doesn’t contain the job qualifications or the equal opportunity statement, but bear with us:

We are looking for an experienced head of training to help develop and run our global sales training function within the Spotify Ad Sales organization. You will be responsible for designing and implementing global and local training programs in order to scale sales training across all our markets, based on the regional teams’ needs and market dynamics. These programs will help to educate and develop the sales teams to ensure that business needs are met while improving organizational performance. Your vision and initiatives should align with the overall strategic goals of the company and the ads organization while reflecting our technology, business initiatives, and culture. The result of these short- and long-term efforts should include increased sales, revenue growth, transformation of the business, elevated performance, and an enhanced culture. Above all, your work will affect the way the world experiences music.

What you’ll do:

Understand the different training needs in all markets and partner with sales leaders to define the region and market priorities for sales training and enablement on a quarterly basis

Design, develop, and deliver effective and innovative training programs that could include onboarding programs and online tutorials, modules, certified training learning assessments, and web-based job aids

Anticipate needs, resources, time, and budget

Build relationships with advertising leaders, sales teams, and cross-functional business partners (for example, sales operations, advertising product, marketing teams, and HR) in the region to collaborate on business needs and priorities, as well as balancing the training cadence and sequence based on the overall global priorities and cadence of the business

Serve and maintain local external sales training vendors for specific training requirements, as needed

Explore and champion new ideas and experiences to improve and enhance training and learning across the region and globally

Leverage global programs to scale training across sales teams with consistency and provide iterative feedback, while localizing content and training for sales teams’ needs and market dynamics

Serve as the project manager for maintaining the design, packaging, and delivery of the training experience

Provide ongoing feedback to the advertising leadership

Work closely with Spotify’s broader learning and development team to build off of and/or integrate any existing programs to support the advertising organization

Work from our office in New York

Obviously a full job description is way too long for an IPP, so we will isolate, highlight, and focus on the key objectives for this persona based on success in the role while carefully suppressing any bias for what we want to sell to them. A well-crafted persona should fit on a single printed page, which means we must keep the objectives tightly worded and few in number.

The first and ultimate objective for the head of sales training is to increase sales productivity; if the revenue per associate for trained individuals does not increase relative to those who were not trained, then training was clearly a waste of time and money. As productivity tends to increase as associates become more tenured, a sales productivity objective should also include a key performance indictor for employee retention—the result of what Spotify refers to as “enhanced culture.”

The opportunities the head of sales training will encounter in achieving higher sales productivity can be found in the “What you’ll do” section of Spotify’s job posting. However, what’s missing are two critical pieces that affect average revenue per sales professional and average tenure. These metrics require further refinement to neutralize the impact of hiring (and firing) cycles. Imagine that Spotify’s sales professionals have the three levels of maturity fairly typical in B2B sales organizations. First-year associates in learning mode have relatively low productivity. Associates between the first and second years accelerate rapidly. Associates with two years or more have high, stable productivity. In this case, the head of sales training would want to work with her sales operations partner to establish KPIs, one for each of the three tenure ranges. Similarly, rather than overall average tenure, the most relevant KPIs are the retention rates of salespeople tenured less than one year, one to two years, and two or more years. The point to be made here is that an average head of sales training may not recognize the overarching importance of the sales productivity objective or have experience with defining, measuring, and reporting on the KPIs. Linda, our hypothetical sales development representative from ValueSelling Associates, now has the opportunity to move from being “just” another vendor to being a true partner if she can help the head of sales training succeed.

The second objective is to design and deliver high-impact sales training programs. Working within the context of Spotify’s job posting, this brief objective statement encapsulates many other factors. The phrase “design and deliver” takes into account global scale with local flair. It also implies that the applicant should have such skills as project management, engaging cross-functional partners to define training priorities, and demonstrating expertise in training tools and techniques. The phrase “high impact” reinforces the contributions to productivity and retention represented in the first objective.

An optional third objective includes managing a network of external sales training partners. Heads of sales training, like all functional leaders, are bombarded on a daily basis by vendors claiming to be the best thing since sliced bread. Since the impact of any particular training program can be assessed only after it is experienced, quality is incredibly difficult to assess in advance. Once again, Linda has the opportunity to shift from vendor to partner by doing the unexpected—recommending other training providers her clients have successfully used in the past.

Influence Map

The Predictable Prospecting method is focused on securing conversations to initiate and advance the sales cycle. Hence, an Ideal Prospect Persona must include a map of those who influence the decision maker. To illustrate this, consider the visual metaphor of an archery target with three concentric circles (Figure 3-1).

  FIGURE 3-1   Influence Map Bull’s-eye

Start by picturing the decision maker sitting alone in the bull’s-eye. Corporate buying decisions are complex affairs designed to simultaneously lower risk and ensure support for change. While many people can weigh in with opinions and objections, only one person has the authority to say yes. Working for a large enterprise with over $1 billion in revenue,² we can safely assume that the head of sales training at Spotify has the budget and authority to ink contracts with new training partners.

Now picture the direct influencers and gatekeepers that include administrative assistants, corporate attorneys, risk managers, and purchasing agents, among others, sitting in the innermost ring, closest to the bull’s-eye. Judging from the Spotify job description, the head of sales training must collaborate with advertising leaders and sales teams, as well as cross-functional partners in human resources, product management, and marketing. Even with decision-making authority, the head of sales training must consult with a combination of people, including her boss (the senior vice president of sales), her subordinates, the head of sales operations, and the chief learning officer.

In the next and outermost ring of the target sit the indirect influencers; these are weaker ties who can be incredibly valuable for generating warm referrals to the decision maker. These indirect influencers may include peers, individual salespeople, and virtually anyone who works for the company. Indirect influencers also exist outside the company in the form of trusted partners or various professional connections. Another important group that belongs in this category of outside influencers consists of the sources the decision maker trusts and turns to for information. A head of sales training will most likely turn to independent sources that include Selling Power Magazine, Training Industry Magazine, and the Association for Talent Development.

To complement the influence map, we may go a step further by including critical details about the expected buying process. In addition to the roles likely to be involved in the decision, an Ideal Prospect Persona might also include typical decision-making criteria along with the expected duration of each stage of the sales cycle.

Core Value Proposition and Primary Objections

Up to this point, we have explored Ideal Prospect Persona elements independent of a salesperson’s products and services. In articulating the core value proposition and primary objections, we relax the independence constraint.

A great core value proposition should link directly to one or more of the decision maker’s major objectives. In addition, because business decisions take time, money, and effort, a great core value proposition must ask, “Why change? Why now? And why with us?” For example, the core value proposition of the Predictable Prospecting model is boosting sales-driving productivity by helping sales professionals secure more meetings with the right people, with less effort.

Assuming the decision maker has the budget and authority, the most common objections Linda might encounter when speaking to the head of sales training at Spotify are the following:

1. Need: “Why change?”

How to overcome: As explained by Chip and Dan Heath in their outstanding book Switch: How to Change When Change Is Hard, people accept change when one directs the rider, motivates the elephant, and shapes the path. The rider inside the Spotify training leader’s brain is rational and craves testimonials and statistics demonstrating the expected return on learning. The elephant is emotional and must feel she is doing the right thing for the organization. Finally, Linda can shape the path with learning goals, tools, set-back schedules, and so on, making the experience of deploying a globally consistent yet locally tailored training program as effortless as possible.

2. Trust: “Why you? I have never heard of you or your company.”

How to overcome: While trust is built by delivering value over time, salespeople trying to secure a meeting do not have that luxury. Hence, social proof in the form of references, case studies of engagements with similar companies, and bylines in well-regarded publications are among the best tools available.

3. Urgency: “Why now?”

How to overcome: While there are many less-than-honest tactics to create a sense of urgency based on scarcity (think “limited time offer while supplies last”), trusted partners create a sense of urgency by linking their products to an organization’s strategic objectives. Facing intense competition from Apple, Google, Pandora, and many others, Spotify needs every advantage to enable its sales force to win the most lucrative advertisers.

Personalizing Personas

As mentioned earlier, we recommend keeping business-to-consumer demographics such as education and marital status out of business-to-business Ideal Prospect Personas. By the same token, we also recommend avoiding the common B2C practice of mapping personas to archetypes, a practice popularized by Carol Pearson and Margaret Mark in their 2001 book The Hero and the Outlaw: Building Extraordinary Brands Through the Power of Archetypes. This book outlined 12 consumer mindsets: everyman, caregiver, sage, explorer, hero, magician, revolutionary, jester, lover, ruler, creator, and innocent. While knowing these mindsets may help B2C salespeople understand their customers, they are an unnecessary distraction for B2B sales professionals.

The decision on what to include and what to exclude gets a bit murkier when it comes to the professional ambitions of the ideal prospect. The best salespeople help their clients succeed on critical initiatives, the consequences of which may be higher pay, rapid promotion, and greater recognition. In most cases, career goals like these are obvious and they are not directly relevant to selling and servicing clients; therefore, they can be skipped. Related elements found in some B2B personas are day-in-the-life stories (more efficiently expressed by knowledge and skills) and hero stories that paint a picture, like that of a client who buys a product and saves the company.

And now we come to the toughest decision of all—whether or not to personalize a persona with a catchy name and memorable photo. In the plus column, this practice allows a sales organization to share a complex concept in a portable, compact package. We might call the head of sales training “Theresa, the training leader.” In the negative column, the practice may turn off sales teams that are more jaded. Since there is no right answer, do what feels right in a given environment.

Information Gathering

Most salespeople and their teams can assemble a fairly complete Ideal Prospect Persona without much extra input. However, we recommend taking time to polish the persona because that investment will pay big dividends during the day-to-day grind of prospecting when having accurate insights concerning prospects can mean the difference between success and failure. Since products and prospects are always in flux, we recommend reviewing and updating personas at least annually.

The first version of an Ideal Prospect Persona needs to be carefully verified by seeking confirming and disconfirming information using a variety of sources. Interviews and surveys of an organization’s best customers and hottest prospects are the first places to start, and they can provide the best and most accurate sources of information. Social media, LinkedIn in particular, has become an invaluable source. Additionally, we also turn to external sources such as industry analysts, journalists, complementary vendors who interact with our ideal prospects, and even the prospect’s customers.

After refining the Ideal Prospect Persona using insights culled from external sources, one can turn to internal information starting with existing sales and marketing collateral. Anyone who deals with prospects and customers on a regular basis—sales, marketing, customer service, product management, and senior business leaders—is valuable in refining the persona.

In a nutshell, here is the Ideal Prospect Persona we built in this chapter to engage a head of sales training at a media and entertainment company:

Decision maker: Theresa, the training leader

Functions: Head of sales training; sales training director

Professional objectives

1. Increase sales productivity and engagement as measured by average revenue per associate (by tenure band) and employee retention rate (by tenure band)

2. Design and deliver high-impact sales training programs

3. Manage a network of external sales training partners

Influence map

1. Direct influencers: Line-of-business leaders and sales leaders, as well as cross-functional partners in human resources, product management, and marketing

2. Gatekeepers: Administrative assistants, corporate counsels, risk managers, and internal finance professionals

3. Indirect influencers: Sales operations peers, talent development peers, and individual sales professionals

Our value proposition: Drive productivity by helping sales professionals secure more meetings with the right people, all with less effort.

1. Why change: Our proven, turnkey, Predictable Prospecting training program can lead to higher productivity and employee retention.

2. Why now: Get the jump on increasingly aggressive competitors.

3. Why us: References and testimonials from elated clients are available on request.

In Part I, we have constructed a Predictable Prospecting targeting model consisting of competitive positioning, an ideal company profile, and an ideal prospect profile. In Part II, we will turn to engaging these targets beginning with crafting messaging that maximizes the odds of securing meetings.