Illuminas recommended a two-phased approach that began with holding internal workshops with key stakeholders of the research and ended with conducting qualitative in-depth interviews (IDIs) with 11 types of IT decision makers in the US, Germany and Japan.
The stakeholder workshops enabled us to gather internal stakeholder feedback about current customer motivations and success and allowed us (in collaboration with the client) to build hypotheses about existing customer segments using the internal feedback.
The IDIs allowed us to validate our hypotheses and build profiles of customers and prospects. The results were used to prioritize each persona based on sales opportunity and level of engagement.