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Ideal Customer Insight & Buyer Personas

The Insight Challenge

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SmartestEnergy, a leading B2B renewable energy supplier, needed to sharpen its marketing and sales strategies by developing a deeper, evidence-based understanding of the businesses and decision-makers most likely to convert to its services. With limited insight into who its ideal customers were and how they made energy procurement decisions, it needed a research-driven foundation to target the right audiences with the right messages — and equip its sales team to engage and convert more effectively.

The project we crafted

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A three-phase audience insight programme to define Ideal Customer Profiles and build rich Buyer Personas grounded in the real needs, motivations and switching behaviours of energy decision-makers.

  • Desk research combining competitor analysis, CRM customer profiling and sales team Q&As — establishing a foundation of hypotheses on ideal customer profiles

  • A large-scale online survey of 200+ UK B2B energy buyers - spanning current SmartestEnergy customers and non-customer decision-makers across SME and C&I sectors

  • In-depth qualitative research with 20 ideal customer participants — combining self-completion persona profiling and 30-minute video interviews exploring Jobs-to-be-Done, Switching Forces and Empathy Maps

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Outcomes

A suite of data-driven Ideal Customer Profile infographics and six multi-page Buyer Personas — covering decision journeys, Jobs-to-be-Done, Switching Forces and Empathy Maps — delivered alongside activation workshops for marketing and sales teams.