A multinational infrastructure software provider had been generating content for its go-to-market campaigns for the general market, and the company was interested in customizing this content for specific types of decision-making personas. It had been awhile since the company engaged in any type of persona research and as a result, the personas they had access to were outdated and missing key pieces of information. Thus, our client was looking to conduct primary research to create profiles of specific types of decision makers its marketing team could use to customize their GTM strategies.

Specific objectives of the research included:

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.