Personas in B2B: Useful Tool or Theater?

Why are personas created so often and used so rarely?

Four personas emerge from a workshop. They get names, a stock photo, an age, a hobby and a quote. They are printed, hung up and included in the presentation for management. Six months later, nobody in sales remembers their names. The copy on the website has not changed, and neither have the conversations with customers.

So the question is: Are personas a useful tool in B2B, and if so, under what conditions? To answer it, we first clarify what a persona is and how it differs from an ideal customer profile. Then we weigh what research says about benefits and failure and present a model that fits B2B better than the classic profile. At the end comes what a useful persona looks like.

A persona that changes no decision is decoration.

What is a persona, and how does it differ from the ideal customer profile?

A persona is the description of a typical person an offer is intended for, condensed from observations of many real people. The tool comes from software development. Alan Cooper popularized it in the late 1990s to remind developers that they were not building for themselves but for users with their own goals. From there it migrated into marketing.

The article Defining target customers sets the order: first comes the ideal customer profile, which describes the kind of company you work with best. The persona comes afterwards and describes the people in these companies you talk to. This order matters. A good persona in a company that does not suit you leads you astray.

Benefit or failure: what research shows

There are two readings of personas, and both have evidence. The first says: personas help. In their review, Salminen, Nielsen and colleagues (2024) summarize the benefits studies report: a shared understanding of customers in the team, more empathy and less of a tendency to project oneself onto others. Individual studies report a positive return and better marketing performance.

The second reading says: personas often fail. The same review lists the typical criticisms from research: weak methods, small samples, lack of accuracy, effects that are hard to verify. Above all: teams show great interest in personas but hardly use them in daily work. The reasons given are a lack of credibility, accuracy and usefulness.

The authors draw a conclusion from this that I consider accurate. Many problems lie not in the tool but in the organization introducing it. They developed a scale for persona readiness and tested it with 372 professionals from various industries. Readiness could be divided into five areas: culture, knowledge, data and systems, capabilities and goals. Those who rated their readiness higher also rated personas more positively.

The area of goals in particular goes to the heart of the problem. The authors describe it with the question of whether there are clearly defined use cases for personas. If personas are left to themselves after they are created, the effort is easily wasted. The limits: the study measures professionals’ assessments, not the success of personas in sales, and it mainly concerns product development and design, not B2B in small and midsize businesses.

The thinking model: the buying center instead of the profile

The classic profile comes from consumer business, where one person buys. In B2B, that is rarely the case. In 1972, Frederick Webster and Yoram Wind described the model of the buying center: a purchasing decision in companies is made by several people in different roles, even if they do not formally act as a group. Osmonbekov, Johnston and Donthu (2024) still use this model today as a basis for describing how buying groups might change through new technology.

This leads to a different cut. A useful persona in B2B does not describe a person with an age and a hobby but a role in the buying process with its tasks, concerns and questions. In a small customer company, one person can hold several roles; the owner is then decider, buyer and user at once. In a larger one, they are spread across several people, and each needs different information.

The model also explains why profiles so often do not help. Whether Eric enjoys cycling says nothing about what he needs in the buying group. Whether, as the buyer, he ultimately has to defend the numbers to management says a great deal.

When are personas theater?

From the research criticism and the buying center model, features can be derived by which theater can be recognized. They are useful because they occur in many businesses and can be fixed with little effort.

Another warning sign is personas that only confirm what the team already believes. One of the benefits Salminen and colleagues name is precisely reducing the tendency to project oneself onto others. A persona created in a workshop without customer conversations often does the opposite: it gives the team’s assumptions a name.

How do you build a persona from real conversations?

For a small business, a lean route is enough. It needs no market research, just ten to fifteen conversations and the willingness to listen carefully.

1. Define the use case

   What will the persona be used for? For example, for the topics of articles or for the conversation guide in the first meeting.

2. Derive roles from the ideal customer profile

   Which roles actually occur in the customer companies you are looking for? Usually there are two or three.

3. Hold conversations

   With customers who bought and with prospects who declined. Ask about the trigger, concerns, information sources and how the decision unfolded.

4. Record patterns

   Which questions, concerns and phrasings recur per role? Customers’ verbatim phrasing is more valuable than summaries.

5. Condense onto one page

   One page per role: task, goals, concerns, typical questions, influence on the decision, preferred information channels.

Conversations with prospects who did not buy are particularly revealing. They show which role in the buying center had concerns that nobody answered. How to conduct such conversations is described in the article Analyzing lost deals. Notes from first conversations in the CRM are also a good source if they record role and questions.

What do you use personas for in daily work?

A persona is a tool when it changes a decision at a specific point. The following use cases have proven themselves for small businesses, and each is tied to a concrete task.

• Topics for articles. Every recurring question of a role is a possible topic. How this becomes an editorial plan is described in the article Editorial plan for expert articles.
• Service pages. For each role, the page contains an answer to its main question: risk for the decider, total cost for purchasing, changeover for the user.
• First conversation. The conversation guide includes the question of who else is involved in the decision and what these people want to know. More in the article The first sales conversation.
• Proposal. A proposal that is passed around internally contains a section for each role involved.
• Qualification. Whether the decider is known and reachable is a criterion for assessing an inquiry. More in the article Lead qualification.

How articles oriented to these roles prepare sales conversations is described in the article Content marketing in B2B.

What follows in general

The question of whether personas are useful is an example of a more general pattern. A tool is often judged by whether it works, although it usually fails on whether it is used. Salminen and colleagues call this readiness. In everyday business, it means data, a clear purpose and a routine that keeps the tool alive.

The limits of this assessment are clear. Research on personas comes mostly from product development and design, not from sales in small businesses. I am not aware of robust measurements of how strongly personas change closings in B2B. What is established is that personas are frequently not used and that organizational preconditions play a major role in this. The buying center model is an established explanatory model, not a measurement.

Conclusion and a first step

The question at the start was
personas are a useful tool in B2B. The answer is yes, under three conditions. They describe roles in the buying process rather than invented biographies, they are based on real conversations, and they are tied to a fixed use case. If one of these conditions is missing, they become theater that costs effort and changes nothing.

• Check whether an ideal customer profile exists. If not, start there.
• Define the two to three roles involved in decisions at your customer companies.
• Set one use case per persona, such as articles or the conversation guide.
• Arrange five conversations with customers and five with lost prospects.
• Count recurring questions per role and record them verbatim.
• Write one page per role and present it to the team.
• Put a review date twelve months from now in the calendar.

A good persona has no favorite film. It has a question you must answer before it can say yes.