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Bob Thompson

Hubspot uses persona-based teams to align with buyers, accelerate growth

Posted by Bob Thompson on October 23, 2012
comments 0 comments  |  1351 reads

Yesterday I presented my ideas about Buyer Experience Management (BXM) at the Sales and Marketing 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.

I was delighted to see a brilliant case study presented by Mark Roberge, SVP of Sales and Services at HubSpot, a company best known for pioneering inbound marketing for SMBs.

As Hubspot has grown, its solution has evolved to more of an integrated marketing suite, sold to a wider array of companies -- including some large enterprises. With an array of marketing approaches (not limited to inbound) they generate some 50,000 leads per month. That's right, 50,000. Wow.

Anyway, Mark said they made a big shift in 2012, and to me it shows the power of buyer/seller alignment.

As a critical first step they spent some time creating personas to represent their target buyers. Three are illustrated below (out of 8 total). You'll note huge differences between Owner Ollie and Enterprise Erin, which means a different approach is required to engage, close and service these customers.


Then they organized integrated teams around each persona. Instead of marketing, sales and service each operating in their own silo (the traditional approach in most companies) they organized persona-based teams, each with its own marketing, sales and service resources.


Now each "revenue team" is aligned with the buyers they are designed to serve. The persona teams meet monthly and are measured on customer success, unit economics and growth. Mark says this approach has actually accelerated their already impressive company performance, ahead of other SaaS providers.

Mark's deck is available on Slideshare.

Further reading: B2B Sellers, Wake Up! Adopt Buyer Experience Management, or Get a Pink Slip from Customer 2.0


Bob Thompson

Bob Thompson is CEO of CustomerThink Corp., an independent research and publishing firm focused on customer-centric business management, and Founder/Editor-in-Chief of CustomerThink.com, the world's largest community dedicated to customer-centric business. Thompson is a popular international keynote speaker, blogger and author of numerous reports, articles and papers. He also serves on the Board of Directors of the Customer Experience Professionals Association.
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