The Changemakers: The power of personas: Frida Ahrenby, GetAccept

Frida Ahrenby is CMO at GetAccept, a digital sales room platform on a mission to radically redefine the way companies run sales. In her role, she’s responsible for the company’s global marketing strategy and execution in all markets.

Having grown the marketing team from three people to 25 over the past two and a half years, our chat with Frida comes at an exciting time for GetAccept. It’s a wide-ranging chinwag, covering category creation, personal branding, and – most importantly – the power of hyper-relevant customer personas.

Listen as we discuss:

How to create detailed customer personas
Learning and evolving personas for your marketing
How brand creates demand
Encouraging employee advocacy and personal branding
What makes an effective leader in the B2B SAAS world

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Transcript of the key takeaways

What made you embark on the project to rework your customer personas so extensively at this point?

Frida: I’ve (…) thought that if you just understand the customer base from a revenue perspective, that would give us enough input or the customer base from a value segmentation perspective that would give us enough information to, to run activities on. But then I realized that obviously that is just one view of looking at it.

And it doesn’t really say anything about who the customer really is, what triggers them, what’s the challenge that they have, what keeps them up at night and how should we communicate to really, really, truthfully reach them.

The other side was more connected to the fact that both the marketing team was growing so rapidly and I was constantly getting questions about who are we talking to? Who’s the audience? The fact that we were belonging to so many different categories, trying to sort of find our place. It was many times we ended up in confusion and difficult for me to give a clear direction.

And the third thing that I was realising that since we didn’t have a clear set of personas, marketing made up one way to communicate towards a certain target audience and product have other, and sales have a third version.

Did you learn anything particularly surprising about your ICP [Ideal Customer Profile] that you never knew before?

Frida: I think there were a couple of things that stood out to me that I might have had a gut feeling about that, but it was very clearly when we saw it in the data. So, one of the things was the importance of an emotional connection to the brand of the vendor that you are looking to buy from. What stood out from our personas was that they valued a close relationship to the company and the brand, that was one thing that we realized, okay, that we’re doing because obviously we put a lot of effort into building our brand and, and you know, communicating our brand and it felt like, okay, good, then we’re doing that right.

How did you go about it from a practical perspective?

Frida: We started off with a survey towards our ICP, the industry, a certain size of companies that we were targeting.

We sent out a survey to about 400 companies and definitely not our own customers. And we asked them questions about their purchasing behaviour.

We then segmented and filtered the data to see different patterns. And then we looked at our own customer base and picked 20 customers and we did in-depth interviews with them. 90 minutes long which validated the data and added qualitative insight to the quantitative.

Final step was to talk internally with our sales, product, with customer success, and the marketing teams to get the insights from their perspectives and validate what we saw.