B2B UX research

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It can be difficult to reach users, since in a B2B context the customer, provisioner, user, and end user can be different roles at different companies. Users often didn’t choose a service, and they might only interact with it for a small part of it for their jobs.

Think about personas as models for groups of people who share common behaviors, needs, and goals. They might—but not always—also share a job title. For example, you might have Account Executives, Customer Success Managers, and Sales Engineers represented within a single persona, “Customer-facing,” because they all interact with customers to make sales, communicate business value, and achieve customer satisfaction.

Start by interviewing subject matter experts and empathy mapping “proto-personas” based on their knowledge and experience. It’s not a replacement for user research, but their knowledge and assumptions will give you a frame of reference and ideas of who to talk to next as you validate (or invalidate) what you hear.
The most common source of needs data comes from customer feature requests. They are valuable as an opportunity to reach out to an interested user and understand the use case—what, where, how, and why—behind their request.

Creating an ecosystem map can help you understand and validate how organizations are structured and how personas relate to each other. For example, you might hear about many types of Developers, but because some are on teams in Lines of Business and others are part of the CIO, their behaviors and needs are different and deserve distinct personas.