Sales growth doesn’t just happen. It happens when your messaging reflects the challenges and terminology of your ideal buyers.

This is the way Agnes O’Connell, VP of Demand Generation at 360insights, thinks about driving growth. 360insights is a partner engagement and business optimization company that offers a suite of channel solutions. Agnes helped lead a strategic shift at 360insights to create a clearer Ideal Customer Profile and a more effective positioning strategy by anchoring messaging in buyer language and segment-specific outcomes.

Agnes outlines four key strategies behind this initiative:

1. Start with Vertical Language and Buyer Vocabulary
   Before talking about outcomes, 360 prioritized showing up with the right language. “We first and foremost need to showcase that we understand what they call a certain person in their channel… even what they call a rebate,” Agnes explained. The team mapped the terms used by decision-makers across industries and global markets, ensuring they “showed up correctly” from the start of the buyer journey.
2. Back into Outcomes from Real Stories
   Rather than guess or generalize, the team at 360 “did a lot of rear-view deciphering.” They went back through roughly 50 client stories—including legacy and new stories—to reverse-engineer the outcomes that mattered most. These were categorized by challenge, product solution, and resulting outcome.
3. Multiple Levels of Outcome Mapping
   From that analysis, Agnes and team uncovered patterns across user experience outcomes (often voiced by directors or managers), business outcomes (important to VPs and execs), and broader market-level outcomes like sales growth or market share. “User experience was a big one—especially for enterprise orgs saying, ‘Hey, I had this experience. Now we need to run 100X smoother.’”
4. Document and Rank Common Patterns
   The language derived from these stories reshaped the company’s case study, content, and website strategy—internally and externally. “We updated our website off of all that language,” Agnes shared. “We ranked essentially the challenges and outcomes… and started to see a lot of commonality.” This helped align solutions to the right buyers, from Channel Chiefs and Directors of Partner Programs to VPs of Marketing or Sales, depending on the vertical.

In conclusion, Agnes’ strategy at 360insights demonstrates how listening to the market and aligning with vertical buyer language can turn a generic positioning effort into a high-impact, customer-fit engine. By capturing voice-of-customer insights and mapping them to outcomes across multiple personas and industries, Agnes helped elevate the relevance and effectiveness of 360’s go-to-market messaging.