Are your sales, marketing and product departments aligned and synchronized? Or is your organization pulling slightly to the left or the right, creating resistance to optimal market traction and revenue performance?
Leading consultancies and researchers have long documented the benefits of having sales, marketing and product functions working and executing strategies in lockstep. In fact, just a few years ago IDC estimated that the inability of B2B companies to align sales and marketing around processes and technologies could be costing them 10 percent of revenue per year. That’s more than $1 trillion in lost opportunity in the B2B marketplace alone—and for many companies this is the difference between making their numbers or not.
If alignment is so critical, why do companies continue to be frustrated by the friction that results from misalignment of these functions? The mistake some organizations make is taking a “systems first” approach. They believe the latest cloud-marketing platform will finally rally the troops around a common data set that will magically generate a dashboard of actionable metrics, a 10-fold increase in pipeline opportunities and double-digit growth. The truth is, real traction is achieved when all functions work together to define and understand the needs of the people who use what you create and sell.
Enter the user persona workshop. A workshop dials back and resets the team to the root objective. This establishes a common baseline of understanding of your users’ needs, how they can be served by the business and what makes them important to the business. From this understanding, priorities are established and everything else can start to fall into place, and in alignment—from product development, to value-propositions, to content creation, to marketing communications, to lead nurturing, to field engagement.
Understanding user personas is different than the practice of developing customer targets, demographics or market segments to pursue. User personas focus on user needs, and helps your organization be responsive to the jobs and tasks customers need to perform in their workflows and professions.
Here are nine tips for an effective user persona workshop:
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Paul Bonington, Managing Director
Paul has over 25 years of experience in senior operating roles where he has successfully built brands and launched businesses for organizations in all stages of maturity. At Mod Op Strategic Consulting, Paul is responsible for leading client engagements with a focus on business strategy, new products, business development, marketing and process optimization.
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