How to Create Buyer Personas: A Complete Guide

Demographics? Good. Psychographics? Better. Demographics and psychographics? Best.

That's because when you're developing strong buyer personas, you're going beyond basic characteristics to uncover the motivations, needs, and desires that drive your target customer. These deeper insights help you understand your audience's psychological core, allowing you to focus on the right customers and craft sales messages that resonate and convert. Here's how.

A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer that you create using market research, existing customer data, and interviews. It includes demographic traits like their role and company as well as psychological traits like motivations and challenges. A buyer persona helps salespeople understand their target audience's needs and determine whether a customer is the right match for the product or service.

• A positive buyer persona describes personas who are an ideal customer, which means they are motivated and more likely to purchase your product or service.
• A negative buyer persona describes personas who aren't great fits for your solution, which means they're more likely to be difficult to work with, end the relationship early, or not buy at all.

Buyer personas help you gain clarity about your customers by offering data-driven insights. They show you what potential buyers need, want, and expect from your business. With this valuable information, you can develop effective sales plans, marketing strategies, and product development ideas that appeal to your customers' specific desires.

Buyer personas help you gain a better understanding of your customers so you can make your sales interactions more relevant. You can strengthen your relationships with current customers and identify high-quality leads among prospects, leading to better outcomes.

With a buyer persona, you spend less time pursuing the wrong prospects and more time targeting the right ones. The result is increased sales team productivity and a higher likelihood of closing sales quickly.

These are some other benefits of creating buyer personas:

• Adds value: Buyer personas don't just help the sales team. They can also be used by other departments like marketing, customer service, revenue operations, or product development to help them better understand the company's customers, so they can provide informative interactions with them.
• Enhances personalized communication: A seller can add a relevant and tailored angle to emails or other outreach so it resonates with a prospect's needs. By focusing on the individual's preferences, a seller can understand and empathize with a customer's unique needs and expectations.
• Uncovers new lead sources: By identifying your ideal customer, you may find a new industry or role to target for leads. For example, a recruitment software company may be targeting human resources at healthcare corporations and discover new opportunities in financial services.

You'll know your buyer personas are working if you're getting better results with the same amount of work — whether it's booking more meetings with the same amount of outreach or closing more deals from the same number of conversations. Sales performance can be tracked in the dashboard of the sales analytics software of your customer relationship management (CRM) platform.

Businesses often develop various types of personas for their different audience segments and criteria. Business-to-consumer (B2C) buyer personas often include an individual’s personal lifestyle, interests, and needs, while a business-to-business (B2B) buyer persona focuses more on the profession and company. Here are the common categories of role-based personas for business-to-business buyers:

• The decision-maker persona represents the person who will make the final choice whether to buy your product or service. They likely can approve the investment and are focused on how the purchase will benefit the business.
• The influencer persona plays a key role in persuading the decision-maker persona to close a deal. Their opinions, recommendations, and expertise carry significant weight in the process, but they are not the ones purchasing the product directly.
• The end-user persona describes the person who relies on your product or service in their role. They focus on product features, benefits, and usability. Their satisfaction matters, and their needs are relevant for product development.
• The champion persona represents the internal advocate for your product or service. They help promote your offering within their company, introduce you to key stakeholders, and positively advance the sales process in your favor.

Some companies break down buyer personas even further into four types based on decision-making styles: competitive, spontaneous, humanistic, and methodical. Competitive and spontaneous personas are both fast-paced decision makers, but competitive personas are more logical while spontaneous personas are more emotional. Humanistic and methodical personas are slow-paced decision makers, with humanistic personas being more emotional, and methodical ones being more logical.

A robust buyer persona should include demographic details such as age, education, and gender as well as professional information like industry, role, and job description. The hypothetical representation of your ideal customer should also capture psychographic and behavioral information to provide insights into how the persona's behaviors influence their decision to buy your product or service.

You may choose to expand your buyer persona depending on your industry. For example, if you're selling a software product, you might include details about technology usage or preferred platforms.

Create buyer personas from the outside in. First, use data and research to fill in traits you might see on a resume. Then, use interviews to go deeper into the psyches of your target customers and discover the things they care about most.

Here is how to create and implement a buyer persona:

A buyer persona should begin with the basic work-life characteristics of your ideal customer (demographic traits). Knowing these traits makes it a lot easier to go over a large volume of leads and identify which prospects to focus on and which to rule out. Keep in mind, though, that leaning too much on demographic data might rule out great potential customers who come from diverse and underrepresented backgrounds.

Here's a starter list of traits to look for:

• Title and role
• Company size
• Income level
• Industry
• Region
• Gender
• Age
• Marital status
• Job history
• Education
• Community groups

Use research and data to fill in the outline of your ideal customer. If you already have a sales plan, start there. You should also have useful data in your CRM system, including demographic information on past customers.

From there, round out your understanding with research. Look through company presentations and customer stories, and go online to search for additional information. For example, you might track down buyer personas that other companies have created, then search for target customer titles on LinkedIn and in analyst reports.

Let's imagine that you are a sales rep for Fancy Designs, a company that specializes in website development software that allows organizations to create professional-looking websites without the need for a developer. Your buyer persona is the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). After digging into your data and doing research, you might discover that a lot of CMOs have about 15 years of experience, hold a bachelor's degree, and work at companies with more than 100 people.

To anchor your imagination and bring your buyer persona to life, let's give her a name: CMO Melissa.

Now it's time to understand the daily work of your buyer persona. Your objective is to discover the elements of their job description so you can speak more intelligently to their goals. These elements include:

• Daily responsibilities
• Professional challenges
• How they define success
• Skills required for success

Searching through job listings is a great way to discover this information. You can also send surveys to current customers with this role. If you don't have any, consider sending surveys to targets who fit your existing demographic data, offering them an incentive for participating. The incentive could be a gift card, discount offer, or entry into a prize raffle.

For example, you might reach out to CMO Melissa, reframe the categories above as questions, and ask her to list her top responses. For example: "What are your top two job responsibilities?"

Now's the time to get even more personal and discover your buyer persona's underlying drivers so you can attract them with relevant, personal messages. You're on a mission to discover:

• Methods of learning
• Motivations
• Challenges

It's time to go to the source. Actually, there are two sources: subject matter experts who know this persona inside out and target customers themselves. Schedule interviews with product people and sellers from within your company who can tell you the kinds of people who are best suited for your offering.

Then, find a group of customers who are willing to sit down with you for a conversation. Ask your sales team to recruit customers during sales calls and meetings. If your base of customers isn't large enough (or if you're having trouble getting people to agree to chat), expand your search to include prospects.

Draft questions that touch on the three bullets above and keep them brief. Consider including polls in your interview as well, so you can group responses into data points. If you have a large enough number of respondents, group them based on categories like industry, geography, and seniority, so you can find similarities and nuances within each group.

Returning to CMO Melissa, you might discover that she's motivated by having the latest customer-engagement technology, such as website chatbots driven by AI sales agents. You might also discover that this is one of the most high-pressure jobs in the C-suite, and it takes a certain kind of person to withstand that pressure and keep going.

A buyer persona brings all your valuable research together into one succinct place, so you can reference it while prospecting and selling. Often, the buyer persona is organized like an infographic, with insights and bullets that you can easily skim. A buyer persona may feature a photograph or illustration, a name, and a brief biography detailing their primary characteristics, challenges, and objectives.

Some companies expand their buyer personas into presentations with multiple slides so they can show their research in greater detail. Whatever format you choose, make it consistent across all the buyer personas in your company so sellers can quickly find the information they need.

Here's an example of a buyer persona for CMO Melissa:

Responsibilities

• Execute a marketing strategy
• Grow and mentor marketing talent

Skills required for success

• Calm under pressure
• Ability to collaborate with other executives

Methods of learning

• Conversations with peers
• Industry content like marketing reports

Motivations

• Using new technologies
• Personal recognition

Challenges

• Getting buy-in from executives
• Retaining talent

Make buyer personas a part of your sales enablement program, and pull them up before every customer interaction, from email outreach to calls and meetings, to remind yourself of your buyers' needs and preferences. For instance, if you're calling on a prospect who fits CMO Melissa's buying persona, you may focus the meeting on your product's new technologies.

Be sure to revisit your buyer personas and update them periodically. It's important to prioritize this when there are shifts in your business, market changes, or you notice new types of customers becoming interested in your product. That way, your buyer personas will remain relevant and valuable.

In the example we used previously, this might look like Fancy Designs noticing a surge in new clients with creative services titles who are using their software. In response, the business develops a new buyer persona to address this emerging segment.

Don't forget to loop in other teams as soon as your buyer personas are ready. For example, the product team can use buyer personas to ask follow-up questions, and the marketing team can use them to test new messages in advertising or gauge interest in a new event.

To help spark ideas for your buyer personas, here are some examples created by businesses. These examples illustrate how a well-developed persona can help visualize your ideal customer.

• HR Harry: Harry is the ideal target customer for a salesperson at a human resources software platform. Harry is a human resources director at a mid-sized company with fewer than 100 employees. He’s in his late 30s, and his salary is $150,000 a year. Harry is motivated to keep his employees happy and faces the challenge of finding software to organize their vacation schedules and monthly evaluations.
• Accounting Alice: Alice represents the buyer persona targeted by a payroll company. Alice has held several financial services jobs in the Midwest region. She is now the vice president of accounting for a landscaping business that has grown to more than 200 employees. She currently pays employees manually and needs an automated system to reduce payroll errors so she can focus on her daily tasks.
• Retailer Ron: A salesperson at a local direct-mail advertising service calls on retailers in his region. Ron, a manager for an area chain of sporting goods stores, is responsible for increasing sales. Ron is in his mid-20s and is active in the community’s youth soccer leagues. He struggles to raise awareness among sports enthusiasts and is looking for advertising that can improve the stores' performance.

Your sales team will acquire more customers as your company grows and scales. When this happens, it's essential to have best practices to build upon your existing buyer personas and include your new customers.

Here are some best practices to maximize your personas' potential:

• Use data from social media platforms: Use listening tools to monitor and analyze social media conversations. The tools collect data using keywords or phrases about mentions of your target audience, brand, and competitors. This approach offers valuable insights into buyers’ interests and perceptions that may not be captured through traditional survey methods.
• Apply psychographic profiling: This method involves exploring the psychological characteristics of the audience, including their values, attitudes, interests, and lifestyle preferences. Profiling uses tools like surveys, interviews, and social media analysis to better understand the motivations behind customers' behavior.
• Collaborate across departments: Gather your sales, services, and marketing teams to engage in cross-departmental workshops about buyer personas. Share your insights on buyer characteristics and preferences and learn from others.

The development of your buyer personas should strike a careful balance between being too broad or too narrow. If your buyer persona is overly broad, you may not have enough actionable information. But if the persona is too narrow, significant business segments could be overlooked. For example, a broad buyer persona would be "every CMO in the eastern United States," and a narrow buyer persona would be "CMOs in Massachusetts with teams of two people."

Here are some other mistakes to avoid when creating your buyer personas:

• Avoid bias: Remain vigilant against creating personas built on unfounded assumptions. During customer interviews, speculations must be substantiated to ensure buyer personas accurately reflect the typical customer. Also, do not make guesses about buyers based on age, generation, or other stereotypes.
• Maintain accuracy: An inaccurate portrayal of a buyer persona can affect how salespeople prioritize their targets. Although sellers know they need to regularly update their buyer personas as the business evolves, many forget. When you don't have the latest information, accuracy suffers. Set buyer persona update reminders in your sales software.
• Not creating negative buyer personas: Sometimes, sales teams become so focused on their ideal customer that they overlook including negative buyer personas in their process. This approach wastes sellers' time, as they pursue customers who are unlikely to convert. Start by researching customers who had low satisfaction with your company to determine why they were not the right fit.

According to the Salesforce State of Sales Report, buyers expect personalized engagement focused on their individual needs and preferences. Eighty-six percent of business buyers say they're more likely to buy when their goals are understood, yet 59% of business buyers say most reps don't take the time to understand their goals.

By integrating buyer personas into your sales strategy, you can drive more sales because your sales team will be equipped with content tailored to each persona and focused on their specific needs and objectives. Consider creating a content library in your CRM that includes sales scripts, conversation guides, case studies, and product demonstrations curated to meet the specific requirements of each persona. Your customer engagement will be enhanced as relevant content resonates with your buyer.

Lead scoring, a method used to evaluate the quality of leads and prioritize your sales team's efforts, can be used to assign values to positive and negative buyer personas. Leads can then be given to each sales rep and divided into customer segments, such as industry or territory.

By adding buyer personas to your sales strategy, you can develop a thorough understanding of your ideal customer, including their demographics, motivations, and challenges. You can take this essential information and pursue customers who want and need your product or service. You'll deliver personalized and relevant interactions that resonate.