Should Your Internal Sales Team Be Your Next Persona?

Sales enablement content is the new buzzword these days – and for good reason. Organizations have typically lived in silos, with marketing and sales operating independently of each other. With the switch to a buyer-focused marketing approach, we’ve all learned quickly that if we don’t educate sales on what marketing is doing and provide them their own tools to help buyers through the funnel, all of our work and investment is essentially wasted.

So that leads us to ask the question:
Should our sales teams be treated as a persona in our marketing initiatives?

 

I thought this was an interesting suggestion that Sirius Decisions raised in their recently published Content Strategy and Operations: Planning Assumptions 2016. In this brief, they discuss the five areas we all need to improve upon in order to move content marketing from early adopters to early majority.

The first area, which probably comes as no surprise to anyone, is aligning with sales to create quality, easily accessible sales enablement tools. Sirius goes on to say that the sales team needs to be its own persona with its own unique content strategy. And if a center of excellence or content team doesn’t yet exist within an organization, marketing should take the lead to help develop this strategy.

So should you treat sales like a persona? The short answer is yes. Treating sales as a separate persona doesn’t need to be complicated or take a year to implement. Work with sales to create a few core assets or repurpose a few existing assets. Share them from a central location that everyone can access easily. And, most important, include sales from the beginning. Start by educating the sales team on how a buyer-focused strategy will ultimately bring them more qualified leads – faster – which in turn leads to more sales.

PS… If you’re a Sirius Decisions subscriber, be sure to grab a copy of the Content Strategy and Operations: Planning Assumptions 2016, to see all 5 areas of improvement.

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