iCIMS Personas
Background
iCIMS is a company that sells talent acquisition software, primarily known for its applicant tracking system (ATS). As iCIMS grew to become one of the leaders in the industry, so did their customer base. This resulted in a variety of customers, from small companies to large corporations.
Our Problem
While working on various projects, including the corporate website and marketing landing pages, I noticed a lot of gaps in the way we sell our products. Sales tactics were either outdated and focused on smaller companies, or executed based on internal processes that may not make sense to a prospective customer.
Our Solution
I took the initiative to fill in those gaps by creating research-based personas and customer journey maps, that were focused around the customer verse the company’s internal processes. I distributed surveys, conducted interviews, and collaborated with business partners from every part of the customer sales cycle in order to create accurate and practical assets.
Personas directly impacted our design work because we found out that there are indeed a multitude of buying personas as companies grow, including an IT leader. The significance of the IT leader emerged through our research. We realized it was vital to incorporate marketing language on the corporate website around the IT leader persona, and these findings directly impacted the sales team as well.
Tools we used: Adobe CC, Excel (data analysis)
Process
Strategy - Conducted internal research to determine persona and journey map hypotheses, conducted external research to determine which personas to prioritize with research, and created a project plan creation to follow and present to executive stakeholders
Research - Qualitative research included interviews with customers and prospects (personas and journey map), quantitative research included surveys to gather broader insights
Creation - Affinity mapping to determine patterns in personas and journey, strategic determination of persona contents and journey map phases, collaboration with design to create distinctive and branded deliverables
Execution - Created a process to operationalize deliverables by identifying opportunities from gaps we found through research, educated the company, facilitated quarterly business execution meetings, and managed the roadmap
persona & journey map snippets
