When you are selling to companies (a.k.a. B2B sales), it is key to engage with the right contacts working at these companies. Usually the nature of what you are selling determines with whom you should engage. E.g. if you are selling software for sales people, you should reach out to sales leaders and people in charge of business systems. But it's probably not relevant to reach out to people in the accounting department. It is also favorable to focus on people as high up in the org chart as possible.
That said, we are dealing with two "dimensions" of contacts:
Their "job level" - e.g. C-Level, VP-Level, Director, etc.
The "department" they are working in - a.k.a. their job function
Your contacts have incentives and an agenda that is mainly determined by their job function and their job level. Thus, when you are engaging with them (marketing, cold outreach or sales interactions), you must speak "the persona specific language" that resonates best with each contact. E.g. in the example above, a sales leader might be most interested in revenue growth and forecast accuracy, while sales ops is more interested in ease of use, migration and support.
This is an indicator of the "level of seniority". Goldie detects these job levels out of the box in 6 languages (en-US, en-UK, fr, de, es-ES, es-LATAM):
C-Level
VP-Level
Director
(Co-)Founder
For instance the titles 'Managing Director', 'Managing Partner', 'Geschäftsführer', 'Directeur General', 'Director Ejecutivo' are all synonyms for "CEO" in different langauges or types of companies.
Notice how Salesforce allows you to define "Opportunity Contact Roles" and track what role a contact has in the purchase process (e.g. Executive Buyer, Evaluator, Technical Buyer). These roles as they are predefined in Salesforce tell very little about the contact's agenda and what message resonates best. This is NOT what we mean by "persona" and it's important to understand the difference.
The straightest way to define personas is to ask yourself, what are the various types of contacts you are usually dealing with in the sales process. That should give you a list of 3-8 different types of contacts. But that's not your list of personas yet. The next step is to think about what each of these types of contacts care about most and which of your key selling points are relevant for them. You will notice that the relevant key selling points for each type have a large overlap. Based on that overlap, try to reduce the number to 2-3 and you have your list of personas.
For instance, in the example above you might have these types of contacts: Sales VPs, Chief Revenue Officers, Sales Managers, Sales Ops Managers, CRM Program Managers, IT Managers. Based on what these types of contacts care about, it turns out that the key selling points are the same for these types of personas.
Sales Leader: Sales VPs, Chief Revenue Officers, Sales Managers
Sales Ops: Sales Ops Managers, CRM Program Managers, IT Managers
Once you have found your personas, it's time to configure Goldie's Persona Detection.
Follow these steps:
In Salesforce, from Setup open Create > Picklist Value Sets
In the list find the Global Value Sets "Persona" and click on it.
In the list "Values" click "New" and add the names of the personas.
Once you have followed these steps, the picklist field "Persona" on the lead and contact object have these values selectable. However, users are not supposed to edit these fields, as Goldie will populate these fields for you. You may want to make them "read-only" in the page layout.
Goldie can be "trained" to detect personas automatically. The training data is based on so called "Persona Clues". The idea behind persona clues is that specific keywords or their co-occurrence in a contact's job title typically are indicative to a specific persona. This is why Goldie analyzes a large sample of your contact's job titles and gives you a report on frequent keywords or frequent co-occurrences - we call this report the list of "persona clues". You can then review this list and if you find a persona clue that is indicative of a specific persona, you tag it as such. Once you have tagged all your persona clues (which completes the training process), Goldie will scan all your contact/lead records and populate the field "Persona" accordingly. Also, moving forward, a trigger on the contact/lead object populates the field for new or updated contact/lead records.
Contact Goldie support in order to be guided through the training process in detail.