What Is a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona represents the combined attributes of a broad cohort of individuals who have a say in the purchasing process. This can include several influencers and decision-makers throughout the company who might not even be using the product. That is why for product teams developing B2B products, it makes sense to develop both a buyer persona and a user persona.
The buyer persona will often have different reasons for wanting the product than a user persona will. The product, sales, and marketing teams must address these unique goals and needs as they build the product and create messaging around its features and benefits.
What’s an Example of a Buyer Persona?
Imagine your company was creating a live sales-training event—a seminar or conference. Your user persona for this product would be the salesperson attending the event. For that persona, you’d want to make sure your product resonated with their unique goals and needs: improving their sales skills, making them more valuable to their company, helping them command greater commission or salary over time, enhancing their career, etc.
But those messages won’t necessarily resonate with the buyer persona: the person or people at the company who will decide whether or not to approve the expense and time for that sales rep to attend this event. So you will also need to construct the buyer persona to help your team develop the event and its messaging to appeal to these people in particular.
Product
Live sales training
Buyer Persona
- Chief sales officer
- Sales vice president
- Sales manager
- COO or CEO
Goals
- Improve the sales department’s effectiveness
- Raise the overall skill level of the company’s sales representatives
- Boost the number of sales, average sale size, and overall revenue
Challenges
- Typical new-hires to the sales department are inexperienced and unskilled
- The company offers insufficient or ineffective sales training
How Our Product Solves This
Our live sales training will teach sales best practices in an engaging, memorable, and cost-effective way.
How Do I Create a Buyer Persona?
Here are a few best practices for creating any type of persona for your product.
Step 1: Learn key details about this person
The first step in developing a buyer persona—or any persona—is to learn the necessary details of that person’s career and life. The more you can flesh out who this person is, the more effectively your team can develop the right messages.
Using the sales-training example above, you know your buyer will likely be either the head of sales or a senior manager at your customer’s business. Once you know that, you will want to build a demographic profile. The details you’ll be looking for include:
- Industry
- Job title
- Geographic region
- Age range
Step 2: Meet with these people to learn what motivates them
Now that you have a basic understanding of who this buyer persona is, you’ll want to learn what makes them tick. The only viable way to do this is to communicate directly with a representative sample of these people. This can consist of one-on-one interviews, a small focus group, a large-scale survey, or a combination of all of these methods. Your goal in communicating with your buyer persona is to:
- Learn their specific goals and challenges
- Gain an understanding of how they typically solve problems
- Learn why they haven’t been able to solve the specific problem your product addresses
Step 3: Pull it all together to capture the buyer-persona story
After you’ve compiled and analyzed all of this information from your buyer persona, your team should have a strong understanding of what motivates these people, what obstacles they’re facing, and how your product or service can help solve those problems. In other words, now you have your buyer persona’s story—and you’re ready to begin crafting your product’s messaging in a way that hits those emotional triggers and persuades them to green-light the purchase of your product.
Related Terms
persona / user persona / product vision / customer advisory board / unique selling proposition