Case Study
Customer Persona Development – B2B CGT Buying Dynamics
Five stakeholders – one deal. Mapping who actually decides in CGT procurement.
The Challenge
A life sciences company entering the Cell & Gene Therapy market assumed CGT buyers resembled their traditional research customers: individual scientists making independent purchasing decisions based on technical specifications. That assumption was wrong in almost every dimension.
CGT companies were developing therapies for patients. Vendor selection involved regulatory compliance, manufacturing risk, and financial exposure that research purchasing never approached. Five different stakeholder types — scientists, process engineers, manufacturing operations, quality/regulatory, and procurement — participated in every significant vendor decision, each with different priorities and different power to stall or kill a deal.
Without documented understanding of who these stakeholders were, what they cared about, and how influence flowed among them, marketing and sales would keep targeting the wrong people with the wrong messages at the wrong stage of the buying process.
- Industry: Cell & Gene Therapy / Life Sciences
- Services: Stakeholder Research, B2B Buyer Journey Mapping, Decision Dynamics Analysis, Sales Enablement Framework
- Timeline: 2-month research phase within larger CGT engagement
- Client Profile: Established supplier entering CGT market; existing customer relationships built on individual researcher relationships, not enterprise buying dynamics
Our Approach
01 | Multi-Stakeholder Research Design
We designed a research program to capture diverse perspectives across customer segments: large biopharma with established CGT programs, emerging biotech, CDMOs, and across therapy modalities (autologous CAR-T, allogeneic, gene therapy). Within each account type, we mapped which stakeholder roles existed and how authority was distributed.
The interview protocol was built to uncover what stakeholders actually did, not what they said they did. Questions explored real vendor evaluation stories — good and bad experiences, near-misses, deals where a supplier was eliminated and why. Stated preferences are unreliable; behavioral patterns from real decisions are not.
02 | Persona Identification & Description
Rather than treating the buying committee as a single audience, we identified four distinct roles operating inside the purchase decision — each with a different function, a different form of influence, and a different way of stopping a deal. The framework distinguished technical specialists, whose domain expertise shapes early evaluation; gatekeepers, who hold outsized early veto power regardless of their formal seniority; influencers, who shape consensus during scale-up and validation without necessarily holding final authority; and decision-makers, who confirm commercial terms once technical alignment is already in place.
Mapping these roles — not just who they were, but when each one entered the process and what kind of “no” they were capable of delivering — gave the client a structural view of the buying cycle that a single-persona approach could never surface.
03 | The Buying Journey
The research mapped not just who the personas were, but when they entered the purchase process and what they needed at each stage. Scientists and engineers dominated early evaluation. Operations and quality engaged mid-process during capability assessment. Procurement entered late, often after technical consensus was already established. Sales teams that skipped scientists early — assuming they weren’t the “real” decision maker — were frequently eliminated before they knew it.
A critical segment-level finding: large biopharma moved on 6-12 month evaluation cycles with formal RFP processes. Emerging biotech moved faster but required substantially more technical hand-holding. These two segments required meaningfully different engagement models.
The Impact
Buying dynamics documented from assumption to evidence
Sales teams could orchestrate multi-stakeholder engagement instead of defaulting to whoever picked up the phone.
Scientist veto risk identified and addressed
Content strategy and early-stage engagement were redesigned to earn scientist credibility first, closing a gap the client hadn’t recognized.
Segment-specific strategies defined
Resource allocation and sales coverage could be built around actual customer dynamics, not a one-size-fits-all model.
Sales enablement foundation established
Marketing and sales shared a common language and factual foundation, ending internal debates about what customers actually wanted.
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