Buyer persona
A profile of a real person inside your ICP: what they are trying to do, what they fear, and where they look for answers.
In depth
What it really means
A buyer persona describes a person in the buying group: their role, what success looks like for them, what they are afraid of, the objections they raise, and where they get information. It is the input that decides what you say and where you say it.
Personas have a bad reputation, deservedly earned by a decade of documents containing a stock photo, a fictional name, and the detail that Marketing Mary enjoys yoga. That version is useless. The version that works contains sentences from real customer interviews and the specific objection that person raises in month two of an evaluation.
The buying group is the point
Around half of B2B buying groups contain two to four people, and roughly 42% contain five to nine. Larger enterprises routinely exceed ten.
That means one persona is never enough. A typical B2B SaaS deal needs at least three: the person with the problem, the person who signs, and the person who will have to implement or maintain it. Each has different fears, and the one that kills deals is usually the third, who was never written for.
What a useful persona contains
| Include | Skip |
|---|---|
| The metric they are measured on | A stock photo and an invented name |
| What they fear going wrong, in their words | Personal hobbies |
| The objection they raise, verbatim from calls | A generic pain-point list |
| Where they actually look: which subreddit, which newsletter | “Consumes content on social media” |
| Who they need to convince internally | Age range and location |
| What would make them look bad for choosing you | Aspirational quotes |
Pros & cons
Pros
- Produces specific language, which is what makes content feel written for someone.
- Reveals the blocker persona nobody was writing for, which is often the deal-killer.
- Directs distribution to channels that exist rather than channels that sound plausible.
- Sharpens objection handling on comparison and pricing pages.
Cons
- Built from assumptions rather than interviews, they are worse than nothing, since they encode guesses as facts.
- Go stale as roles and titles change, which in tech is fast.
- Multiply. Teams end up with nine personas and use none.
- Easy to confuse with the ICP and produce a document that is neither.
The mistake people make
Writing personas without talking to anyone. A persona assembled in a workshop from what the team believes is a record of internal assumptions with a photo attached. Ten recorded customer conversations produce a better persona than any workshop, and the direct quotes become headline copy you could not have invented.
Best practices
- Build from ten or more recorded customer conversations, and keep the quotes.
- Cover the whole buying group, including the person who has to run the thing afterwards.
- Cap it at three or four personas. More than that and none get used.
- Name the exact places they look, down to the specific community or newsletter.
- Record objections verbatim, since paraphrasing removes the useful part.
- Refresh every year, and any time your buyer’s job title shifts.
FAQs
What is a buyer persona?
A profile of a real person inside your ICP: their role, goals, fears, objections and information sources.
How is it different from an ICP?
The ICP describes the company. The persona describes a person inside it.
How many personas do I need?
Three or four, covering the buying group. Half of B2B buying groups have two to four people and many have more.
Are personas outdated?
The fictional-biography version always was. Personas built from recorded interviews remain the most direct route to specific copy.
What is the most-missed persona?
The person who will have to implement or maintain the product. They rarely champion a purchase and frequently block one.
Keep reading
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