As the selling landscape evolves, it’s becoming more critical every day to communicate with your buyers personally and intentionally. The customer is at the heart of persona based selling, and within each and every workflow, there needs to be a sales touch point model designed specifically around the persona based messaging you’ve created.
To accomplish this as a sincere seller, you must be able to quickly organize people by similar personas, create custom messaging for each, and then test those messages at scale.
This testing begins with fully understanding your buyer personas. Once you’ve identified the personas that you want to approach, both by function and where they live within the buying cycle, it’s finally time to uncover their pain points — specific to their function — and how your solution is going to help relieve those pains.
First, create custom a sales touch point model based off of where each persona likely lives. What is their means of communication? What medium is going to be most conducive to the first conversation?
For example, IT personas are more likely to be reached via emails, where Sales personas are more likely to be reach by phone, and Marketing personas are more likely live on social. So, with each one of these personas, you’re going to have a different cadence of touch points — everything from velocity to the time that you reach out to them.
Enterprise sales personas are going to be longer, more passive touch cycles. Transactional sales will be a quicker, higher sales touch point model, aiming to solicit that first response. These small differences are where the persona based strategy plays into the specific and targeted sales touch point model.
Let’s start with the champion: if you’re building a relationship with a champion, you’re likely going to be able to have a conversation with them fairly easily because the champion is likely the end user — the person who’s working from the bottom up to get the buying cycle moving. Use the champion to gather information, and capitalize on the fact that the sales touch point model will be quicker and faster. (Read: You can put more of them into that funnel.)
But when you look to the influencer, the one who is most parallel to the decision maker (for us at Salesloft, the decision maker most likely being the Sales Development Manager, Sales Opps, or their Marketing counterpart) you’ll want to focus on who’s going to get side benefits from your solution. The influencer may not be the end buyer, but they are going to be able to help influence the decision maker based on the knowledge of what’s in it for them.
This all leads to your decision maker, the one with whom you’re going to have to be hyper-personalized. Reaching this persona takes a lot of touch points, specific to where they live, with a focus on executive buy-in. This function wants to know the high-level reasoning: How could this solution help me? Where’s the ROI? What’s it going to do to help me grow my business?
When you cater your messaging and touch points to your buyer personas, it’s best to inject those personas with that persona based messaging within your strategic cadence and workflow. The goal is always to ensure the highest rate of conversions from each and every touch point.
The best way to achieve this goal is to create a formula for when and where each one of those personas lives along the timeline of that buying process.
Begin by reaching out to the champion to uncover more information about the organization with questions like, “Who is the decision maker? What is the decision making criteria? What are the pain points that organization experiences?”
Then, with the influencer: give them material. Have conversations around how the side benefits of your solution help them in their role. Give marketing the ability to allocate right resources for building a sales touch point model in the messaging, while also allowing those activities to track back into Salesforce. This is all to give credit where credit’s due — to know what’s working — what messaging, what talk track, etc.
And then finally, with the decision maker, make sure that they fully understand the value prop of your solution, and how it’s going to help them specific to their function. The final executive buy-in is likely going to be with someone that you finally reach in specific scenarios (like when the deal is stuck or you’ve got a previous relationship established).
All in all, these custom messaging tracks are catered completely to the buyer personas and where they live. And it all starts with hypotheses to discover the best plan of action with each one. That’s when you can eventually dive deeper into A/B testing, and truly understanding which messaging converts best.
You’ve created these personas based on function. You’ve created the custom messaging for each persona. And now you’re following through by creating a sales touch point model to reflect this high level of personalization.
At the end of the day, everything we do as sincere sellers has always been focused on the needs, desires, pains, and functions of each person in a sales cycle. This strategy is simply meant to help uncover the best places to communicate with people, and how to implement a customized messaging strategy to connect with your buyers better and faster.
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We’re not here to tell you what’s new — we’re here to tell you what works. And delivering personalization, sincerity and professionalism at scale is the key to success in sales development.
For a more comprehensive look into Salesloft’s internal SDR process, download the second section of our newest playbook trilogy, The Sales Development Playbook: Executing. In this section, we share the ins and outs of efficiently using Salesloft to call and email prospects.
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