Concept 4 of 5

Buyer personas and user personas

2 questions test this

The framework holds Buyer Personas and User Personas as two separate boxes, sitting alongside Buyer Experience in the Planning category. The separation is the point. In most business-to-business products the person who signs and the person who logs in are not the same, and the two failure modes are symmetrical. Serve only the buyer and adoption collapses after the first renewal cycle. Serve only the user and there is nothing to renew.

What a buyer persona holds

The problem they are accountable for, in the terms their own manager judges them on.

Their evaluation criteria, in the order they apply them. Buyers rarely compare on every dimension, and knowing which two decide the shortlist is worth more than knowing all eight.

Their objections, and what evidence would answer each one. This is the material sales tools are built from.

Where they look for information, which sets the channels that reach them.

What they risk personally if the purchase goes badly. This is the most under-recorded field and often the strongest predictor of a stalled deal.

Several buyer personas usually appear in one purchase. The economic buyer who holds the budget, the technical evaluator who can veto, the person whose team will run it, and sometimes a compliance or procurement gate. Each has a different question.

What a user persona holds

The job they are doing, described as it exists today including the parts your product has nothing to do with.

The context they do it in. Interruptions, devices, time pressure, what else is on the screen.

How success is judged for them, which is often speed or absence of blame rather than any feature.

What they currently work around, which is the most direct route to requirements.

The buyer's journey

Buyer Experience is the third box in this group, and it documents the sequence a buyer actually moves through rather than the sequence the sales process assumes. It comes out of win and loss interviews almost for free, because asking someone what steps they took is one of the questions in that interview.

The value of writing it down is that it shows where buyers stall and what they were trying to find out at each stage. Content, sales tools and launch activities all target specific points on that journey, and without it they get produced for the stage the company finds easiest to talk about.

Keeping them useful

A persona earns its place by settling arguments. If a debate about a feature can be ended by pointing at what the persona is judged on, the persona is doing work. If nobody has opened it since the workshop that produced it, the persona was a deliverable rather than a tool.

Common misconceptions

One persona per segment is enough.

The framework separates buyer and user deliberately, and a single purchase commonly involves several buyer personas with different criteria. Collapsing them hides the person who can say no.

Personas need names, photographs and hobbies to feel real.

Decoration does not change decisions. What changes decisions is the persona's goals, the criteria they judge on, their objections and the evidence they need. Everything else is padding.

Personas are built from a workshop with the internal team.

A persona assembled from internal belief records what the company assumes. Personas are built from interviews, and win and loss analysis is the usual source for the buyer side.

2 questions test this concept

A company builds one persona per segment, combining the buyer and the user into a single archetype. What does this hide?

  • AThe framework separates buyer and user deliberately, and one purchase commonly involves several buyer personas with different criteria. Collapsing them hides the person who can say no.
  • BNothing, since combining reduces the number of documents to maintain.
  • COnly the demographic differences between the two roles.
  • DThe user's preferred communication channel.
Check whether it stuck.

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Lean UX, On keeping personas light enough to be revised.