What does "Joe the Plumber" have to do with sales?

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Joe the Plumber's 15 minutes of fame last week transformed the debate and post-debate discussions. And it's a lesson that we, as sellers, would be wise to pay attention to.

The McCain camp had clearly identified their target market: uncommitted blue collar male voters who could still be swayed with the right message - big government taking their hard-earned money.

McCain's PR machine jumped on the "real Joe" after seeing him talk with Obama during a campaign stop. With a stroke of genius, Joe the Plumber became the new working-class poster boy.

And the conversation changed. Suddenly we were evaluating the candidate's proposals based on how they impacted Joe. McCain & Obama started talking to one person, not an amorphous group of nondescript citizens.

We need to do the same as marketers & sellers.

That's right. We need to create customer personas in order for us to fine-tune our messaging and ensure it's effective. Perhaps you sell to multiple decision makers. If so, then you need multiple personas.

Whenever I'm doing training for a sales organization, this is one area I cover almost every time. It makes that much difference. For example, if my client sells to Marketing, we may create personas on these positions:

Chief Marketing Officer
Vice President, Corporate Communications
Product Marketing Manager
Public Relations

If all these people are involved in the decision process, we need to know how they think in order to be effective. Specifically we need to know their: