In my previous post I talked about the importance of achieving go-to-market team alignment (a $ trillion dollar opportunity!), and the five critical aspects that can get you there.
One of those five was the creation – and operationalisation – of shared personas and playbooks.
In this post I’ll dive deeper into these areas, explaining what they are, why they’re important and how to implement them in your business.
Let’s start with personas.
Personas are a fictionalised representation of a target segment of your market, based on real insights.
Typically they look at demographic, firmographic, behavioural and psychological factors to help those using them better understand your customers and prospects.
Here’s a couple of good examples of personas:
There are lots of great resources out there on how to create good personas, so I’m not going to write yet another take on it. Instead I’ll focus on how to actually make use of them and embed them into your team.
But first, let’s look at playbooks.
Oxford Languages defines a playbook as “a book containing a sports team’s strategies and plays, especially in American football.”
How does that translate to what a good GTM playbook should be? Well it should be a precise set of instructions that keeps narrative to a minimum, but gives everyone on the team knowledge of what they should be doing and when (not how).
This is how you can coordinate complicated, dynamic teams within your business to work together towards a common goal.
Again, the focus in this post isn’t on how to create a playbook, but on what to do with it once it’s created, so it becomes useful to your business.
However, one essential note is that your playbook has to map to how your buyers buy (the buyer’s journey)…otherwise you’ll have an internally focussed document that simply doesn’t map to how your prospects want to work with vendors in your space. This will leave your team and prospects equally frustrated.
It’s also why personas and playbooks should go hand-in-hand. Playbooks may well focus on your internal operations, but if they’re combined with well understood personas, this will ensure you’re more ‘client’ focussed than ‘you’ focussed.
So now we know what playbooks and personas are, let’s turn to putting them to work and using them as a way to align your go-to-market (and other) teams.
There are 6 key areas that you’ll want to consider:
- Documentation
- Onboarding and certification
- Audits
- Salesforce/CRM
- 1:1s and deal reviews
- Retros
Documentation
Documenting your personas and playbooks is table stakes, but if you don’t do it (or do it wrong) then everything else falls apart, so it’s worth starting here.
First off, it needs to be centralised in a location that is easily accessible by everyone in the company. One mistake companies can make is having a sales persona, a marketing persona, a user persona etc. which are developed by each team, but don’t actually resemble each other, and they’re only known to that specific function.
While you may well have multiple personas to account for different market segments you’re targeting, you shouldn’t have different personas that only speak to a particular function in your business. This way you can easily start to diverge over your understanding of who you’re trying to win as a business.
And while playbooks are usually more focussed on the commercial side of things, it’s still important to have it shared centrally so product/eng/design teams etc. can understand how it is that buyers buy.
You also need to avoid having multiple versions of the same persona. This may sound obvious, but I bet your folder system has multiple versions of docs with words in the name like ‘draft’ ‘old’ ‘current’ ‘2021’ ‘2022’ ‘new’ ‘updated’ ‘ignore’ etc. which clearly gets confusing if you don’t know what you’re looking for.
Rather than creating lots of updated versions and copies with different names, it’s best to retire or archive any old ones and ensure there’s always just one, canonical version that people can find and refer to.
To that point, it needs to be updated regularly (but not too regularly). If people access the playbook or persona and see it was last updated 4 years ago, there may be questions about how accurate it is. Equally if it changes every 5 minutes it’ll be hard for everyone to keep track of a moving target.
I would suggest 3/6/12 month reviews, where any changes are properly rolled out across the team (more on this below).
Finally, the documentation needs to be easy to understand. Not so in depth it’s like reading “War and Peace”, because let’s face it, nobody will bother. But not so high level it’s open to wide interpretation by anyone reading it.
Once you’ve got your documentation process in a good place, it’s time to think about the next step.
Onboarding and certification
If you want people to really follow and internalise your playbooks and the personas you’re targeting, make sure it forms a part of their earliest experiences at the company.
Alongside things such as values & culture, people-related processes and functional tooling…a company-wide onboarding process for those shared personas and playbooks is a perfect way to operationalise them.
It sets the tone and shows everyone joining the company how important they are.
But just asking them to watch a video, attend a Hangout or read a doc isn’t enough. You – and they – need to be confident they’ve properly absorbed the information and understood it.
This is where the concept of certification comes in, as it allows you to test their knowledge and application of the materials, so that post-onboarding everyone knows that their new colleagues have the same shared understanding as they do.
And of course, the certification element doesn’t just apply to new starters. When any material shifts in your personas or playbooks take place, you’ll need to ensure everyone in the company is up to speed with those changes, and having them re-certify is a great way to achieve that.
With this process in place, you should see that the outputs of your teams correlate strongly with the personas and playbooks you’ve educated them on. But the next step adds in a layer of quality control on top.
Audits
It’s good practice to check at regular intervals just how well your assets and other customer facing materials align with your personas and playbooks.
For example, take a persona and check it against the language and copy of your landing pages, nurture programs and sales decks. Does it feel like it really speaks to them?
Even better, can you get a real client that is the embodiment of your persona to do some secret shopping and see how well the experience resonates with them?
This isn’t about looking over the shoulder of your team to try and catch them out, but it is about maintaining a relentlessly high bar for your business acting in a consistent, clear and customer facing manner.
And it’s easy when you’re trying to generate high volumes of output to skip that focus on your core personas in order to ship it and move onto the next thing on your ever-growing checklist.
Regular audits are a good practice to not let that get too out of control.
And there’s also a good argument for occasionally auditing your playbook execution too. Is everyone still following the critical steps or are folks starting to skip one here and there?
Do people still mean the same thing when they reference being at a particular stage of the sales cycle? Or that they’ve secured the support of a champion in their deal?
Which brings us onto the next area…your CRM
Salesforce/CRM
Whilst not as relevant for personas, there’s no better way of operationalising a commercial playbook than baking its core tenets into the CRM you’re using so that reps literally get guided through it when using their daily tech stack.
Work with your RevOps team to create exit gates for each stage of your sales funnel, with clear notes attached regarding what’s expected and an inability to move the deal forward without meeting the criteria.
If a rep runs through this sequence on every single deal, it quickly relays the message that following the steps in the playbook is important – and mandatory – and gives you guardrails to ensure it’s being followed.
1:1s and deal reviews
As useful as it is having the playbook built into the fabric of your CRM, taking the time to speak about it with your team provides a greater level of depth, understanding and ‘why’ that doesn’t just force their hand, but earns their buy-in to its importance.
In 1:1s, ask which aspects of the playbook they find they’re best at, and in which areas they’d like to improve. You can utilise your CRM data to help guide that conversation, which leads to the opportunity for providing highly targeted coaching, aligned to your on-the-ground playbook.
If each rep can improve 1-2 aspects of their execution of the playbook every quarter, the compound impact of that across your whole salesforce is absolutely massive.
Equally, ask them about which personas they are best suited to selling to and where they struggle. You’ll also find useful gaps in your team’s knowledge that can lead to focussed training with the help of your sales enablement or product marketing functions.
Of course, this doesn’t just apply to the sales team. If you’re leading the marketing organisation or another part of the GTM team, you can have the same useful discussions about where your team’s strengths, areas for improvement and highest/lowest interest lie in relation to the playbooks and personas that sit at the heart of your business.
This means your playbooks and personas will not only be ingrained across the organisation, the people executing them will get better every day.
Retros
Personas and playbooks are not static.
They need to evolve and flex as your clients and prospects shift, market dynamics change and your product or overarching company strategy develops.
To ensure you’re not executing an out-of-date playbook, or focussed on personas that yield diminishing returns on your investment, host regularly retros.
You can keep them simple, for example using a start, stop, continue format.
Use them as a chance to gather all of your team together and explore which aspects of your personas no longer ring true, or add in more depth and insights gleaned from the field. It might be time to retire one and introduce another.
Similarly with your playbooks, consider if any steps and stages are growing less effective, or whether any promising experiments from individuals should be graduated into the official playbook.
This keeps everything fresh, ensures everyone knows they’re working in the most up-to-date and relevant way, whilst not changing so much that you’re fully re-educating your whole GTM org every 3 months.
Conclusion
Having playbooks and personas are useless unless your teams actually utilise them day-to-day, in order to guide their focus, generate cross-functional alignment and deliver value to your prospects/clients by understanding them and how they want to buy.
To achieve the benefits you therefore need to operationalise them.
As seen above, this takes real effort and willpower (particularly to begin with), but once you’re in a rhythm it’ll become self-perpetuating (with a little nudge every now and then to keep things going).
Follow these tips and you’ll have a rock-solid GTM operation grounded in the playbooks and personas that’ll allow you to win, again and again.