The Problem
An enterprise data protection software company was in the midst of revitalizing its marketing and sales strategy. As part of the process, they needed to better understand key buyer personas to effectively craft their target audiences, messaging, and sell-in practices.
The Approach
We developed an interview-based project with a mix of existing customers and externally-sourced respondents across enterprise-scale IT Operations teams and MSPs.
Leveraging a structured discussion guide, we explored a wide variety of elements—organizational hierarchies, decision-making influencers, buying processes, and price sensitivities—to evaluate these topics across respondents and within specific segments.
Once the data was fully collected, we reviewed the qualitative transcripts to facilitate the building of organization hierarchy templates, persona templates, and other strategic documents.
The Results
Organization Hierarchy Mapping
We isolated the stakeholders involved in both initiating and influencing the purchase process across industry segments while simultaneously flushing out their titles, responsibilities, and professional relationships to each other.
Value Proposition Resonance
We pinpointed the major KPIs stakeholders worked towards, allowing our client to isolate the product benefits that would most resonate with each stakeholder type.
Price Exploration
A pricing exploration uncovered the typical price points that determined if teams could self-provision software or would need procurement involvement, providing a way to help price the software to minimize internal hurdles.
Product Interest Evaluation
Additionally. by testing a few basic product concept ideas as part of the study, we collected intel on what products resonated with our client’s core audience and which ones fell outside of their professional jurisdiction. This allowed our client to pinpoint products and features that would enable easy upsells and cross-sells from those that would require completely new sell-in processes.
Did You Know...
While journey mapping is most often associated with marketing strategy, it is a key sales and product strategy tool too. Journey maps show sales operations and development professionals what materials are needed during the sell-in process, and how to anticipate stakeholder conversations and pushbacks. Meanwhile, journey maps also give Product teams visibility into the KPIs they have to solve for their everyday users.
