A buyer persona is a profile of one typical buyer: their role, what they're responsible for, what worries them about a purchase, and where they look for information. The buying committee is the group of people inside an organisation who take part in a purchase decision. In B2B you need to understand both, but a single persona can't stand in for the whole committee.

Many B2B teams build one or two personas, aim all their marketing at them, and then wonder why deals stall with people they never planned for. Personas help when there's one for each role on the buying committee, built from real buyer evidence. They mislead when they're invented in a workshop and treated as the whole buyer.

Where Personas Came From, and What They're For

Alan Cooper introduced personas as a software design tool in his book The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. Designers wrote a profile of a typical user so the whole team could picture who they were building for. Marketing teams later adopted the idea to picture who they were writing for.

A persona is useful when it helps a team make a better decision about one person: what that person needs to hear, what proof they need, and where to reach them. It works well for a consumer buying for themselves. In B2B, the person who reads your content is often not the person who approves the budget, so a single persona covers only part of the decision.

Why One Persona Can't Represent a B2B Purchase

The typical buying group for a complex B2B purchase involves 6 to 10 decision makers, according to Gartner. Each person judges the purchase from their own role, and any person in the group can slow it down or stop it.

Frederick Webster and Yoram Wind described the roles in a buying group in the Journal of Marketing in 1972, and their terms are still widely used:

• Users: the people who will use the product, and who often raise the need in the first place.
• Influencers: people whose specialist advice others trust, such as an IT or security manager.
• Buyers: people who manage the purchase and negotiate terms, often procurement.
• Deciders: people who can say yes or no, usually because they hold the budget.
• Gatekeepers: people who control what information and which suppliers reach the group.

One person can hold more than one role, and not every purchase involves all of them. This is why a campaign aimed at one persona can do well on downloads and still lose deals. The user who downloaded the guide was convinced. The decider who holds the budget and the influencer who checks security were never reached. The B2B buying committee sets out what each role usually needs from your marketing.

When Personas Mislead

Personas have well-known weaknesses. Christopher Chapman and Russell Milham set them out in the proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society in 2006.

A persona can't be proven wrong. Because a persona is partly fictional, there's no test that shows it doesn't match real buyers. A persona made up in a workshop can guide marketing for years without anyone checking it.

More detail describes fewer people. Every detail added to a persona, such as an age, a job title, a company size and a hobby, narrows the group of real people it describes. Chapman and Milham showed this with a published persona that had at least 21 attributes. Under simplified assumptions, they estimated it would describe only about 134 people in the United States, while stressing that the figure was an illustration rather than a measurement.

Personas can be used to justify decisions already made. When a persona disagrees with other evidence, such as sales feedback or support cases, the most senior opinion in the room often decides which one wins. A persona then becomes a way to support a decision rather than a way to inform it.

A common problem in B2B marketing is a persona built around one job title, with a name, a photo and personal details that don't change any marketing decision. The team aims every campaign at that one person, and the rest of the buying committee hears nothing.

When Personas Help

Personas help when they describe each role on the buying committee and are built from what real buyers say and do. A useful B2B persona includes only what changes a marketing decision:

• Their role in the purchase: user, influencer, buyer, decider or gatekeeper, and when they get involved.
• What they're responsible for: the results their own manager judges them on.
• What worries them about this purchase: cost, security, disruption, their own reputation if it goes wrong.
• What proof they need: a business case, a security review, a reference customer, a trial.
• Where they get information: the publications, events, peers and channels they trust.

Leave out details that don't change a marketing decision, such as a made-up name, age, family or hobbies. They make the persona feel real, but they narrow the group it describes and give the team something to argue about that doesn't matter.

How the Ideal Customer Profile, Buying Committee and Personas Fit Together

Work in that order. Decide which companies to target first, then map who takes part in the decision at those companies, then build a persona for each role that matters. How to define your ideal customer profile covers how to choose the companies.

From One Persona to the Whole Committee: An Example

For example, a company sells payroll software to mid-sized businesses. Its marketing is built around one persona: an HR manager in her forties who is overloaded with manual payroll work, likes practical guides, and reads HR industry newsletters. Its guides and webinars attract plenty of HR managers, but deals stall after the first sales meeting.

The marketing team reviews 15 recent deals with the sales team and maps who took part in each one:

• The HR manager raised the need and championed the purchase. The existing persona describes this role well.
• The finance director held the budget and asked how the cost compared with the current payroll provider. Marketing had given the HR manager nothing to answer that question.
• The IT manager reviewed security and how the software connected to existing systems. Several deals stalled here for weeks.
• Payroll staff would use the software every day and worried about errors during the switch.

The team keeps the HR manager persona but removes the personal details. It adds a persona for the finance director, the IT manager and the payroll staff, each built from what those people said in the deals. Marketing then produces a cost comparison the HR manager can take to finance, a security summary for IT, and a guide to switching providers for payroll staff.

How to Build Personas for a Buying Committee

Start with real deals. Take recent won and lost deals from one target segment and list everyone who took part, with their job title and their role in the decision.

Interview people in each role. Talk to customers and to buyers who chose someone else. Ask what they were responsible for, what worried them, what they needed to see, and where they looked for information.

Write one short persona per role. Include the role in the purchase, responsibilities, concerns, proof needed and information sources. Leave out personal details.

Check your content against every role. List your campaigns and content, and mark which role each piece serves. Where a role has no content, your marketing isn't reaching that member of the buying committee.

Update them from new deals. Review the personas when the sales team reports a new role appearing in deals, or when deals start stalling at a different point.

FAQ

What is the difference between a buyer persona and an ideal customer profile? An ideal customer profile describes the kind of company you want to sell to. A buyer persona describes one person in that company and what they need from you.

How many personas does a B2B company need? One for each role that regularly takes part in purchases in a target segment. Different segments can have different buying committees, so check each segment separately.

Should personas have names and photos? They can make a persona easier to remember, but they add nothing to a marketing decision. Name the persona by its role, such as "the finance director", and spend the space on what the role needs.

Are buyer personas still useful in B2B? Yes, when they describe each role on the buying committee and are built from real buyer evidence. They're less useful when they're invented, or when one persona stands in for the whole committee.

Build a Persona for Every Role That Decides

A buyer persona describes one person. A B2B purchase is decided by a group. Map the buying committee from real deals, build a short persona for each role from what buyers actually say, and check that your marketing reaches every role that can say yes or no. B2B Marketing Fundamentals covers understanding the buyer as part of the strategy decisions that come before any campaign, and ends with a one-page growth strategy for your own business.

Sources

• Gartner, "The B2B Buying Journey". Source of the finding that the typical buying group for a complex B2B solution involves 6 to 10 decision makers. gartner.com
• Frederick Webster and Yoram Wind, "A General Model for Understanding Organizational Buying Behavior", Journal of Marketing, 1972. Source of the buying roles: users, influencers, buyers, deciders and gatekeepers.
• Christopher Chapman and Russell Milham, "The Personas' New Clothes: Methodological and Practical Arguments Against a Popular Method", Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 50th Annual Meeting, 2006. Source of the arguments that personas can't be proven wrong, that added detail narrows the group described, and that personas can be used to justify decisions. doi.org/10.1177/154193120605000503
• Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. Source of personas as a software design tool.