Most personas we see in companies were made in a workshop in one afternoon. They have a name, an age, hobbies and a stock photo. Then they land in a folder nobody opens again, because no decision follows from age and hobbies: not a headline on the website, not a salesperson’s answer to an objection.
In B2B sales, demographics say very little. What matters is the situation: what happened at the customer’s company that made them start looking, what they’re worried about and who else has to agree.
In B2B, a team buys
Buying a service or software at a company rarely depends on one person. Usually involved are:
- The user, who will work with the solution every day and knows the problem best.
- The decision maker, who holds the budget and answers for the result.
- The reviewers: IT, security, legal or finance. They can rarely say “yes”, but they can often say “no”.
- The champion, who convinces everyone else and needs arguments from you to do it.
That’s why it makes more sense to describe roles in the decision than one invented person. Each of them reads your website with a different question in mind.
Where the data comes from
A persona is only as good as its sources. The best are:
- Customer interviews, both with people who bought recently and with those who chose a competitor. Usually the same answers start repeating after just a few conversations.
- Sales notes and lost-deal reasons in the CRM. If nobody records them, that’s the first thing to change.
- Questions to support and sales. They show what the website doesn’t explain.
- Queries in Google Search Console. The words people search with are often different from the ones the company uses.
Questions worth asking
In a customer interview, don’t ask whether they liked it. Ask how the decision went:
- What happened that made you start looking for a solution?
- What did you try before, and why wasn’t it enough?
- Who else was involved in the decision?
- What almost stopped you from buying?
- How did you compare the options, and what tipped the balance?
- What did you search for on Google before you found us?
- What were you worried about?
- How would you describe us to a colleague at another company?
Write the answers down word for word. Customers’ own words are the most valuable part of a persona.
A persona on one page
You don’t need a slide deck. One page per role is enough:
- Role and situation: who they are at the company and at what moment they find you.
- Trigger: what started the search.
- Goal: what they want to achieve, in their words.
- Selection criteria: what they compare offers on.
- Objections and risks: what they fear and what they need to hear to stop fearing it.
- Who else decides: and what that person will ask.
- Quotes: a few sentences from the interviews, unedited.
- Where they look for information: search, LinkedIn, referrals, comparison sites.
How to use it
A persona is a tool, not a document. It works when every team uses it for something specific:
- Website: the headline answers the trigger, the following sections answer the objections, and the FAQ answers the reviewers’ questions.
- Sales: answers to objections prepared before they come up.
- Campaigns: ads written in customers’ words, not in the language of the proposal.
If you’re commissioning a new website or campaign, attach the persona to your agency brief. And if you’d like us to run the customer interviews for you and turn them into campaigns, see how we approach marketing.
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