Your Persona Drives Your Strategy

Read time: 3.5 minutes

Good morning Daily Sales Reps and welcome to the middle of the summer!

Today, I’m going to discuss how Personas Drive Messaging and how to quickly mold your messaging to the type of person you’re reaching out to.

Sales Outreach is not a one-size-fits-all kind of thing.

Throughout your career, you’ll move across different companies, which means you’ll sell to lots of different people. And while you can take certain strategies, processes, and tools with you - your messaging needs to switch on a dime every time you change personas.

For example, if you’re selling to a Sales Leader, you’re best bet is deploy one of two strategies:

1. Direct & Clear: This is my personal favorite when selling to sales leaders (or even founders). Don’t waste time with lofty intros or attempting to be overly polite. Show them exactly what the message is, why you’re reaching out, and how you can help them. Sales Leaders are busy and due to their (assumed) type of personality, they’re going to appreciate the salespeople who get right down to business.

2. Clever & Impressive: The other angle to take if your prospect is a Sales Leader: clever, witty, and impressive. If you string together an undeniable email that makes them think “I need to hire this person”, then you’ll likely get a response. Sales Leaders are more likely to appreciate this approach because they’re constantly working out new strategies with their sales teams, so they’ll understand what it takes to craft an amazing message.

In a previous role, I was selling to sellers (and founders) and I had an email that performed incredibly well. +65% open rate / +12% response rate.

The subject line was… “Blatant Sales Pitch”

My audience at that time appreciated the subject line.

They knew exactly what they were getting into when they opened the email. It was short and to the point - took about 30 seconds to read and landed me a lot of meetings.

It’s crucial to understand who you’re reaching out and make “safe” assumptions about their personality type. Here’s a general profile for a Sales Leader:

• Hyper-focused on “closest to the dollar”

• Loose on process

• Excited to try something new that will produce results

• Extroverted

While a Sales Leader or Founder might appreciate your direct, clear, or impressive messaging - others will find it repulsive.

Let’s make a few assumptions about the HR Persona understanding these are generalizations and not true for everyone in HR.

Here are some common traits for HR professionals:

• Places a high value on helping people

• Not as focused on making money

• Personable and conversational, but not necessarily extroverted

• Process-driven, rule-follower

Approaching an HR Leader with the same veracity and directness as you do a Salesperson might get you a pinch immediately.

Instead, you might want to take time to hyper-personalize your outreach. Conduct thorough research (the 3x3x3 research framework is my favorite) and use it in your messaging.

Be thoughtful, make your message as empathetic as possible, and help them understand what your solution will do for their people.

One last persona review: Engineering/Development Leader

Let’s say you’re selling Application Management software and your primary buyer is an Engineering Leader who came up the ranks as a technical software developer.

This is another instance where being hyper-direct or witty might land you in the trash bin quickly.

With this prospect, it’s worth your time to connect with your own internal Engineering Leaders and ask them how they like to be sold to, what messages resonate with them, and what they find most valuable about your company’s product.

This is a good practice at any time for any persona, but especially for the engineering persona. Why?

Because development/engineering/coding is quite literally a different language and when outsiders try to speak to it without real-world applicable knowledge, they lose credibility immediately.

Make sure your messaging is technically sound and of course, is tied to the value of making their lives easier.

Pro Tip: meet with engineering on a regular basis because eventually, you’ll learn unique concepts and terminology that you can plug into your subject line that will set you apart from your competition.

Engineering is a unique community and if you can speak to a unique topic with genuine understanding - you’re in.

That’s it for today’s issue, happy hunting this week!