Outreach announces persona modeling, complete with auto-assignment

Introduction

Today, I'm excited to announce that we have released Persona modeling within Outreach.

Now, for those of you less familiar with this concept, personas are a way to classify your prospects based on similar attributes, so you can more effectively communicate with them. Marketing teams have been using personas for decades to effectively track customer cohorts for optimizing marketing efforts.

And now, sales teams can harness the same power to track what language, communication channels, and timing is most effective by persona. Let's take a look!

The Demo

Personas can be created and modified by administrators within prospect customization settings on your left-hand navigation. Simply select Add, and create the name of your persona.

Create as many personas as you need to categorize your target prospects within the accounts you are trying to sell into.

Once complete, you're going to want to setup triggers to automatically assign personas to your prospects in the background, because it's the only way to ensure it's done consistently across your sales team. For each persona, create a trigger and set it up to assign a persona, if a persona has not yet been assigned, and the title meets your criteria.

In our case, we look for certain variations of seniority, and certain variations of role for our VP of Sales persona. Once you're all setup, make sure to hit save.

Then, as new prospects are created or updated in Outreach, whether created through the Salesforce sync, imported by CSV, or updated manually, personas will automatically be assigned correctly.

Additional Information

Personas are an incredible way to segment the prospects in your accounts for account-based sales.

As a general rule of thumb, when determining what your personas should be, you should start simple. Think about four to five persona segments that you commonly target in your sales efforts.

Then, think about the titles and roles that would segment them, and set your triggers up to reflect this.

In the future, you should expect to see us expand on sequences and templates to identify which personas this content was designed for, and safety mechanisms to match.