The Forrester Sales Persona Framework

Ensuring reps have the right types of enablement content to effectively engage with buyers is a critical challenge for both sales and marketing. Portfolio marketers should build sales personas to ensure that enablement programs and content are designed around the specific needs of different types of seller roles. Using multiple sales personas when building enablement resources reduces content waste while helping reps connect with buyers, accelerate sales efforts and win deals.

Marketers worry that they spend considerable time and resources creating sales content that reps don’t use. Similarly, sales leaders share their concern that reps don’t have the knowledge they need when they need it (see The Sales Knowledge Transfer Framework). Both issues stem from a tendency to treat sales as one generic team vs. a set of roles, each of which has unique needs. In this report, we describe the types of information needed to build sales personas that support the development of more effective enablement content (see Figure 1).