Who uses Funnel?
Building empathy and a shared customer model for marketing, sales, product and CS through buyer personas.
- Role
- Lead designer & researcher
- Team
- Marketing, Sales, Product, CS
Reference cards for the buyer personas
The challenge
Marketing was rethinking Funnel's positioning and needed a sharper view of existing customer segments — their goals, behaviours and attitudes. At the same time, Sales and CS were rolling out playbooks that lacked the customer attributes to make them land.
The idea
Buyer personas were the most effective way to solve both problems at once — and to give the whole company a shared, empathetic view of who we were building for.
The scope
We focused on existing customer segments rather than aspirational ones. Keep it simple and small, then iterate. The biggest fear was personas that either got ignored or ossified and went stale.
The process
I started by collecting internal preconceptions through interviews and workshops with sales teams across our global offices, then aligned with marketing and sales stakeholders on the questions we needed to answer: what challenge are customers trying to solve, what's the buying context, what would they use instead. From there I ran qualitative interviews with recently converted customers and mined the CRM for quantitative signal.
Launch & conclusions
Five distinct buyer personas. We marketed them internally — printed cards, posters, presentations, company meeting slots — and they became the canonical customer model across product, marketing and CS, referenced in workshops, daily conversations and roadmap decisions.
Reflections
Once adopted, it became clear people were using buyer personas as user personas. The people who buy Funnel aren't always the people who use it. That insight set up the next initiative — user personas built on top of this foundation.
Adopted across Product, Marketing and CS as the canonical customer model — referenced daily in roadmap, GTM and support conversations.