In early stage companies, marketing is sometimes a misunderstood and underinvested area. Especially if the company is engineering led and selling to other engineers. As a result, the marketing can come across as generic features and benefits for a generic audience. “We’ll let the product speak for itself, we’ve got 1,000 stars on GitHub.” That’s a great , but it doesn’t mean you’ve got sustainable product / market fit.

While tech companies sometimes get initial traction positioning as “by developers for developers” sooner or later you’re going to want to expand your scope. Are you selling to all developers? Specific types of developers? For what kinds of applications? What about their managers?

Marketing operates at multiple intertwined levels. At the broadest level you have strategy and competitive position. Next, is your ideal customer profile or target company. When you get into actually selling a B2B product or service, things get more complicated. Because you’re not just selling to a company, you’re selling to the people in that company. And different people can play different roles in the purchase decision reflecting their goals, ambitions and fears.

If you’ve ever found yourself in a debate about what it is that customers want, having a more precise view on customer personas can help cut through the noise.

A persona is a representation of the different people involved in buying or using your product. Yes, you could have Dave the developer as one of the personas. Dave might represent the guy who is giving you GitHub stars. He’s a classic early adopter who likes to learn new technologies and wants to make a name for himself as an innovator.

But Dave doesn’t work in isolation. His boss, Mary the Manager, might be the person who decides what software goes into production. And she’s been burned betting on startup technologies that didn’t deliver. If you don’t figure out a way to get her on your side, you might find your deal sidelined.

Marketing isn’t a “one size fits all” communication. You have to tune your message to the needs of the different personas in your buying process.

In the early days of selling two-factor authentication at Duo Security, our customers were pretty typically network IT administrators in mid-market companies tasked with securing internal systems. They weren’t security experts and they wanted to get an easy-to-use solution up and running quickly. Duo’s 30-day free trial and detailed online documentation made it easy for them to configure, test and deploy a solution fast. Most customers were up and running within 3 days. We developed a reputation as the easy solution.

As the company grew, we expanded our product line and our ambition to sell to larger Enterprise customers. However, as anyone who has done Enterprise sales knows, we encountered more feature requests and more complex sales cycles. We had to be SOC-2 compliant. We needed to integrate with a broader range of single-sign-on products. There were also more requests for more reporting. Government customers were asking for FedRamp certification. At the same time, we didn’t want to lose our mojo, the ease of use that made us successful with mid-market and small business customers.

During a period of rapid evolution and growth it’s easy to get confused about who your target customer is. Sometimes the things Enterprise customers ask for are at direct odds with the needs of small and mid-market customers. And you’ve only got so many engineers. That can lead to a lot of conflicting inputs across in product, engineering, marketing and sales.

To get clarity, we built out more detailed personas. The design team led the charge and they became adopted broadly across the company.

Our earliest personas were based on interviews with real customers. We looked for common characteristics, roles and problems they faced in using security tools. We had Gary the IT Administrator and Helen, the Chief Information Security Officer. Helen was based on a the CISO of Ohio State University, which, football rivalries aside, had become a large customer. We also had Henry the Helpdesk Specialist. And because Duo was widely deployed in organizations, we identified Lee as our prototypical user.

These personas provided clarity to Product and Engineering as they built the roadmap. They could speak clearly about the benefits of specific features designed to help Gary, Henry or Helen or Lee.

These personas also improved the focus of our marketing communications. We could identify campaigns and content that was intended for Helen the CISO as distinct from Gary the IT Admin. Helen was thinking strategically about the organizations overall security posture, cloud adoption, mobile device policies and reporting. Gary was more focused on day-to-day operations and specific technical integration capabilities. If the rollout of two-factor integration didn’t work, or if users got locked out inadvertently, he’d get the blame.

I knew our persona strategy was working when I saw printed copies of the of the personas with pictures of Helen and Gary on the wall in different departments of the company. It was a good reminder of who we were serving.

When we spoke about our customers we no longer spoke generically. There was now much greater understanding and empathy toward the different roles people played and how they used our product. Would the new reporting help Gary? Is Lee going to understand how to configure and use a new feature? Discussions were based less on opinions and more about how to do right by the different personas.

Personas increased everyone’s understanding of customers across the organization and gave us a useful and shared framework for making decisions.

Thanks to Pete Baker, founder of the digital agency FinalFinal for his contributions to this article. Pete was previously Head of Design, Brand and Creative at Duo Duo Security and a huge champion of personas.