Sales & Marketing Playbook: Unleashed
"Sales and Marketing Playbook: Unleashed" is a dynamic and informative podcast that provides listeners with the essential strategies, tactics, and insights to excel in the world of sales and marketing.
Hosted by industry experts and thought leaders, this podcast delves deep into the latest trends, best practices, and innovative approaches that drive success in the competitive business landscape.
Whether you're a seasoned professional or just starting out, "Sales and Marketing Playbook: Unleashed" offers a treasure trove of actionable advice, real-world examples, and inspiring interviews to help you unlock your full potential and achieve outstanding results in sales and marketing. Join us on this journey of discovery, growth, and transformation as we unleash the power of effective sales and marketing techniques.
Sales & Marketing Playbook: Unleashed
Master Your Customer Personas
Have you ever felt like your marketing dollars are disappearing into thin air? Or wondered why your sales team struggles to convert seemingly good leads? The answer might lie in how well you understand who you're actually selling to.
In this enlightening episode, Craig Andrews and Evan Polin tackle the often misunderstood concept of customer personas and why they're fundamental to business success. As Evan aptly puts it, "If you don't know what a good prospect looks like, you're never going to find them." They reveal how properly defined personas serve as your business compass, guiding every marketing decision and sales conversation toward greater profitability.
The hosts share practical strategies for developing detailed personas, from conducting client interviews and analyzing historical data to exploring psychographic elements like communication preferences and lifestyle choices. Their baseball analogy brilliantly illustrates the problem many businesses face: being a pitcher with twenty catchers behind the plate means you might eventually hit one, but that's not an efficient strategy. Instead, they show how focusing on specific, profitable personas creates that "sweet spot" where marketing and sales align perfectly.
Craig and Evan don't just theorize—they provide real-world examples from their own businesses. Evan explains how he markets differently to attorneys versus commission-based salespeople, while Craig shares insights about targeting home service professionals. Their examples demonstrate that effective personas go far beyond basic demographics to include how prospects think, where they spend time, and what language resonates with them.
Whether you're struggling with unfocused marketing efforts or frustrated by low conversion rates, this episode offers concrete steps to transform your approach. Listen now to discover how well-crafted customer personas can turn your business from throwing "spaghetti at the wall" to precisely targeting the prospects who will become your most profitable clients.
Thank you so much for joining us. Meet Evan Polin, the president of Polin Performance Group. A master in sales coaching with over two decades of experience, evan is not just a consultant. He's a force in sales, focusing on mindset, planning and skill development. He's also the co-author of Selling Professional Services the Sandler Way. Joining him is Craig Andrews, partner and CEO of Beholder Agency. An expert in growth marketing With 20 years under his belt, craig blends marketing creativity with strategy to propel businesses forward, making Beholder Agency a leader in effective marketing solutions. Together, evan and Craig are here to share their wisdom on winning strategies, best practices and transformative insights that will fuel your growth. Get ready to revolutionize your sales and marketing approach right here on the Sales and Marketing Playbook Unleashed.
Speaker 3:And welcome to the Sales and Marketing Playbook Unleashed. I'm Craig Andrews and my partner in crime, Evan Poland. How are you doing today, Evan?
Speaker 1:I'm doing great. You don't look too beat up from your trip out to Vegas this past week.
Speaker 3:Well, time will heal all wounds, evan, because it was a little rough for me getting back across the country. I know I'm getting old, primarily for that reason.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I know it's tough when you're in your 30s going back and forth like that Wow.
Speaker 3:Compliments will get you everywhere, evan. Let me tell you something. The playbook is working very well, and I'm going to tell you why. We just hit our milestone of 500 downloads of our podcast. So congratulations, partner. We hit 500 downloads. People are listening to what we have to say.
Speaker 1:Watch out, Jason and Travis Kelsey, we're going to catch you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so we're coming, we're coming, okay. So today's episode episode we're talking about this is going to be one of our episode series again, and we're talking about understanding customer personas. Customer personas are very important when it comes to marketing, when it comes to sales and when it comes to almost anything. And in the best Steve Irwin impression, you know, we're in the depths of the marketing and the sales world looking for that unique animal called clients.
Speaker 1:Were you once Sage an impressionist while you were out in Vegas.
Speaker 3:I think I was. I was trying, I had food and tomatoes and that's why it was a little rough for me. But yes, today we're going to talk about customer personas, and the thing to keep in mind here in the introduction is what is a buyer persona? Why don't you start in terms of the sales process? What's a persona or a avatar or anything of that fashion? However you define it?
Speaker 1:Sure, and I think first, even taking a step back, a little bit further than that, when we talk about buyer personas, buyer avatars, if you and your business don't know what a good prospect looks like, if you don't know what a good strategic partner, referral partner, looks like, you are never going to find them. You're doing marketing and you're not clearly focused on what a good prospect looks like for you, what a good client looks like for you. You're never going to find them and you're going to get really, really frustrated. So in my world, that persona is knowing who I'm looking for, whether it is size of client, whether it is industry, whether it's who the decision maker is. And I know that you're going to get into all of these things.
Speaker 1:If you don't know what you're looking for, it's like going on a destination vacation but not knowing what that destination is. You can drive immensely, forever, and occasionally you'll have some good experiences. You may have a lot of bad experiences, a lot of frustration, but if you don't know that end point that you're getting to, you're never going to get there. So having that persona is giving you that compass, giving you that map, knowing exactly what to look for so that then you can develop all of your strategy around that.
Speaker 3:And so I'm a very visual guy, right? So the way I kind of look at it, based on our baseball theme that we talked about several episodes ago, imagine being a pitcher with 20 catchers behind the plate. Right, you could throw it and somebody's going to eventually catch it, right? But the reality is that may not have been the catcher you wanted to throw it to to get into that strike zone.
Speaker 3:And I think that having those personas in place allows you to target. So marketing can be very expensive if you don't target properly. So if I go and, as the phrase goes, throw spaghetti on the wall and go and try to target everybody in creation, to target everybody in creation, you and I've both been to a lot of networking events and and we all give the kind of same spiel in which we help clients x of x number of size and x number of industries do x number of things. But when you're really talking about having that persona internally, you really want to be very detailed in terms of who you're talking about. And I think that, as we talk about what's essential in terms of the alignment between sales and marketing, if you as the sales guy and me as the marketing guy can target the same person, the same persona, we have a greater chance of success.
Speaker 1:Yes, that's that one one plus one starts to equal three or five, versus equaling two If everybody's on the same page and the multiplier goes crazy.
Speaker 3:So, real quick, I'm going to bring up this image here no-transcript sales over the leads, I should say over to the sales reps. There they can really optimize and sell and get to the point so they can continue that process of selling. There's a small little section inside of there I don't know if you guys can see it right between the sales, marketing and brand, that small little bitty triangle that's in there. Ok, that is the sweet spot. That is the sweet spot If you have your persona down correct. That is the sweet spot for really having everything really take off for you. So, with that being said, let me kind of move on to our next piece here in terms of the kind of things that you should be looking for in your buyer persona from a marketing perspective episode.
Speaker 3:The next episode is going to talk about the sales perspective, but here we're going to talk about different things that you can do in terms of what data sources are you using to build that persona from a marketing perspective? We might do surveys, send out to a client base and have surveys in place. We might do surveys, right, send out to a client base and have surveys in place. We might do interviews. There's nothing like interviewing a client and saying what about me? Did you like? What about me? Don't you like? What about me? Can I do better?
Speaker 1:Believe me, people have opinions. What do they say about opinions, Evan?
Speaker 3:They're like everybody's got one. Everybody's got one. There you go. Thank you for keeping that PC Anyway. So in the interview process you want to be candid and frank with your client base and a good plethora of them so that you're in a position that you get true feedback about what that person is and what they represent. Big on data right Data, data data Analytics tells you a lot. So if the right hand and the left hand match you all of a sudden have concrete information that they're telling you the truth. You just have to make sure you're analyzing the data the proper way. But the number of people that hits your site, the number of people that hits your information or reads your stuff, can change your game huge in terms of who the persona is.
Speaker 1:Can I share with you one other thing that people should be doing in terms of helping them fine tune. Going back to the data, absolutely you should all be going back to look at your previous clients. What kind of services did they buy? What was the profitability? So that, yeah, one one thing if you're getting lots and lots of orders, lots and lots of new clients, but if you're not making any money on those things, or you know, if you know you love getting those huge logos, but if you find that those clients that are, you know, really, really, you know high revenue, but if they're not very profitable because of all of the time and effort and work it takes I don't know how many so as you look at that persona, you should go back and look at the historical data what business has come in, what was profitable, what wasn't profitable, and that should go into the mix to help you fine tune what that persona should look like Totally agree.
Speaker 3:And that's where that sweet spot comes into place, Because if I can maximize my profitability with the right client, regardless of their size, the reality behind it is is that we all get wooed by that big name, as you said, but the reality behind it is we make more money on this other persona and once you know that, then you might sit back and go. I don't need that big guy, even though it sounds good and everybody looks good. Salespeople like money, right, that's what they're, that's what they like. So if they're making more money on this particular persona, why wouldn't they go after them more? That's really the logic that comes to that. Did you have something you want to add to that?
Speaker 1:No, I am with you. 1000. For business owners who work smart rather than just working hard, it's all about how much you're,000 to do, but another business is doing $10 million in revenue and taking home $2.5 million. Which business owner would you rather be? The second one, for sure, absolutely. So just keep that in mind. As Craig said, not getting wooed by the numbers, not getting wooed by the logos, but really looking at what's best for your bottom line business.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. And so to dive a little deeper in terms of the profiles, we call them profiles, personas, avatars. Everybody has a different name for them, but they're really the same being. If you will, we like to, from a marketing perspective, dive deeper. What's the average age of that persona? Who's making that decision?
Speaker 3:If you have a young tech company that could be in their mid-20s, early 30s and be that ideal client or ideal prospect, ideal client that you really want to target, and how they think? So how do they think? How do you put that stuff together? Where do they play? Where do they eat? What's their lifestyle like? How do they process and work with their employees?
Speaker 3:All of that stuff can really touch upon whatever your niche. Is that you really want to make sure that you're speaking their lingo right? Because, evan, people do business with people they like and people like themselves and people like themselves. So there's how the sales and marketing touch, how the sales and marketing touch. So if I go off and have content created and I'm going to go through that in a second if I have content created that speaks like we do, speaks like they do, we all of a sudden have a synergy that all of a sudden just starts to elevate yourself and makes you more likable for that end prospect. So what's interesting is about bringing this stuff up is you have a sales training program that kind of touches upon the whole gamut Right Of all the different things that happen to sales, and personas happen to be one of them. Why don't you tell our audience a little bit more about your sales program?
Speaker 1:I appreciate you not shoehorning this into this episode. Yeah, we really the audience really appreciate that. But yes, I have a 12-week sales training program coming up. This is a little bit different from some of the custom work that we've been doing, but more of a group sales training session. We're really hitting on three things big picture, having the mindset to be successful, having that sales plan in place and being able to track that sales plan. And giving you some of those prospecting tools that can help you leverage your marketing to develop more business, get in front of more opportunities. And then, lastly, how to more effectively qualify those opportunities, how how to more quickly determine is this the right fit and get into a yes or no more quickly in the process. And then, as you bring in more business, how to get more referrals and introductions from the clients that love your products, love your services. So, because today we are talking about personas the personas that this program is appropriate for a couple different places.
Speaker 1:If you are a new owner of a law firm, accounting firm you've gone there. You have a sense of how much business you'd like to do, but you're not quite sure how to get there. Great program for you If you are in a firm and you know that you need to start to develop business, to make partner, to be able to have the autonomy to go out and start your own firm. This program is good for you. If you are a business owner or a salesperson and most of the money that you make, most of your income, is based on how much business you close, this program is for you and you are going to get tools that are going to give you immediate ROI.
Speaker 1:So check it out. It's a 12-week sales training program, one Zoom session a week. Sessions will be recorded. If you're not able to make it, you will have access to my app for six months. That will provide reinforcement to the training sessions as well as helping you to track your goals. And if you decide that you want to upgrade the programs, there's an additional group coaching. There's an additional one-on-one coaching that's available as well, so go ahead and check it out. I believe that the URL is scrolling along the bottom, but those are the personas that this program would be appropriate for.
Speaker 3:And let me tell you guys, the one reason why we wanted to really push this program across is that if, even if your focus right now is on marketing or branding, you know what's really going to be important is also the sales component. So a lot of times Evan and I go back and forth and we're in a position that we're saying, OK, Evan, I don't know if your sales process of this particular client of mine sales process up the par, We'll send them to someone like Evan to go through and run through this type of training. So I highly suggest that everyone takes this into consideration, because there's going to be certain things that a professional like myself will ask you guys and you'll go. Well, I think it's kind of and I'm going to say, okay, this might take a little longer than you anticipate, Because if you don't know that, then again we're back at the mini catchers at the end of the home plate and we're throwing things at the wall to see if it works, just for it to be expedited a little sooner going through the sales process.
Speaker 1:And Craig, just from your perspective, how often has somebody told you I've got all of these leads, but these leads must be no good because I can't close them? I've got all of these leads, but these leads must be no good because I can't close them, when really the issue is they now have all of their leads on their, all of these leads on their plates, but then they don't have the skills to be able to more effectively qualify, disqualify those and close those leads more quickly.
Speaker 3:I can tell you, early in my business I was that guy for sure.
Speaker 1:I wasn't looking for you to raise your hand, but I'm not afraid.
Speaker 3:I know it works Right. So I think that ultimately, the point behind it is is that that happens a lot and a lot of times people get overwhelmed and that's why we talked before about sales, marketing, marketing sales because they really don't have the skills to manage the process from end to end. And I think that having this program in the place, having the tools that you can go back and refer to it, having the information that you go oh, there's an idea and even after the fact you can go back and have the consulting sessions and go I think I did the elevator pitch like this for that persona, but I probably should have did it like that that having that stuff in place and, craig, the word that I really like that you used that I think is good for both marketing and sales and, quite frankly, branding as well is process.
Speaker 1:Don't know if you see this, but a lot of times people will come to me and they're using one of two systems. They're either winging it or they're flying by the seat of their pants and they're doing it one way on one time, a different way. The next time, I'm guessing you find the same thing. You know, they latch onto a shiny object Okay, let me try an email campaign Now, let me try LinkedIn now and they don't really have any process behind it. And then they want to know why it doesn't work and why it feels like they're throwing money away.
Speaker 3:And one of the things we have to do is we have to bring a process to the marketing. So because, again, you can't measure data if it's constantly changing, and so that's the where the process comes into play and so, picking up, kind of where we are here I want to talk about from a marketing perspective and the personas, sort of what you just referenced, evan. If we're going to be in a position that we're creating content, okay, content's very important. We all do it. We all may not do it well, but we all do it.
Speaker 3:You have a LinkedIn page, right? Yep. You have a company LinkedIn page, right? Yep. Got a website. Got a website. You got emails. You got social media Instagram, facebook, twitter all of that stuff is content-durative. So the thing that we often suggest to people is develop the profiles, develop the personas, and you're actually sending out a social program per persona. If I said that, right, that's a lot of Ps persona. If I said that, right, that's a lot of Ps. Ideally, you're targeting your specific persona through the profiles, the social media profiles that operate best for them, because you can't be one to everyone. For instance, I had a conversation the other day in which I asked somebody in terms of what is your favorite social media profile. And they said Facebook. I said, from a client perspective, you would have lost me because I'm not on Facebook a lot. I'm on LinkedIn, I'm on Instagram, but I'm not on Facebook. So think about how, not having me as a target, not on Facebook, you've lost people like me.
Speaker 1:And I think the other thing that's good to bring up here. A mistake that lots of people make is they'll say, yeah, but I'm on Facebook, or yeah, but I'm on LinkedIn. Just because that's your preferred modality doesn't mean that that's what your prospects. That's not where they are or that's not where they're getting their information to make their buying decisions. So it doesn't really matter all that much what you personally are comfortable with or what your personal preference is. You need to get into the mind of your prospects to identify where they are, where they're getting their information, and then you need to make sure that you're showing up there.
Speaker 3:And to piggyback on top of what we talked about earlier. Wherever they are, you have to speak like they are. So you can imagine there's a lot of people out there who will say I have a post whether it be a blog, an email, whatever and I'm going to send that out to everybody in my contact base. Well, everybody in your contact base is not the persona that we're talking about. So that we don't get too long-winded here, as a kind of a real-world example, I'm going to give one in terms of a persona for me, Evan, and you give one for a persona for yourself. So for us, we basically operate probably on a retainer-based process in which we charge monthly and so forth. I have no problem saying that. But the clients that we're looking at are small to medium-sized businesses who actually don't have the time to go out and do the marketing themselves. So we're an ideal vendor for them because we can take care of it from soup to nuts, and we primarily focus in the service space, professional service space. If you can imagine what that person calls, we might call that person Bobby. We give them a specific name, or Bobby or Bobette, however you want to call it. We don't really have a gender breakdown.
Speaker 3:But if you take that persona and you look at who we're targeting, you can probably visualize because I'm a visual guy you can visualize what a home service person looks like, how they're at your home working on it, and they're in a position where they are out there constantly working on your home. They're not thinking about marketing at that time. What they're primarily thinking about is, if it's a plumber fixing your pipes, If it's a pest control person killing the bugs, If they're a roofer, they're on your roof in that hot sun doing the work. So how are they marketing themselves? From their website to their emails, to their LinkedIn posts and so forth?
Speaker 3:It really becomes hard to do that from that fashion. So we put a name and a face to that person. We have a revenue basis that we look at. So that way, when we're writing about it and we're writing content about it, we're really targeting that person. We're talking like we're you and I are talking right now, and that's what I want people to understand. When you think about personas and we can get deeper into statistics in terms of what they look at and watch and so forth, even down to the sports. We're a big sports town. You know a lot of those guys are big Philadelphia sports guys.
Speaker 3:Go birds, go birds. They might do things to draw that out in terms of the content. That's how you know you're making a connection, just like the go birds, evan. What about yourself? What's a persona for yourself in the real world?
Speaker 1:So for me I really have two different personas. I work with a lot of attorneys, accountants, consultants people who were never in their worst nightmare would consider themselves salespeople and people who are applying their services the overwhelming majority of their time during the week. But guess what? Those folks need to be able to go out and build a book of business, have clients to work on. But that persona, a little bit more professional, probably only have three to five hours a week for sales and business development because they're actually doing the work the rest of the time.
Speaker 1:My other persona is the small business owner or the salespeople who are primarily based on commission. They are selling the overwhelming majority of their time. The language that I can use for them is a little bit different than the language that I'm using for the professionals. So if I were to market to the attorneys the same way that I'm marketing to the software salespeople, it's not going to work and vice versa. I was just brought into a company. It is a legal recruiting firm that recruits lawyers for large companies and things like that. They actually brought me in because their previous training company got it all wrong. They were treating their people like lawyers, even though their job was to stand up in office and was to go out and sell 50, 60 hours a week and it was a total miss. So I need to know my audience and their persona so that then I know the right message, the right program. Otherwise it's not going to resonate.
Speaker 3:And that's absolutely true for myself as well and a lot of times you can be in the place and work for a client, or whatever it might be, and be totally wrong.
Speaker 3:So now, going back to that three circle diagram, your brand is affected because of the perception that they put out there, because if you tell one person something wrong, the whole world knows wrong. The whole world knows Through their network of people, as we all know. So it's important to make sure that you target appropriately and be in a position that you're talking to the right people or you're in front of the right audience, just from a time perspective, and make sure you're not losing your own time in the efforts that you're doing, and to make sure that you're targeting and servicing the clients that you should be servicing the right way. And so, as we start to wrap out our show here, we're going to start to talk about the next episode here. So, evan, I'm going to throw this to you when we're talking about buyer personas from a sales perspective, tell me about what we're going to hear in the next episode.
Speaker 1:Sure. So in the next episode, now that we've kind of got this background, we're now going to look at okay, from a sales perspective, now that we have a sense of what the different personas are, how are we going to adjust our outreach? How are we going to adjust our talking points, our messaging, even to the once we know our personas? How are we going to use that to help us figure out, of the 22 different prospecting things we could be doing, which ones make sense based on who I want to target, who I want to get in front of? And then the other thing we'll start to think through and you alluded to it before is making sure that when we're qualifying, when we're asking questions, when we're getting out there, that we are using the language of our clients and not our own inside baseball, our own terms that aren't going to resonate with the people who we're trying to sell to. So we're going to use today's program as a launching off point for our next episode.
Speaker 3:And I know that you talked about referrals in that place. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. We're really going to think through again from the referral piece, again knowing who you want to be in front of. You know going digging through the data of your previous clients, like we talked about earlier, is going to help you be a lot more specific in terms of the referrals you're asking for Question I'll throw out to the audience right now how many times have you gone to somebody and said, hey, craig, do you know of anybody who might you know, who might need my services, who might be good for me to talk to? I'm guessing, if you're like most of the people, that I come across, eight to nine times out of 10, you hear oh geez, evan, I can't. You know, Craig, I can't think of anybody, but if I do, I'll let you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and please don't hold your breath for that follow-up call or email to come, because it doesn't come nearly frequently enough. But if we know what our good personas look like, if we can go and say, hey, craig, who do you work with that does xyz? Hey, craig, I went through your linkedin. I noticed that you were connected, these couple of people that on the surface would seem like an ideal person for me to talk to. Can we talk about that a little bit. I promise the number of referrals that you get are going to grow exponentially Again once you're clearly focused on what that buyer persona looks like and understanding what their needs are, and so one last time.
Speaker 3:I'm going to put up the link here to get to Evan's sales training. Understand that that's just the tip of the iceberg. There's 12 different weeks of information here that he's going to impart upon you, and it's just a matter of changing the wording, changing how you say things that might get people to trigger faster. He grows smarter and faster through sales processes. Again, I'm Craig Andrews and this is my partner in crime, evan Poland, and we'll talk to you guys next time. And keep an eye. If you have any questions, if you have any thoughts about personas that you want to talk about, by all means hit us on LinkedIn. You have the access to it. If you're looking at this show, hit us on LinkedIn. Tell us who your persona is. How can we help you adjust it? Again, until next time. I'm Craig. That's Evan. We'll talk to you again next time.
Speaker 2:Bye now. Thank you for joining us on this exhilarating journey through the world of sales and marketing. Remember, the playbook is in your hands and the possibilities are limitless. Keep exploring, experimenting and innovating, and watch as your business reaches unprecedented levels of success. Don't forget to subscribe to the Sales and Marketing Playbook Unleashed on all major podcast platforms, and follow us on YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn for even more exclusive content. Until next time, keep hustling and keep winning.
