The Challenge
A leading tech career hub to determine their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and develop key Customer Personas. This foundational research was critical in getting the right message to the right part of the market. With increasing competition in the space, our client wanted to boost growth by homing in on the best-fit customers and more effectively conveying their value. However, when staring at 100,000 companies that hire technologists, they lacked clarity on which prospects and personas to focus their efforts on.
The Solution
To determine our client’s ideal customer profile and personas, Shapiro+Raj employed a rigorous 3-phase methodology:
- AI-Driven Hypothesis Development: Shapiro+Raj blended client’s existing data and public labor market data into our proprietary AI engine, Stella, to develop initial hypotheses for an ICP. Then hundreds of LinkedIn profiles, and job postings for heads of HR, leaders of talent acquisition, tech recruiters, and hiring managers, were synthesized with AI to generate 4 draft buyer personas.
- In-Depth Qualitative Interviews: Next, the team conducted interviews with individuals in the ICP. These interviews refined and validated the personas.
- Activation Workshop: Finally, Shapiro+Raj led a 2-hour virtual workshop with client stakeholders. In this session. The workshop helped the client internalize the personas and begin building a messaging framework to speak to specific customer aspirations and challenges.
The result was an actionable set of ideal customer characteristics and detailed personas the client can leverage across go-to-market functions from marketing to sales to product enhancement. The human-centered qualitative approach combined with AI augmentation allows a friction free ability to use the research to test messaging ideas in real-time.
The Outcome
Our novel approach of leveraging Stella’s AI capabilities helped us generate insightful hypotheses from comprehensive customer and market data in record time, accelerating the overall research timeline by a month, and saving costs by 40%. Our judicious training empowered Stella to construct detailed personas and role-play responses to draft messaging. Stella’s human-like AI avatars provided rapid feedback, enabling quicker iterations and delivery which helped us work faster and smarter.
The project resulted in a tactical playbook for the client to more efficiently find, sell to, and serve their ideal customers. The ICP model allowed our client to qualify prospects based on firmographics, hiring volume, industry, regulatory environment, and other attributes. The personas unpacked what motivates, challenges, and persuades recruiters and hiring managers. Together, these insights helped the client speak to their customers more contextually.
According to the client CMO, “I’ve been doing this kind of work for 20 years and this is, I have to say, the bestICP and persona work I’ve seen.”