This article originates from a presentation at the Product Marketing Summit, Las Vegas in 2022. At the time, the speaker, Ali Hanyaloglu, was the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Akeneo. He’s now the VP of Product Marketing at Amplience.

Catch up on this presentation, and others, using our OnDemand service. For more exclusive content, visit your membership dashboard.

Hi, I'm Ali. I'm a product marketer, I'm a storyteller, and I love 90s music. For any fellow 90s music fans, there are three albums sprinkled into this article. See if you can spot them all.

Let me tell you a story. It's about how last year my team and I decided to throw the personas that we had out the window and start all over again with a fresh approach. No more 50-slide decks about Marketing Maggie, her age, and her titles – just actionable personas that can benefit the entire organization and therefore ultimately benefit our customers.

In this article, I’ll look specifically at:

About Akeneo

For those of you who don't know Akeneo, where I lead the product marketing team, we’re in the product information management (PIM) space. We sell our solution to brands, manufacturers, and retailers with vast catalogs of products that they sell online, whether that’s on their own site, through a marketplace, or elsewhere.

We not only help them manage all the information about the products that they sell, but we add marketing enrichment, so it's compelling and stands out.

The problem with our personas

Now, let’s get back to our story. At the start of this journey, we had the same kinds of personas that everybody else does. They were okay, but I wanted to challenge them. I wanted to test if they truly matched the customers we were talking to, and the way I wanted to do that was by validating our assumptions through both quantitative and qualitative research.

As is often the case, our personas were filled with the kinds of profiles that I talked about before: “Here's marketing Maggie, she is typically a VP of Marketing or a CMO. She has these challenges,” and so on and so forth.

We’d use those personas as part of things like new hire onboarding, but nobody really knew what to do with that information. That's what we needed to change. The personas were too focused on people and not focused enough on what they were trying to achieve.

The other issue was that these personas were highly anecdotal, based on conversations with sales and product management teams. We needed to become more data-driven in our approach.

Worse still, all of our personas were derived from our user persona, Julia. There's a big sign in our head office in Nantes that says, “Build what Julia wants.” That’s a great rallying call for the product team and engineers, but what about everybody else? We had put Julia at the center and gone out from there: Julia's boss, Julia’s IT person. It was time for a new approach.

An enhanced understanding of our buyers

We realized that everything we knew about personas was wrong. We needed to enhance our understanding of not the user, but the buyer. As product marketers, this is the value we can bring to the organization.

Let product management take care of the user persona. We'll take a look at the buyer persona, and then we'll collaborate afterward.

First, we needed to figure out the triggers that would cause the buyer to look for a solution to their particular problem. Second, we wanted to identify their buying criteria and the path that they took to make a decision. Third, we had a buyer's journey, but it was kind of rough.

We wanted to not only enhance it but simplify it so that it would become actionable for the rest of the marketing organization.

To better understand our buyers, we did three axes of research. We did quantitative research; I surveyed 500 respondents across different industries, roles, and levels.

We also did qualitative research: interviews that were conducted with both the business side and the IT side of our customers’ businesses. And then, to remove any regional biases, we did this in our four primary markets: the US, the UK, France, and Germany.

Quantitative research

Let’s start with the quantitative survey. One of the first questions we asked was if they know what a PIM is. If the answer was no, we disqualified them. If the answer was yes, we asked them if they were equipped with one.

We never asked them what kind of PIM they had. That’s because we often find that, depending on who you’re speaking to, a product information management system could be a SaaS-based solution like ours, it could be a database that was built in-house, or it could even be a spreadsheet that they use to manage all of their products.

To avoid biasing our results, we didn't want to make any assumptions about that.

Once our respondents got past that screening question, here are some of the other things we asked them about:

  • Their business goals
  • The challenges they were facing
  • Their authority level in the decision-making process
  • The success metrics they’d look at when choosing a solution in our space
  • Their decision-making criteria
  • The sources of information they’d use to help them with their decision-making

The results of that survey were then collated into a report by OpinionWay, the survey company we worked with. That meant we didn't just get the raw data, which we could have spent months poring over and analyzing, but some key insights that they found and validated with us.

From this report, we were able to map out the buyer journey anew. We also shared this with the executives, primarily because I wanted to challenge their assumptions about who our customers are, and more importantly, who their decision-makers are.

Some of those results just validated what we knew already, but now we had data to back that knowledge up. Some results were more surprising and challenged the misconceptions that we had before.

Qualitative research

So that was the quantitative research. What about the qualitative stuff? This is where we conducted interviews. We engaged with an organization called the Buyer Persona Institute, which does what it says on the tin. Here’s what we asked our interviewees about:

  • Priority initiatives – The business initiatives led them to identify either a problem or the need for a solution that would allow them to meet specific business goals.
  • Success factors – The factors that would help them in determining which solution was the wisest choice.
  • Perceived barriers – There are always barriers both during the decision-making process and the implementation process, but which ones were they most concerned about?
  • Decision criteria – The checklist that they go through in order to make a decision and move forward.

Some unexpected findings

All of this research – qualitative and quantitative – was really insightful. Some of the findings that came out were not what we were expecting at all, so we felt like real dummies.

We’d always assumed that there was one decision-maker. What we found was that there is typically a whole buying group with one lead evaluator – and that buying group could contain anywhere between six and eight individual roles.