Infusionsoft Project X
The Challenge
Our company knew our customers were 37% less likely to cancel their accounts and 52% more likely to meet their business objectives when working with one of our service partners. So the purpose of this project was to align with the company’s goal of expanding our Service Partner base to lead to customer success. To do that, we needed to understand our service partners’ goals, motivations, requirements, pain points and business models to ultimately create a product and experience tailored to them.
My Role and Methods
My role was to own research from end–to-end and share findings cross-functionally. Since the partner program had been in place for over 10 years, I started by surfacing the knowledge we already had in-house with stakeholder interviews. I interviewed long-time members of our partner team, product managers, the business development and partner support teams. Then I analyzed support tickets and Net Promoter Score (NPS) comments from our service partners to put together a proto persona.
Once those steps were complete, I looked to disprove the proto persona data (to avoid confirmation bias) by conducting interviews with our service partners and partner council members and observing weekly discovery sessions that were being conducted by our product managers. These steps led to personas backed by quantitative and qualitative data.
The Results
At the start of this project it was understood we would gain a deeper understanding of our service partners through research. But subtypes of service partners also emerged; they had varying business models, served a variety of client bases, had different goals, motivations and needs. This example is one of the Personas created for one of our sub-types, which served as the project’s near-term priority partner. The personas were shared with the product team, executives, Marketing and the Partner team. This information has guided the product roadmap and allowed internal teams, like the Partner team, to identify potential partners for further research and our beta program. Marketing was also able to use this information to manage messaging to partners about upcoming products at an annual partner conference.