Buyer persona: who buys, and how they describe the problem

Personas keep marketing and sales talking to a real person instead of "the market". A page written for a head of finance reads differently from one written for a bookkeeper, even when the product is the same.

A useful B2B persona answers:

• Role and seniority. What is their job and who do they report to?
• Goals. What are they measured on?
• Problems. What gets in the way, in their words?
• Buying role. Do they find, recommend, approve or veto?
• Where they ask. Which communities, peers or sources do they turn to?

Teams often skip the last question, but it decides where you'll meet them.

Personas sit inside an ideal customer profile. The ICP describes the company and the persona describes the person within it.

People usually reveal their persona in the first line of a request. Here are sample sentences, scored 0 to 100 for buying intent the way HearBuyers scores posts:

• Sample, score 90. "Head of ops at a 60-person agency here. I need a resourcing tool my project managers will actually update. Budget approved." It gives role, team, goal and authority.
• Sample, score 63. "PM here, our resourcing spreadsheet is chaos." This is a user with pain, likely a recommender rather than the buyer.
• Sample, score 10. "I'm a student writing about project managers." Not a buyer.

The second post still deserves a helpful reply, because a recommender often brings the buyer.

• Inventing details. Hobbies and stock photos make personas feel real but don't help you sell. Stick to what changes the message.
• Writing them from a workshop. Build them from interviews and from what buyers write in public.
• One persona per company. Most B2B deals have at least two.
• Never using them. A persona that doesn't change your copy or your targeting is decoration.

• Ideal customer profile: the company-level view.
• Jobs to be done: the progress each persona is trying to make.
• Voice of customer: the raw words personas are built from.
• Pain points: what each persona needs fixed.

To find the exact words your persona uses, run Reddit keyword research from your website and compare the phrases with your persona doc.