What Are Personas?

A B2B persona is a model of a buyer, user, or stakeholder in a typical customer organization within one of your customer segments. The persona is a vibrant model depicting customers' attributes and goals distilled from customer research (both qualitative and quantitative). Persona scenarios present customers in action as they make buying decisions or as they use products and services. Personas are your company's nexus between research, execution, and outstanding customer experiences.

The Face of Personas

Each individual B2B persona description includes a photo, name, title role, and descriptions of: (1) attributes that help your employees identify with the persona, (2) daily responsibilities that relate to the product or service your company offers; and, most importantly, (3) goals that illuminate the motivations lying behind typical customers’ attitudes and behaviors. The individual persona should feel familiar and make your customers “come alive” for your employees.


Buyer Personas

Buyer Personas represent those roles within your customer organizations that make purchase decisions and engage in the purchase process. They may not ever use the product or service they purchase, so buyer personas are different than user personas. They have different daily responsibilities and goals than users and the workflow activities they engage in revolve around the decision to purchase a product or service for their company. Often, buyer personas’ activities include interactions with other personas within their persona ecosystem. Like other types of personas, buyer personas are built from data gathered through quantitative and qualitative customer research.


Buyer Personas differ depending on the size of your customers’ organizations and the product or service they are considering buying. To capture all aspects of the buying cycle, you may need to create more than one buyer persona and assign each one a different buying role, such as:

  • Evaluating Buyer: gathers information about purchase options (i.e., the persona who interacts most closely with your Web site or sales team during the pre-decision phase) and reports findings and opinion to the economic or technical buyer.

  • Economic Buyer: controls the ultimate decision to release funds for the purchase.

  • Technical Buyer: has technical expertise that influences the purchase decision.

  • Orderer: actually orders the product or service.

Obviously, not all of these roles may be necessary as there is a great deal of overlap in many situations. Your quantitative and qualitative research will indicate which roles are important to include in your persona ecosystem, and your company’s existing and planned sales and marketing tools will also indicate which personas will provide valuable insight.

A B2B company almost always has more than one persona within any one customer segment ecosystem, which can depict buyer personas, user personas, and stakeholder personas. Although our clients often work with multiple customer segments that could result in many personas, we often focus on only a few primary buyer personas to solve problems for a specific issue or product.

Evolution of Personas

Alan Cooper introduced personas as a powerful interaction design tool in his books The Inmates Are Running The Asylum and About Face, About Face 2.0, and About Face 3. Interaction design is an approach to the design of high tech products and systems that relies on user research to help determine what behavior the product or service should have in order to satisfy users' goals. In the interaction design context, personas are "a precise descriptive model of the user, what he wishes to accomplish, and why." (Cooper, About Face 2.0) Interaction designers use personas to solve specific design questions, such as: "Should all recent account activity appear when Rose (the user persona) first opens the application, or would she rather see her balance and a menu of possible actions?" "Should the pallet of colors remain on the screen after Bob (the user persona) chooses green, or should the pallet automatically close?"

In recent years, Goal Centric has been pioneering the evolution of personas from a design tool to an essential business planning and decision-making tool. Buyer personas answer questions like, “At what point and through what channel does Silvia (evaluating buyer persona) want access to the detailed capabilities description of our product?” and, “How open is Matthew (technical buyer persona) to a custom solution, or is he really only interested in our off-the shelf product, and why?” Just as personas help interaction designers focus on the design option that will best satisfy users' goals when using a Website or software application, buyer personas can also help executives, marketers, salespeople, and customer service representatives to understand, anticipate, and satisfy customers' goals. Buyer personas become the focal point around which an organization can become customer-centric.

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