Buyer persona

What goes in a buyer persona

• Role and seniority. The range of titles, who they report to, and the part they play in a deal.
• Goals. What they are measured on this year.
• Problems. What gets in the way, in their own words. Keep the exact phrases, since they end up in your subject lines and first lines.
• Buying concerns. What makes them hesitate: risk, the effort of switching, who else has to agree.
• Where they look. The channels, events and people they trust for advice.

Several personas in one B2B deal

A B2B purchase often involves more than one person. The one who signs, the one who uses the product every day and the one who can block it, often in IT, security or finance, each get a persona of their own, since each needs a different reason to say yes. The ideal customer profile picks the accounts. The personas decide who you write to at each one and what you say.

The line between the user and the buyer is an old one in product work. Alan Cooper's book on software design, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, has a section titled "It's a User Persona, Not a Buyer Persona".1 A design team writes its personas for the person who uses the product. A seller needs that person and the one who pays, since a user who likes the product can argue for it before the buyer signs.

How to build a buyer persona

1. Pick the deals to learn from. Recent wins, recent losses, and customers who renewed.
2. Interview the people in them. Ask what started the search, what they compared, what nearly stopped the deal and who else had a say. Writing about user personas, Nielsen Norman Group suggests 5 to 30 interviews, five per group at a time, until each new interview turns up only a few new insights.2
3. Group by what they share. Sort the notes into themes and look for people who overlap on goals, problems and concerns.2 Job titles alone make weak groups.
4. Write each persona on one page. Use their phrases, and keep one quote from a real interview on each.
5. Use it in the work. Turn each persona into a search filter, a scoring rule and a message angle, and revise it when new interviews stop matching it.

In GetSales a persona can become the prompt of an AI column you define. Score each row with it before anything sends. It keeps its reasoning beside each answer with how sure it is.

Related

• Understanding personas: how titles and roles change the message, a short video from Outreach Essentials.
• Lead list builder: describe who you sell to, and every person lands in your table with a status.
• Data enrichment: work emails found finder by finder, and AI columns that score each lead.

Sources

1. Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, 2nd edition, Sams, table of contents, published 24 February 2004. Read 28 October 2026.
2. Page Laubheimer, Nielsen Norman Group, 3 Persona Types: Lightweight, Qualitative, and Statistical, 21 June 2020. Read 28 October 2026.