Why Sales Personas are Important for Business Success 

Ever wish you had a twin you could split your work with? Or get twice the job done with less time and effort?

While it’s impossible to summon a shadow clone like Naruto, you can leverage a sales persona.

Often overlooked, sales personas are a key tool for executing sales and tackling intense workloads. Whether it’s a model of an SDR, account executive, or even the CEO, well-crafted personas will help drive and scale results.

Here’s a closer look at how sales personas can empower business success.

What are sales personas?

Sales personas are a data-driven model of a person on your sales team. 

Sales personas can replicate a real person on your team, down to their name, position, and writing style, or you can craft a fictional team member.

Most “fictional” sales personas fill the position of a sales development representative (SDR), business development representative (BDR), or sales representative. That’s because the majority of entry-level sales team members usually aren’t in a public-facing role (e.g. giving interviews to the media, appearing on podcasts). As a result, you might name your persona “Sarah” even if there’s no Sarah on your team.

However, personas that are based on a specific account executive (AE), chief sales officer (CSO), or chief executive officer (CEO) will take on the person’s name and basic info. If Starbucks were to create a CEO persona, it would reply “Brian Niccol” when asked.

The same applies to start-ups relying on founder-led sales. Their personas would also contain the founder’s name and basic info.

How do sales personas fit into a sales strategy?

At its most basic, a sales persona is like a playbook containing the skills, tactics, and approaches used by the role it replicates. An SDR persona might focus on lead generation and relationship building while an AE might target account renewals, cross-sells, and upsells.

Instead of using the same approach for everyone, which would be the case with a one-size-fits-all persona, targeted personas allow sales teams to tailor outreach that has a greater impact and scores better results.

Traditional sales strategies use personas to make sure team members know how to approach and speak with potential and existing customers. SDR personas go to SDRs, AE personas to AEs, and so on. Alternatively, you might give content writers a CEO or founder persona for ghostwriting purposes since many CEOs and founders are focused on other parts of the business.

However, if you want to try an AI-powered sales strategy, you can use sales personas to configure generative AI so that the AI writer knows how to run outreach.

Why sales personas are essential for targeted outreach

If you want to run targeted outreach, sales personas are critical for several reasons:

• Personalization at scale – Sales personas allow you to use AI tools and CRM systems to automate personalized outreach and send each prospect a message that feels custom-written for them. You can also create targeted personas, such as an SDR for real estate or a sales rep targeting SaaS companies.
• Easier nurturing – Sales personas can map out the types of content that will appeal to specific customers. This simplifies the challenge of designing content-driven cadences for nurturing campaigns.
• Improved chances of conversion – Sales personas help you address an audience’s unique pain points and motivations. By targeting the right people with the right message at the right stage of their customer journey, you have a greater chance of making a connection that leads to a sale.
• Sales frameworks and success scripts – Sales personas usually contain 3-5 high-performing templates and emails. To simplify and speed up writing, templates might contain personalization placeholders or spintax options. Sales personas also explain how to overcome objections and client concerns, as well as when to loop in higher-ups. 

By understanding the roles within your sales team and how they interact with different customers and industries, you can craft an outreach strategy that gets results. 

How sales personas support team efficiency

Sales personas optimize sales processes by reducing friction between roles and streamlining the stages of your sales process in several ways:

• Consistent approach – Sales personas provide teams with a consistent framework and messaging style. This lets teams stay flexible and agile, allowing individual team members to move up, down, or sideways to cover a role in case someone falls ill or leaves the company.
• Easy training – Sales personas can serve as a simple guide to distribute and train new team members since they break down different customer profiles, best practices for engagement, and the company’s writing style. This speeds up each employee’s onboarding process, and they get to keep a handy guide nearby.
• Improved collaboration – Sales personas enable better alignment and communication between sales and marketing teams, ensuring both teams share insights, work towards the same goals, and avoid contradicting each other. Marketing knows how sales talks to customers, and vice versa (marketing personas let sales know what marketing is doing). 
• AI outreach – As mentioned earlier, teams can use sales personas to train tools like AiSDR to run outreach for them. This allows teams to delegate time-intensive, high-volume work like cold outreach to an AI SDR so they can tackle high-value work that need a human touch.

In the end, sales personas provide a huge opportunity for reducing friction within sales and ensuring smooth handoffs between roles.

Common mistakes when creating sales personas

When creating your sales persona, you’ll want to avoid these common mistakes to make sure they’re effective at helping you scale your sales outreach:

• Overgeneralizing – Personas that are overly broad and apply to too many people can result in a watered-down message that fails to get replies, such as “SDR for IT”. A good sales persona will be more specific like “SDR for start-up founders in fintech”.
• Focusing only on demographics – While demographics are important, psychographic factors like motivations, challenges, and goals play just as large a role. Only by combining the two can you understand buyer behavior and craft messages that have an impact.
• Relying on assumptions – The fastest way to torpedo your sales personas and general outreach is to rely on assumptions and stereotypes. Instead, use real data and customer feedback to build an accurate sales persona rather than guessing.

Best practices for creating sales personas

There are several best practices for ensuring that sales personas are accurate, helpful, and usable:

• Build a comprehensive buyer persona – Good sales personas need to “understand” and know how to speak with potential buyers. This requires collecting data from customer interviews, surveys, and sales feedback, which you’ll use to build a good sales persona.
• Segment personas by key characteristics – Sales personas work best when they fill a specific role and target a specific customer or industry. For example, you might have “John SDR for venture capital principals” or “Lucy AE for software development CEOs”.
• Make regular updates – As market conditions and the overall business environment change, you’ll need to revisit and update your sales personas using your latest data.
• Use sales team data – Sales personas should model your ideal salesperson. This means knowing which emails are most effective, which personalization elements are most meaningful, and which questions potential customers are likely to ask.