From Shelf to Strategy: How Persona Analysis Helped Unlock $20M Opportunity
- Feb 2
- 2 min read
Introduction
Today, I want to walk professionals in the oil and gas industry across marketing, business development and sales through how we used persona analysis to sell a product that has been on the shelf for many years and unlock a $20M opportunity.
“Personas are detailed profiles of one, or perhaps a few, hypothetical target consumers, imagined in terms of demographic, psychographic, geographic, or other descriptive at- titudinal or behavioral information.” (Kotler & Keller, 2015, p. 136). Companies use this technique to understand their target customers and frame better decisions.
In the Middle East region where I work, we mainly have one primary customer: the biggest oil company in the world. This company is huge and it’s challenging to create one persona for all their employees because each department has different goals and roles. So I started working on the persona analysis by analyzing each targeted department individually.
Applying Persona Analysis to Identify an Opportunity
I first worked with the marketing team to create the persona table, so I understood what information was needed. The persona table includes job titles, working relationships, role competencies, goals & priorities, responsibilities, business initiatives, success metrics, motivations, perceived barriers, decision criteria, information sources, and preferred content types. Second, I started gathering data on the Consulting Engineering Department from our sales and commercial team. The third step was reviewing and analyzing this data, and this is where I found that one of this group’s goals and priorities was working on the co-development of new technologies. So I connected with the sales and commercial team and informed them that since one of this group’s goals is co-development of new technologies, why don’t we propose this product that has been on the shelf for years? This is where the sales and commercial team started to think and use their knowledge of the technology and the region to analyze this opportunity. Once it was confirmed that the customer was interested in co-development with this technology, they started preparing presentations and materials to present to the customer.
What Did Persona Analysis Help Us Achieve?
Persona analysis didn’t just help us sell a product.
it helped us change the narrative.
Shifted the conversation from selling a product to achieving customer goals.
Positioned our brand as a strategic partner.
Unlocked an opportunity for an old product.
The buyer persona technique should be used in our daily work to make sure we are not missing any opportunities and to always frame better decisions.
