How to Create B2B Buyer Personas That Aren't Fiction

Most persona decks read like a creative writing exercise. You open the file, scroll past a stock photo, and learn that the target buyer drinks cold brew, checks LinkedIn on the commute and worries about falling behind. Swap the logo on the cover for a competitor's, and nobody on the sales floor would notice. That's the real test when you create B2B buyer personas: each one should describe a buying decision your team can act on, and each one should record something your competitors' personas don't.

Teams that end up with the generic version usually did the sensible thing. They ran interviews, gathered notes and looked at what peers publish. But everyone fills in the same template fields, so everyone ends up with the same persona, and then the same messaging. The second problem is that the set doesn't hold together. One persona is defined by job title, the next by company size, a third by a goal. They overlap, and sales and marketing can't tell which one a real prospect is. The five steps below fix both.

Write the dividing rule before writing any persona

Before drafting a single profile, decide what makes someone persona A rather than persona B. Two rules work well: the decision the person owns, or the situation that sends them looking for a vendor. Whichever you choose, every persona in the set gets split by that same rule.

Both options put the weight on the buying situation. As Clayton Christensen and his co-authors wrote in Harvard Business Review on customer jobs, product developers "focus too much on building customer profiles and looking for correlations in data," when "the circumstances in which customers try to do them are more critical than any buyer characteristics."

Consistency matters more than which rule you pick. If personas A and B are split by company size, persona C can't be split by department. Splitting on two things at once, such as seniority and situation, is fine, as long as every persona is split on both.

Test every pair of personas against the rule

Once the rule is set, take each pair of personas and finish this sentence using only the rule: "Someone belongs in A, and not B, because…" If you can't finish it in one line, merge the two or redraw the line between them. A real buyer who fits both personas sends the same signal: the line is in the wrong place.

Here's a made-up example of a pair that fails. A set includes "Director Dan," who cares about team efficiency, and "VP Valerie," who cares about growth. An operations director arrives with a mandate to cut costs, and she fits both. Efficiency and growth are goals most leaders share, so they can't separate anyone.

A clean line looks different. As marketing executive Tom Wentworth recounts in an essay, HubSpot's early team was split between building for two personas, as co-founder Brian Halligan told it: "Owner Ollie, a small business owner with less than 10 employees and no full time marketer" and "Mary Marketer, a marketing manager who worked in a company between 10 and 1000 employees."

The line was clear enough to force a choice, and HubSpot picked Mary. Its marketers "stopped watering our blog (and other assets) down with business owner content," its sales reps "largely forgot about Ollie," and the company saw "a huge decrease in customer churn." The account is secondhand and gives no churn numbers. Still, it shows what a clean line makes possible: a team that can say no to one group of buyers and mean it.

Fill each persona from what buyers said and did

Most templates ask for age, education, favorite apps and personal goals. None of that helps a rep handle an objection or a writer sharpen a page.

Fill each persona from recent buyers, lost deals and sales calls instead. For each one, record:

• Where it sits on your dividing rule: the decision they own, or the situation that sent them looking.
• The problem in their own words, quoted from a call or an interview.
• What set off the search, and what they tried first.
• Who else had a say, and what each of them needed to hear.
• Why the deals you lost went elsewhere, in the buyer's reasons.
• The line from the next step: something only your evidence shows.

That's what should be in a buyer persona. If a field can't be filled from something a buyer said or did, leave it empty. A guess written into a persona gets treated as fact by everyone who reads it later.

Add the line a competitor's persona wouldn't have

Now ask the uncomfortable question. Could a direct competitor paste this persona into their own wiki and find it accurate? If so, it tells you nothing they don't already know, and the messaging built on it will sound like theirs.

This is where the template problem gets fixed. Companies working from the same fields reach the same answers, so the useful part of a persona is whatever your evidence shows that theirs wouldn't. Look for it in three places:

• The workaround buyers used before they found you.
• The phrase buyers use for why their last approach failed.
• The objection that keeps coming up in the deals you lose.

Write at least one line like that into every persona. If you can't find one, you don't have enough evidence yet, and the next step is more interviews.

Keep only the personas that change what your team does

Each persona should change at least one piece of copy or one sales move: a headline, an email in a nurture sequence, a question on the discovery call. If you can't point to the change, cut the persona.

Run the check against what you already have. Pick a live page or email and ask which persona it was written for, and what that persona told you to say. If the answer is "all of them" or "none," the page or the persona needs work.

Real buyers are messy, which is why the lines need to be clean

The strongest objection is that real buyers don't sit in neat boxes. One person can be both the budget holder and the daily user, so clean splits between personas can look like a fiction of their own.

That messiness is a reason to draw the lines more carefully. Split on more than one dimension if you need to, as long as every persona is split the same way. And when a real buyer keeps landing in two personas, treat it as evidence that the line is in the wrong place. Redraw it instead of adding a sixth persona to cover the overlap.

If you're working out where those lines should fall for your own buyers, get in touch through our contact page to talk it through.

A persona set is finished when every persona can be told apart from the others, and from the ones your competitors wrote.