Hi, I'm Mike gossipy author of The Marketing hybrid. I have 28 years of high tech marketing experience. Having worked for hpn son for many years a couple of startups. And in 2002, I co founded kickstart Alliance, a sales and marketing leadership consulting team, where our focus is to inspire companies of all sizes to become more customer focused. My articles, books, courses and workshops have been used by marketers around the world to help them develop and hone core best practices, core competencies in marketing to become better marketers. Product companies typically begin from humble origins.

They build something and they sell it. And if the product tends to sell very well, then who can argue with that success? But here's the thing customer needs and wants can shift at anytime. And they frequently do. And if there's not somebody sitting at the leadership table, who's paying attention to the ever changing needs and wants and expectations of your best customers, marketing opportunities will be missed. This is why I created this course, to help marketers be more in tune with the markets they're trying to sell to.

And to do this, the tool that we use is called the persona. The persona is a guide to help us marketers on the way to becoming better marketers and being relevant and in tune with the people we're trying to sell to. And the persona, as a quick definition is an illustration of someone who lives in the market segment that we're targeting. But don't be fooled. personas are not labels. There's money more to it than that.

And we'll explore those dimensions inside this course. This course will help you define, build, critique and apply the persona template to your own marketing campaigns and roadmaps. in it. I'll share with you the template that I've developed and used over the years. But don't be fooled, there is much more going on than just the template that you use to connect the dots. What's more important is understanding the questions that you ask to use to really understand what's going on inside the mind of the people you're trying to sell to.

And we'll explore each of those dimensions in this course. But if I were to boil it down to a simple statement, I would say that the secret to your success as a marketer is in being relevant with the people you're trying to sell to. And being relevant requires that we have a more Have an empathic bond with our target market. And the persona is a tool that will help us do just that. In fact, I have a singular belief, whoever understands the customer best wins. And the persona, again, is the tool that will unlock the doors to under our understanding our customers better than anybody else.

This course is organized into 10 steps. And this is the same 10 steps that I've used throughout my career. And each of these steps starting from how do we begin to build a persona, even if we don't have a market research budget, all the way to developing the template to critiquing it, to applying it, socializing with others, and ultimately using it to inform our positioning statements, and our core messaging, the actual words we use to talk to and engage our customers. All of these items will be covered in detail within the 10 steps of this course. This course is Specifically for b2b Enterprise Marketers. Now these marketers might be in product management, and they might be in product marketing or even corporate marketing.

But even beyond that there are other departments within your organization that needs to know and understand what this persona exercise is all about. And so I invite you to think of the persona exercise this way. Think of it as a team sport. If you have colleagues, maybe somebody else in engineering sales, Product Management, invite them to participate in this exercise with you. You'll value from their experiences, and they will add value to the exercise. It's all about delivering value.

And as a marketer, I get it. I've been in your shoes, I've been responsible for creating value and every step of the way from developing marketing plans to executing marketing plans. And that means that there's an opportunity for marketers to become much more than just tactical experts in a particular field, that's good, but it's not always sufficient. There are opportunities now for marketers to add a strategic angle to the work that you're doing. Even if you're an advertising or a web focused marketer, having a little bit of strategic awareness to the broader picture will help you provide and deliver more and better value to your organization. better value that comes with understanding and embracing the nuances of the persona, to then extending that into a positioning statement that truly differentiates you in a relevant and meaningful way to your nearest competitors, to then extending to creating the best elevator pitch possible and the best core messaging that's meaningful to your target audiences.

And then finally, to understand how to create that ever so crisp, go to market plan that aligns that tactic Objectives offers in compelling messages in a marketing blueprint that unfolds in a relevant way over time to move your target prospects through your sales funnel as quickly as possible. All of these items tie together and they're all grounded within the persona exercise. I want to introduce you to a concept I call the marketing high ground. And I define it this way. The marketing high ground is that special place when you understand the market so well so completely, that you become acknowledged and valued internally as the customers advocate. This is a perfect role for marketers everywhere to aspire to.

Again, back to this notion I mentioned earlier, whoever understands the customer best wins. And the more that we as marketers can empathize with our customers and the customer journey that they're on, to solve the problems that they have to achieve the goals that they have, then not only do we become better marketers, but will help our organizations and our companies succeed. And so in closing, this course, is all about personas. And it's about personas in the enterprise, understanding them in a b2b context and learning how to become better marketers. So our marketing programs, activities and offers can deliver a better ROI. And so in doing so, I will share with you the persona template that I've developed and continue to use today, and I'll show you how to apply it to your own business.

I'll help you understand how you can use the persona exercise to achieve organizational alignment between engineering sales and marketing, and you'll be able to then use it to build better products and then drive faster market success. Welcome to product management and marketing personas.