Strategy
Bringing together the various marketing, sales, and CRM departments around a data-driven strategy through the activation of B2B personas.
Operating in a highly competitive environment with HR decision-makers who have complex expectations, Adecco Switzerland wanted to give more meaning and resonance to all of its B2B marketing activities.
The major challenge: developing customer knowledge to strengthen engagement, moving away from purely empirical approaches to rely on structured insights from the field and analytical data, through the creation of B2B personas.
The Eminence teams supported Adecco Switzerland in this process by deploying a three-step approach: research, structuring, and activation.
Eminence supported Adecco Switzerland in a strategic project to research, structure, and activate B2B personas, with a twofold objective.
Objective 1: Redefine business priorities
Adecco Switzerland's strong desire to improve its sales and marketing performance management by relying more on in-depth knowledge of HR decision-makers formed the basis of this project.
The initial objectives included:
- Gaining a more accurate picture of the motivations, decision-making processes, and unspoken needs of B2B prospects;
- Identifying variations in behavior based on geographic area, industry, and organizational maturity;
- Building concrete and consistent personas to fuel various marketing actions (media campaigns, nurturing, CRM strategies, etc.).
Objective 2: Unify the different teams around a common vision
One of Adecco Switzerland's major expectations was more organizational in nature, with the desire to find a common lexicon for all Marketing, Sales, CRM, and Management teams.
As a powerful lever for strategic alignment, personas are therefore intended to become a shared reference point and decision-making tool for all teams.
Challenge 1: The heterogeneity of the Swiss market
The Swiss market is complex, with three different language areas, significant cultural disparities, and very different needs depending on the region and sector.
This type of scenario cannot be addressed with a generic approach, so a balance had to be found to avoid falling into the trap of an overly detailed approach, which would make activation too complex.
Challenge 2: Moving away from theoretical personas
It was crucial for Adecco not to fall into a common trap:creating descriptive personas that tick all the boxes for the perfect target on paper but are difficult to activate in reality.
We therefore had to try to define profiles that were detailed enough to be consistent and at the same time realistic enough to be a real lever for the teams in the field.
To support Adecco Switzerland in this important process, Eminence developed an iterative approach based on four pillars:
- Field orientation: the different personas created had to correspond to real use cases.
- Collaborative project: the construction and identification of personas necessarily involved close collaboration with Adecco's teams throughout the project.
- Scalability: it was essential to remain highly agile and be able to evolve the personas over time, as would be the case in the field.
- Cross-functional activation: integration of marketing, sales, CRM, and operational issues from the design stage onwards.
Our support was therefore built around:
- Qualitative and analytical research,
- Collaborative workshops,
- Strategic structuring of profiles,
- Definition of a multi-team activation framework.
This approach was essential for combining field observations, qualitative and analytical data, and business challenges, and ensuring the creation of personas with high operational and strategic value.
Implement a strategic prioritization framework to ensure optimal activation of personas.
In close collaboration with the Adecco teams, we defined three priority levels to guide:
- efforts toward the profiles with the highest potential
- marketing and sales investments
- strategic priorities for management
The objective was to provide a clear and consistent reading framework for all teams, from operational roles to executive leadership.
Designing personas as living tools
The personas were designed to serve as a decision-making foundation for Adecco’s teams. They are evolving tools that can be integrated into the broader ecosystem: within CRM tools, marketing automation platforms, and sales processes.
Integrating activation needs by team into the thinking
The purpose of the personas is to provide the entire organization with a transversal foundation to ensure a shared understanding of clients across all teams. However, the value delivered by personas differs depending on the team:
The Marketing and CRM teams can benefit from improved segmentation of the client database to personalize messages and user journeys based on maturity level.
Sales teams, in turn, rely on personas as a true analytical framework to more quickly identify client profile categories and better adapt their discourse accordingly.
Finally, for Leadership, personas are a valuable strategic steering tool, guiding both investment decisions across different markets and the evolution of the value proposition.
The project, conducted over several weeks, enabled Adecco to benefit from high-value deliverables:
- A structured, documented, and prioritized catalog of B2B personas,
- A robust foundation to harmonize the work of marketing, sales, CRM, and operations teams.
- A shared and transversal activation framework
The outcomes of this project will be visible in the medium to long term, but initial impacts can already be observed:
- Clients and prospects receive messages that are more consistent and better aligned with their level of maturity across all interaction channels;
- Media and nurturing campaigns benefit from improved performance thanks to more relevant targeting;
- Lead qualification improves through greater cohesion, clearer prioritization, and better alignment between teams.
This foundational work represented an important and necessary step for Adecco Switzerland in transitioning from an intuitive and empirical segmentation approach to a structured, collaborative methodology for customer understanding across all internal stakeholders—significant efforts for sustainable, long-term results.