Problem
As a two-sided market serving small business owners and investors with vastly disparate needs and perspectives, my team at Honeycomb Credit faced a big challenge of understanding the best ways to reach out and engage with potential customers. For example, business owners behave in very different ways, depending on characteristics like funding needs, growth projects, background & experiences, operating history, and more.
It was evident that we needed a universal framework to easily identify our customers and understand how to market and communicate to them effectively. I led a small team to research, design, and implement customer personas at Honeycomb. Each persona would be a composite sketch representing a segment of our target addressable market and the commonalities within the group.
Solution
We built a total of 13 customer personas for Honeycomb, representing composite sketches of 9 business owners (6 positive, 3 negative) and 4 investor profiles. For this summary, we will be focusing on the development of the business owner personas.
Team
Project Lead: Sophia Fang
Members: CEO, Director of Sales, Director of Customer Experience
Feedback & mentorship from our program instructor, Amardeep Kahlon
Research + Methodology
Data Analysis: Segment our alumni businesses based on the age of the business and the amount crowdfunded on Honeycomb
Make adjustments based on historical limitations or extenuating circumstances
Find commonalities within persona clusters and clear differences across clusters
Team Discussion: Evaluate data and anecdotes about the business owners in each cluster
Finalize list of business owner personas
Build out composite sketches of each persona
Design
For each of the 9 business owner personas, we crafted an overall summary, conducted detailed research to build out the persona details, and put our brains together to create personalized outreach strategy. Persona Summary discussed the overview of the business and growth mentality of the owner, allowing for team members to easily match real-life business owners to personas depending on the overall impression of our conversations together. Persona Details meticulously listed out information about the owner’s background, the business’s characteristics, the digital and media footprint of the business, the business owner’s attitude towards growth, the influences on their decision-making process, and common objections heard from this crowd about working with Honeycomb. Finally, Strategy outlined the messaging and outreach plan, elevator pitch, crowdfunding campaign tips, and alumni relationship strategy for the particular persona.
Implementation
We rolled out the personas to the full team and conducted feedback sessions with different departments to validate the behaviors of certain personas. They were also closely integrated into the development of new sales and marketing language, as well as planning for new campaigns.
Impact
These personas have established a shared framework at Honeycomb to understand our customers and optimize across our departments (Marketing, Sales, Product, Operations, and Customer Success) to acquire more customers and improve their experience. They are now a common language imbued across the team and have contributed to further strategic frameworks like Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs).