Buyer Persona
Buyer Persona
What is a buyer persona?
- A fictional customer profile that gives concrete form to the people involved in a purchase
- Describes role, goals, pain points, and buying criteria
- Keeps 'who we are talking to' from getting blurry
The first thing that changes once you have buyer personas is the outline of your proposal. A single document written for one company becomes a document set whose opening pages differ by role. Even for the same solution, the first sentence for a practitioner should be 'how much of my work does this remove,' for a department head 'how does it show up in this year’s KPIs,' and for procurement and finance 'which existing budget line does it come out of.' Being able to explain the same product three different ways is the real output of this work.
The people involved usually fall into four or five groups: the approver who signs off on budget, the user who works with the product every day after adoption, reviewers such as security, legal, and procurement who only decide pass or fail, the champion who persuades internally on your behalf, and the blocker who wants to keep the status quo. In an organization of more than 300 employees, it is common for four or more people to weigh in on a single contract. Don’t confuse this with the ICP (ideal customer profile). The ICP is a filter for deciding which companies to pursue; a persona is a document that records who inside that company you should talk to and what you should say. The material should come from 8–10 interviews that include not only friendly customers but also contacts from deals you lost, and because Korean companies reorganize often, it should be revisited every 6–12 months.
The most common mistake is turning a persona into a demographic card. Entries like 'male, 42, enjoys hiking, practical' don’t change a single line of a proposal, but one line such as 'needs proof of adoption at peer companies to attach to the approval request' leads to a new piece of material. The second mistake is when the marketing team builds it alone and leaves it in a shared drive: a persona that sales never pulls out is the same as no persona. The third is interviewing only the contacts who already like you, which leaves the 'reasons to object' field empty. Then real obstacles like 'pulling people from their regular work is a burden' or 'we tried something similar last year and dropped it' surface for the first time in the final approval meeting.
John KimInstructor John Kim, author of B2B Marketing Design and CEO of Nanum Consulting
Euijung KimBrand strategist with 30 years in advertising, formerly a division head at Daehong CommunicationsThe persona technique was popularized by software designer Alan Cooper in his 1998 book The Inmates Are Running the Asylum (his first persona, 'Kathy,' dates to 1985), and later extended into the 'buyer persona' in marketing.
Consider a hypothetical case. Company A, a 90-person company, sells industrial safety training content. Inquiries came in steadily, but contracts didn't close. Over the past year, only 5 of 32 proposals were won, and most of the rest stalled at 'we'll review internally and get back to you.' The sales team's report was always the same: 'the price is too high.'
- When the sales team lead marked the 18 lost deals by deal stage, 14 had ended at the EHS section manager level, and not a single one had reached plant manager approval.
- The marketing manager interviewed 7 client EHS section managers and 4 plant managers who hold approval authority, 45 minutes each, and three of the plant managers said the same thing: 'Don't show me completion rates. Show me evidence that accidents went down.'
- They split the persona into two cards: the section manager card listed 'statutory training completion deadline' and 'pushback on pulling staff from their work,' and the plant manager card listed 'serious accident risk' and 'headquarters audit response,' each with the reasons they might object.
- When we rewrote the proposal, we filled the first 3 pages with a summary for the plant manager, including accident metrics and audit-response evidence, and the last 10 pages with an operating plan for section chiefs, splitting the 4-hour classroom session into 90-minute blocks.
- Three sales reps changed their pitch so that in the first meeting they said, "Feel free to share this with your plant manager too," and they gave section managers a separate one-page summary to attach to the approval request.
- Four months later, the win rate on proposals rose from 16% to 34%, the average review period fell from 11 weeks to 6, and meetings with the plant manager attending in person went from 3 to 11 per quarter.