It’s no secret that presales requires multithreading and stakeholder management. In fact, it’s such an important topic that David Greene covered it in another recent PSC blog post recently. Once we’ve recognised the principle personas we are expected to work with though, a new challenge appears: what are the biggest concerns for that individual, and where do they fit into the cycle?

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Understanding how to deconstruct the needs of the audience and untangle the relationship between the values as they apply to different parties is the easiest way to take your engagement from a list of “wow” moments to real “a ha” moments. Those “a ha” moments can only happen when you have an intimate comprehension of what will markedly improve your customer’s way of working and living, and to do that the Empathy and Expertise pillars of solutioning need to be combined.

How do we define who?

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Personas are representations of our ideal customers, based on real data and experience. Personas empower us to align our solutions with the unique needs and preferences of the audience we work with. Building around personas can allow us to get more in the shoes of a customer to better understand their problems and the solutions we can provide, as well as making us closer aligned to speak to them in their own language.

If the goal is a technical win and fruitful partnership with the customer, knowing who is best to speak to, when, and about what, pays dividends in the solutioning cycle.

But the personas are not just imaginary characters, dreamed up by product marketing and thrust upon hapless solutionists. In the best cases, they come from knowing our customers at a deeper level. If you’re really fortunate, you’ll define them by talking with current and former practitioners, supplemented by thorough research, and reinforced by feedback.


Building Out a Profile

They are not just demographic profiles, but studies of psychographics, behavioral data, and even relationships.

When we talk about Psychographics, we are addressing the expected pains, values and interests of our persona. Think about the qualitative measures you can give to different groups, such as recognising that this role is often more stressed about time constraints than longing for features. These specifics are often vulnerabilities for the individual on the other side of the table, their hopes and dreams (and nightmares!), and as such might not always be answered at first pass. It requires true sympathy to uncover the specifics here.

When we dive deeper into why they have these pains and interests, we can often detect the whys by mapping them to behavioral data collection. This is less about what the customer wants, but understanding what they do. It might require knowing how they engage with your product, but it also reflects in other activities like how they engage with channels like support or their buying patterns. It’s important to focus deeply on these behavioral patterns, as they often begin to show you the splinters in your personas, especially for similar titles that might be split across different verticals of the business. 

‍

And that leads nicely to the third pillar in relational mapping. To be better at multithreading, it’s critical to know the influence patterns within the business. I have personally found that we have a “hidden persona” in our business in the form of product managers. Although they are a party that had no direct interest in our product, they were often the ones creating the challenges that were ending up on the desks of the engineers and engineering leadership we more frequently interacted with. Once the “blank square” was filled in, we realized that when looking to expand in an account, they were often the best individual to seek out to see if we could get a step ahead addressing the overall solutioning needs within the business.

Take our example that I sketched together.  Each persona have different pain points, and in the case of Sam the specialist, he doesn’t even share a want with another persona.

Their entire use of the product may be different from the others, but what the map doesn’t capture is the relationships between the individuals themselves and the rest of the business. 

If Sam has a ton of influence in the account but sits with a very different set of problems to the Operator who runs the platform day to day, we should begin to isolate how to address their pains and behaviors differently to make sure we don’t create conflict in the information we share.


What’s important is that we learn from each interaction we have across each organisation we have interacted with, because learnings from Sam’s pain mean we can take this onto the next customers and provide a more focused engagement.

But why is this so important to PreSales specifically?

‍

Speaking in their Language

‍

Multithreading requires context switching, but the multithreading isn’t just happening on our side of the table. At the customer, we will be building a technical champion over time, while also trying to identify the team that supports them, and isolate the parties that slow them down or fight against them.

Imagine we are tailoring our demo scripts and mapped out our personas.

When we defined who, we made a note of what the values and interests were of our personas. It turns out, that also impacts how we should address them over time, too. The sales cycle isn’t linear, and new agents come and go along the way, so we need to be able to add some additional dimensions to these personas based on the stages, and their interest in the product. It is important that we understand the art of attention spans in a given engagement, such that most people only pay attention for the first and last 5 or so minutes of it. If we can address people’s personal touchpoints, we can spike through that period, pulling the different personas back into the conversation at a point that matters most to them.

If we frame this around a fairly common offering of support, we see the patterns start to emerge.  Execs early on need a high level view, Operators post-purchase needs a deep dive. Our persona identification helped us define why and what were drivers, and now we begin to recognise the whens as well, and even how to address the problem from two points of view in the same conversation.

The technical champion more than any other needs to be part of this flow. 

 Building a champion does not happen over night. We start by finding those with curiosities that align with our solutions, identify their needs and elevate their impact with the decisions. We know that this may help their career, their team, or their other goals, so eventually by giving them the right resources aligned with these at the right time we are able to build an internal seller who can help us repeat the cycle elsewhere in the business.


Might sound instinctive, but being familiar with the ties and impacts can lead to a richer customer experience, and even make us more flexible as SEs.

‍

What should I do next?

If you want to figure out today what you can do to take better advantage of personas in your demos and presales tasks, Step 1 is to figure out those personas.

Chances are that marketing or sales already have a starting point for some key personas, but it is good to build back a feedback loop to see how well these align with the SE process.

Personally, I also check my notes and CRM records to see exactly who has been engaging and what questions they have to make sure I’m tailoring the content to the right audience that exists outside product marketings aspirational best case.

This is a great time to also consider building out a venn diagram of pain and drivers: do two different sub personas share qualities under a top level persona?

The next step is identifying where they fit along your path. Even outside of persona selling, stage-task mapping is a powerful tool for an SEs, AEs and their Ops and management peers to work on to make sure they know how to delineate responsibility and move deals forward.

It’s an easy exercise from here to take your previous personas and figure out who is most important to address in each stage and their influence on other personas in your generalized plan

.All the evidence you’ve collected up to this point should then go into building those scripts. It’s okay to admit that the scripts cost time, so look for efficiencies: Are there groups who speak similar languages, be that technical or business, or clearly repeatable modules?

That’s not just about building and developing demos around the script. It’s about A-B testing, gathering internal feedback, and most importantly figuring out what resonates directly with your customers.

Just like the deal cycles, persona content should not be static and should evolve overtime.
Perhaps you hire a new team mate who fulfilled that role in their previous job who can enrich the view, or your product evolves.  Grow with these developments and let them evolve to continue recognising the returns.

Measuring something that exists because of SUBJECTIVE interpretations of OBJECTIVE product features can be hard, but as you iterate and expand the adoption, even at a personal level you should be able to see where the successes are happening.

Iterate on this, focus on customer success, and it will all come back to enhancing customer relationships and building much more success in your presales role too! 

‍

About Alex Stuart
Alex Stuart is a Senior Solutions Engineer at Confluent, guiding businesses across Europe on their path to adopting Data in Motion. His passion for fintech and analytics comes from previous roles at Experian and Splunk. He’s “In Motion” outside of work too: as a running community leader and a keen globetrotter at 52 countries and counting.

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‍

It’s no secret that presales requires multithreading and stakeholder management. In fact, it’s such an important topic that David Greene covered it in another recent PSC blog post recently. Once we’ve recognised the principle personas we are expected to work with though, a new challenge appears: what are the biggest concerns for that individual, and where do they fit into the cycle?

‍

Understanding how to deconstruct the needs of the audience and untangle the relationship between the values as they apply to different parties is the easiest way to take your engagement from a list of “wow” moments to real “a ha” moments. Those “a ha” moments can only happen when you have an intimate comprehension of what will markedly improve your customer’s way of working and living, and to do that the Empathy and Expertise pillars of solutioning need to be combined.

How do we define who?

‍

Personas are representations of our ideal customers, based on real data and experience. Personas empower us to align our solutions with the unique needs and preferences of the audience we work with. Building around personas can allow us to get more in the shoes of a customer to better understand their problems and the solutions we can provide, as well as making us closer aligned to speak to them in their own language.

If the goal is a technical win and fruitful partnership with the customer, knowing who is best to speak to, when, and about what, pays dividends in the solutioning cycle.

But the personas are not just imaginary characters, dreamed up by product marketing and thrust upon hapless solutionists. In the best cases, they come from knowing our customers at a deeper level. If you’re really fortunate, you’ll define them by talking with current and former practitioners, supplemented by thorough research, and reinforced by feedback.


Building Out a Profile

They are not just demographic profiles, but studies of psychographics, behavioral data, and even relationships.

When we talk about Psychographics, we are addressing the expected pains, values and interests of our persona. Think about the qualitative measures you can give to different groups, such as recognising that this role is often more stressed about time constraints than longing for features. These specifics are often vulnerabilities for the individual on the other side of the table, their hopes and dreams (and nightmares!), and as such might not always be answered at first pass. It requires true sympathy to uncover the specifics here.

When we dive deeper into why they have these pains and interests, we can often detect the whys by mapping them to behavioral data collection. This is less about what the customer wants, but understanding what they do. It might require knowing how they engage with your product, but it also reflects in other activities like how they engage with channels like support or their buying patterns. It’s important to focus deeply on these behavioral patterns, as they often begin to show you the splinters in your personas, especially for similar titles that might be split across different verticals of the business. 

‍

And that leads nicely to the third pillar in relational mapping. To be better at multithreading, it’s critical to know the influence patterns within the business. I have personally found that we have a “hidden persona” in our business in the form of product managers. Although they are a party that had no direct interest in our product, they were often the ones creating the challenges that were ending up on the desks of the engineers and engineering leadership we more frequently interacted with. Once the “blank square” was filled in, we realized that when looking to expand in an account, they were often the best individual to seek out to see if we could get a step ahead addressing the overall solutioning needs within the business.

Take our example that I sketched together.  Each persona have different pain points, and in the case of Sam the specialist, he doesn’t even share a want with another persona.

Their entire use of the product may be different from the others, but what the map doesn’t capture is the relationships between the individuals themselves and the rest of the business. 

If Sam has a ton of influence in the account but sits with a very different set of problems to the Operator who runs the platform day to day, we should begin to isolate how to address their pains and behaviors differently to make sure we don’t create conflict in the information we share.


What’s important is that we learn from each interaction we have across each organisation we have interacted with, because learnings from Sam’s pain mean we can take this onto the next customers and provide a more focused engagement.

But why is this so important to PreSales specifically?

‍

Speaking in their Language

‍

Multithreading requires context switching, but the multithreading isn’t just happening on our side of the table. At the customer, we will be building a technical champion over time, while also trying to identify the team that supports them, and isolate the parties that slow them down or fight against them.

Imagine we are tailoring our demo scripts and mapped out our personas.

When we defined who, we made a note of what the values and interests were of our personas. It turns out, that also impacts how we should address them over time, too. The sales cycle isn’t linear, and new agents come and go along the way, so we need to be able to add some additional dimensions to these personas based on the stages, and their interest in the product. It is important that we understand the art of attention spans in a given engagement, such that most people only pay attention for the first and last 5 or so minutes of it. If we can address people’s personal touchpoints, we can spike through that period, pulling the different personas back into the conversation at a point that matters most to them.

If we frame this around a fairly common offering of support, we see the patterns start to emerge.  Execs early on need a high level view, Operators post-purchase needs a deep dive. Our persona identification helped us define why and what were drivers, and now we begin to recognise the whens as well, and even how to address the problem from two points of view in the same conversation.

The technical champion more than any other needs to be part of this flow. 

 Building a champion does not happen over night. We start by finding those with curiosities that align with our solutions, identify their needs and elevate their impact with the decisions. We know that this may help their career, their team, or their other goals, so eventually by giving them the right resources aligned with these at the right time we are able to build an internal seller who can help us repeat the cycle elsewhere in the business.


Might sound instinctive, but being familiar with the ties and impacts can lead to a richer customer experience, and even make us more flexible as SEs.

‍

What should I do next?

If you want to figure out today what you can do to take better advantage of personas in your demos and presales tasks, Step 1 is to figure out those personas.

Chances are that marketing or sales already have a starting point for some key personas, but it is good to build back a feedback loop to see how well these align with the SE process.

Personally, I also check my notes and CRM records to see exactly who has been engaging and what questions they have to make sure I’m tailoring the content to the right audience that exists outside product marketings aspirational best case.

This is a great time to also consider building out a venn diagram of pain and drivers: do two different sub personas share qualities under a top level persona?

The next step is identifying where they fit along your path. Even outside of persona selling, stage-task mapping is a powerful tool for an SEs, AEs and their Ops and management peers to work on to make sure they know how to delineate responsibility and move deals forward.

It’s an easy exercise from here to take your previous personas and figure out who is most important to address in each stage and their influence on other personas in your generalized plan

.All the evidence you’ve collected up to this point should then go into building those scripts. It’s okay to admit that the scripts cost time, so look for efficiencies: Are there groups who speak similar languages, be that technical or business, or clearly repeatable modules?

That’s not just about building and developing demos around the script. It’s about A-B testing, gathering internal feedback, and most importantly figuring out what resonates directly with your customers.

Just like the deal cycles, persona content should not be static and should evolve overtime.
Perhaps you hire a new team mate who fulfilled that role in their previous job who can enrich the view, or your product evolves.  Grow with these developments and let them evolve to continue recognising the returns.

Measuring something that exists because of SUBJECTIVE interpretations of OBJECTIVE product features can be hard, but as you iterate and expand the adoption, even at a personal level you should be able to see where the successes are happening.

Iterate on this, focus on customer success, and it will all come back to enhancing customer relationships and building much more success in your presales role too! 

‍

About Alex Stuart
Alex Stuart is a Senior Solutions Engineer at Confluent, guiding businesses across Europe on their path to adopting Data in Motion. His passion for fintech and analytics comes from previous roles at Experian and Splunk. He’s “In Motion” outside of work too: as a running community leader and a keen globetrotter at 52 countries and counting.

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