So congratulations, if you've made it through steps one through seven, you've now created a persona. And if you were to end your exercise, now, you would fail. Because step eight is so important, and so critical to your success as a marketer, because this is where politics comes into play. Step eight is about socializing. It's about sharing the output you develop and inviting other strategic decision makers thought leaders within your company, to have an opportunity to see it, to interact to it, and ultimately to endorse it into adopted as their own. This is so important, because as I mentioned earlier, if you create a persona in a vacuum, you will politicize the output.
This cannot be left to being interpreted as your opinion, oh, Mike developed a persona that's Mike's opinion, but I disagree with it. Therefore, I'm going to ignore if that happens if the persona becomes related to your specific opinion alone, people are going to object to it, they're not going to embrace it, they will react to it with a not invented here syndrome. So socializing the output is incredibly important. You've created it with your small team of four to six people. But to be sure there are others in your organization, who you're going to want to invite to have a chance to provide some feedback and input so you can make it better. And ultimately, once you get their endorsement, now you're going to be able to execute it and put it to use.
So you want to get ahead of office politics. You want to invite feedback, educate others on the importance of the persona, and then print out copies for everybody in the marketing team. They should have it tacked up on their wall. So as they're writing copy, they're updating the website. They're creating, tradeshow, graphics, whatever the case may be, they can all be reminded about who their target market is, and personalize it via persona. And here's a case in point.
So one company that I worked with, in fact, this was live ops. I had gone through a persona exercise, they had never done one before. And so the small team went through the exercise. And then as part of socializing it, the team members went out to several of the key regional sales vice presidents to ask for their feedback. And this were two of the specific comments that came back. Historically, we've been selling too low into the organization, we need to aim higher, and this is the right target for us.
The second VP said, I've been selling to this group for five years, and I've never seen the persona written down before. You got it. Right. This is exactly who I'm meeting with this afternoon. Wow. Can you imagine being on the marketing team and getting this feedback from your regional sales VPS who had before we're probably had some animosity towards marketing, the line between marketing and sales and not been good.
But now as a marketer, you're getting this feedback, I can tell you that the team was completely energized by getting this feedback, that camaraderie, that tight knit group between sales and marketing, just really accelerated the partnership internally, and ultimately the adoption of the persona and then the execution of several marketing campaigns that had a higher return on investment than ever before. And that's because your go to market, their go to market programs were strategic on target and can be could be executed with a level of consistency that had not been achieved before. This made a big difference. And you know, whenever you get salespeople and marketing people doing high fives as they're walking down the hallway, that's a big deal that makes life pretty good in the marketing department.