3P framework: Portrait, Persona, Proposal

The concept

In general, this framework was created for cold email. In a cold email, you have up to 10 seconds to capture the potential customer's attention. But how do you capture it? The most effective way is relevance.
What does relevance mean in B2B cold emails?It means that your offer is aligned with the target company's business. But that’s not enough.
Imagine we have a solution for start-ups and we target all companies in the US just because they are start-ups.There are 72560 such companies in 2023.
It's possible to create a facility that reaches that number of companies, but that’s just spam. Imagine going out on the street and asking people if anyone is interested in your services.
(I must confess, however, that I often meet people who think this way).
But that’s the problem with positioning in the B2B sector - you can’t shake up the entire start-up market.At least not with a single cold email campaign.In the B2B landscape, which is tight and competitive, it's difficult to offer one solution and one service for everyone. And you don’t have to.
If you were to achieve the PMF, you would have more customers than you can serve from all possible sources. It’s a question of scaling what you already know.
However, modern B2B marketing requires segmentation and targeting due to the noise and overwhelming variety of solutions.
Relevance here means that you are the experts in solving specific problems for the companies you want to reach. In B2B, these are usually business inefficiencies.
You can apply this framework to any marketing channel because the first step in any marketing activity is to define your target audience.
It is therefore a “niching down and scaling out" approach.

Persona

Persona is a description of the person we contact in the company.
There are usually two options:
● beneficiary: A beneficial owner of your product/service (e.g. your product is for accountants - you are addressing the company's accountant);● decision maker: Person in the company who manages the process/department (e.g. your product is for accountants, but the decision maker is the CFO).
It is usually best if the main beneficiary is the same as the decision maker.Beneficiaries are usually easy to convert to leads and demos, but they need to “sell” your solution to the decision maker. You may need to work with two personas and two proposals within one portrait, that’s fine.
What about demographics?
I don’t care about demographics here because we build our message heavily on the values/pains/problems people face in their work. Sometimes these issues can be very personal, even psychological or age-related. But we don’t go that deep. The Chief Marketing Officer, for example, has to develop and lead the marketing strategy for multiple channels whether they are 18 or 55.
Here’s a picture I took from someone on LinkedIn:

Title (position/head of the process)
Here I’m talking about the range of positions in our target company. For example, if your persona is the head of the sales department, it can be named differently even in companies with a single portrait - Head of Sales, Chief Sales Officer, VP of Sales, Chief Revenue Officer and so on. The most important thing here is not the name of the position itself, but the role and tasks of this person.
You need to take this into account during the prospecting. Sometimes the founder can manage this process alone, as his company is big enough without a sales manager.
JTBD (jobs-to-be-done)
JTBD is a concept by Toni Ulwick (1) that, simply speaking, built on question:“What jobs does the persona need to do in their position?” so that we can understand how we can help them complete these jobs with our product/service.
When we buy a solution/service, we are not buying the solution itself, but the job it does for us.
If our Proposal is about the value to the business, it might work.However, if our Proposal is focused on the value to the individual in the position, it becomes much more substantial.

Proposal

Business process/department
It is important to define which business process/department we influence with our product/service in the target company. Well, you may usually think it's defined, but there might be other angels that you haven’t noticed.
A company usually consists of more or less the same departments:● Finance and Accounting● Human Resources (HR)● Marketing● Sales● Operations● Partnership/Business Development● Customer care/support● Information Technology (IT, R&D, Engineering)● Legal● Public Relations (PR)● Administration● Executives (strategy, bosses, CEO/COO)
Now, depending on the portrait, there are “company specifics” that should highlight the differences between the usual structure and the structure of your target company. These could be, for example, the companies that do not have a CMO.
Problem (problems, pain points)
What problems do we ACTUALLY solve for our customers?As I said before, people don’t buy the product/service itself, they buy the solution to a specific problem.This could be a problem in the industry or in a specific business process. It should be familiar enough for the persona to recognize it at first glance. It should be written in the exact words they use every day.
The problem could be content team synchronization, a low abandoned cart completion rate, a high percentage of low-quality MQL leads.
A friend of mine, Peter, targets a very specific niche: he helps Eastern European people (mainly Ukrainians) to sound confident in English - in their calls, demos and personal communication. So the problem here is the lack of confidence and experience on how to build a fluent, professional speech in English. People buy from people, and it’s how you deliver the demo that matters.
Solution
The prospect agrees that the problem exists. It is generally known and recognized. But how exactly do we solve these problems? What is our solution/service/product?“We help streamline cold email outreach with the help of AI” sounds pretty boring at the end of 2023.But “Our AI tool generates the prospect database and an email sequence based on the provided” ICP" - that’s a whole different story.
Another thing to consider: Is your solution a "nice-to-have" or a "must-have"? (2) If you have something that solves the intolerable problem, then that’s something you can build your strategy on.

Books

To dive into specific topics I mentioned here, please use the following materials:
1) JOBS TO BE DONE: Theory to Practice, By Anthony W. Ulwick. © 2018, Strategyn, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
2) From Impossible to Inevitable: How SaaS and Other Hyper-Growth Companies Create Predictable Revenue by A.Ross, J.Lemkin

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