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1What is a Buyer Persona?
Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer. Generally speaking, they’re composed of psychographic, demographic and behavioral information.
The objective of your personas should be to provide your marketing and sales teams with the necessary insights about the challenges and pain points your product or solution solves for your best-fit customers. In doing so, you better enable your teams to identify good-fit leads and target them with personalized content that is unique to their needs.
With that in mind, your buyer personas should inform much of what your marketing and sales teams are doing, including how you target your paid advertising efforts and position your products.
The Field Guide to How to Build Buyer Personas that Align Sales and Marketing provides you with the necessary insights to start crafting your own personas by describing the details and information you should include as well as some examples of personas in action.
2Ideal Customer Profiles vs Buyer Personas
While buyer personas represent the people involved in the buying process, Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) define the types of companies that are the best fit for your solution.
An Ideal Customer Profile describes the firmographic characteristics of organizations that gain the most value from your product or service. This typically includes attributes such as industry, company size, revenue range, growth stage, geographic footprint, and technology stack.
Buyer personas, on the other hand, focus on the individual decision-makers and influencers within those organizations. Personas help your teams understand the goals, challenges, motivations, and evaluation criteria of the people responsible for researching, recommending, or approving a purchase.
Together, ICPs and buyer personas help revenue teams answer two critical questions:
- Which companies should we target? (ICP)
- Who within those companies are we speaking to? (Buyer Personas)
For many B2B organizations, a single ICP may include multiple buyer personas across different buying roles. For example, a company selling enterprise software might target mid-market SaaS companies as their ICP while engaging with personas such as a VP of Marketing, Head of Revenue Operations, and IT Director during the buying process.
In this guide, the fictional organization AV Corp targets two distinct ICPs, Entertainment organizations and Corporate businesses. and builds multiple buyer personas within each segment. This approach allows marketing and sales teams to tailor messaging, content, and outreach to both the right companies and the right people within them.
ICP vs Buyer Persona: Key Differences
| Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) | Buyer Persona |
|---|---|
| Describes the company you want to sell to | Describes the person involved in the buying decision |
| Based on firmographic data | Based on behavioral and psychographic insights |
| Includes industry, company size, revenue, and growth stage | Includes goals, challenges, motivations, and decision criteria |
| Helps prioritize target accounts and markets | Helps personalize messaging, content, and sales conversations |
| Used heavily in ABM and targeting strategy | Used in content strategy, sales enablement, and personalization |
When ICPs and buyer personas are aligned, organizations can target the right accounts with messaging that resonates with the right stakeholders throughout the buying journey.
3How to Build a Buyer Persona
Much like snowflakes, no two buyer personas are identical. They should be unique to your buyers and the value you provide them. That said, there is a framework of content you should always try to include.
When building out your personas, focus on the information you need to know to best market and sell to your customers. By leveraging the framework detailed on this page, you can start building out your buyer personas by interviewing your internal teams.
Your sales and service teams have a direct line to prospects and customers and can provide valuable insights into what your ideal buyers do, the challenges they face and what they appreciate most about your solution
7 Components All Buyer Personas Need:
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Role in Company
What level of authority does this particular persona have and what departments are they likely to work in? Are they a manager? Creator? Executive?
Role in Buying Process
Consider the decision-making authority of this persona. Are they a first-touch champion or a decision-maker with specific needs and considerations?
Potential Job Titles
Particularly useful for prospecting and creating paid advertising audiences, be sure to determine the typical titles this persona may hold at their organization.
Responsibilities
The migration team should meet regularly to discuss progress, address challenges, and make timely decisions. Keep the wider organization informed on the process and its impact on them as necessary.
Pain Points and Challenges
What roadblocks prevent your personas from delivering on their responsibilities? What prevents them from exceeding goals?
Value Proposition
This is your organization’s response or solution to the pain points and challenges you have described. Why do you help this persona better than competitors?
Triggers for Change
ain points and challenges don’t always prompt immediately searching for solutions. Describe what has to happen for your personas to consider making a change or buying decision.
Frequently Asked Questions about Buyer Personas & Ideal Customer Profiles
What is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on research, data, and insights from real customers. It helps organizations understand the goals, responsibilities, challenges, and motivations of the people involved in purchasing decisions.
Buyer personas typically include information such as job title, role in the buying process, key performance metrics, pain points, and triggers that lead someone to evaluate a new solution. Marketing and sales teams use buyer personas to create more relevant messaging, targeted content, and personalized sales conversations.
What is the difference between a buyer persona and an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)?
An Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) describes the type of company that is the best fit for your product or service, while a buyer persona describes the individual decision-makers within those companies.
ICPs focus on firmographic characteristics such as industry, company size, revenue, and growth stage. Buyer personas focus on the people involved in the purchase, including their responsibilities, challenges, goals, and decision criteria.
Together, ICPs and buyer personas help organizations identify which companies to target and how to communicate with the stakeholders inside those organizations.
How do you build a buyer persona?
Building a buyer persona starts with gathering insights from both internal teams and customer research. Sales, marketing, and customer success teams often provide valuable perspective on the people they interact with throughout the buying journey.
A typical buyer persona framework includes:
- Role in the organization
- Responsibilities and success metrics
- Role in the buying process
- Pain points and challenges
- Triggers that lead them to seek a solution
- Value propositions that resonate with them
- Common job titles associated with the persona
By combining these insights, organizations can create personas that reflect the motivations and decision-making behavior of their ideal buyers.
What information should a buyer persona include?
A strong buyer persona should capture both professional context and decision-making behavior. This helps marketing and sales teams tailor messaging and outreach effectively.
Key elements often include:
- Job title and role in the organization
- Responsibilities and key performance metrics
- Pain points and operational challenges
- Role in the buying process (decision-maker, influencer, champion)
- Buying triggers that prompt a search for solutions
- Value propositions that address their priorities
These details help revenue teams better understand what motivates a buyer and how to position their solution effectively.
4Buyer Persona Examples
AV Corp Buyer Personas Examples (Fictional Org, Real Personas)
Included in this guide are four buyer persona examples for the fictional organization AV Corp.
AV Corp provides audio-visual, event and facility services across a wide spectrum of industries. They have experience producing long-standing attractions for museums and amusement parks as well as one-off events and facility upgrades for corporate clients.
With ideal customers existing across industries, AV Corp’s marketing and sales team leverage buyer personas that represent he ideal buyers of both of their ideal customer profiles or verticals: Entertainment and Corporate.
As you review the included buyer personas, remember that there isn’t a uniform approach. These examples are meant to provide insights into what you should include in your own personas and reasoning for segmenting your personas across different industries or verticals.
Entertainment Buyer Personas
These fictional AV Corp buyer personas represent buyers in industries and businesses that fit their Entertainment vertical such as museums, amusement parks, or attractions
Attraction Persona
"My main focus is creating memorable and enjoyable experiences for our customers, whether it’s creating new attractions or maintaining existing ones."
Summary: A creative leader for their organization, Attraction Persona focuses on creating engaging and captivating experiences for their guests. Depending on their organization, this can come in the form of park attractions, audio-visual displays and more.
As an organizational leader, Attraction Persona works closely with other teams to conceptualize and plan what experiences they will create and then take responsibility for ensuring they come to fruition, including working with external vendors and creators.
Triggers for Change
- New attraction or multimedia project
- Recent innovation from competitor
- Error or issues with vendors
High-Level Insights for Attraction Persona
How They're Measured
• Attendance or engagement
• Guest satisfaction
• Operational efficiency
• Innovation especially when compared to competitors
Pain Points and Challenges
• Works on a project-by-project basis so they have to find trustworthy vendors each time
• Sti ff competition requires regular innovation, but they don’t have the internal team to always do so
• Often needs to work with multiple vendors to accomplish a proje
Persona-Specific Value Proposition
• We have a proven track record of success and innovation
• We have a large team with a variety of skill sets and diversity of experience, driving innovation
• We manage the relationships with contractors and vendors
Culture Persona
"My job is to sustain the health and growth of our organization by shepherding projects that deliver impactful experiences for our guests and visitors."
Summary: The Culture Persona oversees the management of the organization’s existing attractions or displays. They receive the hando to handle managing relationships with vendors and partners to make sure projects run smoothly.
As a middle-manager, Culture Persona oversees the e orts of internal content, media and design teams based on the projects conceptualized and passed down from their organziation’s leadership team. They are responsible for delivering on the vision and overcoming roadblocks by leveraging the skills and talents of their own team and external partners.
Triggers for Change
- Received funding for a new project
- Limited technology to act on an idea
- Departure of an internal team member
High-Level Insights for Culture Persona
How They're Measured
• Rentals, attendance or engagement associated with their projects
• Reputation amongst the leadership team and competitors
• Ability to meet expectations and project timelines
Pain Points & Challenges
• Projects from leadership don’t always have concrete goals or KPIs associated with them
• Customers expect regular innovation and new attractions
• Competitors who have larger internal teams have launched many new, engaging attractio
Persona-Specific Value Propositions
• Our team will establish measurable goals with all stakeholders at the start of every project
• We have robust experience in creating memorable, innovative experiences
• Our depth and breadth of skills complements existing team
Corporate Buyer Personas
These fictional AV Corp buyer personas represent buyers in industries and businesses that fit their Corporate vertical such as technology, retail, or financial services.
Executive Persona
"I set the strategic direction for my segment and make sure they align with our greater business goals."
Summary: The Executive Persona is a leadership team member that can manage a variety of business units such as client services, customer success or marketing. They are generally the go-between for C-level executives and middle management.
With that in mind, the Executive Persona will have responsibilities and projects that trickle down from the highest level or bubble up from priorities further down in the organization. Their main focus is ensuring the work that is being done aligns with greater business goals and appropriately prioritizing and budgeting for those projects.
Triggers for Change
- Complicated implementation project
- Consistent outages or failures
- Current partner not generating ROI
High Level Insights for Executive Persona
How They're Measured
• Cost of solutions
• Outages or failures of business operations
• Ability to manage the budget and generate return on investment
• Troubleshooting across teams
• Outages or failures of business operations
• Ability to manage the budget and generate return on investment
• Troubleshooting across teams
Pain Points & Challenges
• Held accountable for technology and audio-visual projects. They need them to go well
• Their team has limited skillsets, prohibiting them from taking on large-scale projects
• The response time to outages and failures is too slow
Persona-Specific Value Propositions
• We have a proven track-record of success for implementations
• We have a large team with a variety of skill sets designed to complement those of our clients
• Because we alleviate their workload, Technology Persona can spend more time focusing on outages
• We have a large team with a variety of skill sets designed to complement those of our clients
• Because we alleviate their workload, Technology Persona can spend more time focusing on outages
Technology Persona
"I help power our company’s growth by ensuring that we have e ective operational processes and the right platforms enabling them."
Summary: The Technology Persona is methodical, data-oriented and spends a significant amount of time on due diligence. Their primary responsibilities are ensuring the success of their organization’s technology implementations and the wise investment of their budget on audio, visual and technology needs.
With that in mind, the Technology Persona needs to be thoroughly convinced that an engagement will result in positive ROI for their business. Likewise, any potential investment should enhance or work in tandem with their existing operations versus require extra work from them or the teams they manage.
Triggers Change
- Complicated implementation project
- Consistent outages or failures
- Current partner not generating ROI
High Level Insights for Technology Persona
How They're Measured
• Cost of solutions
• Outages or failures of business operations
• Ability to manage the budget and generate return on investment
• Troubleshooting across teams
Pain Points & Challenges
• Held accountable for technology and audio-visual projects. They need them to go well
• Their team has limited skillsets, prohibiting them from taking on large-scale projects
• The response time to outages and failures is too slow
Persona-Specific Value Propositions
• We have a proven track-record of success for implementations
• We have a large team with a variety of skill sets designed to complement those of our clients
• Because we alleviate their workload, Technology Persona can spend more time focusing on outage
5How to Activate Buyer Personas Across Revenue Teams
What Should You Do Next?
After spending a signficant amount of time researching your ideal customers and developing your buyer personas, it’s imperative that you start leveraging them throughout your marketing and sales processes.
Three Steps for Buyer Persona Activation
1
Build a persona-specific editorial calendar
Your personas should inform what information you’re serving and how you deliver it to your audience at every stage of the buyer’s journey. You can use your personas to develop your content editorial calendar by focusing on topics that answer for their unique challenges.
2
Segment your contact database by buyer persona
With proper segmentation, you can more effectively target your personas with relevant content. Persona segments also enable you to set up more robust marketing automation and nurture functions based on the typical buyer’s journey of that persona.
3
Design persona-specific sales collateral and playbooks
If your sales reps speak to everyone the same way, they’re more likely to fail. Different approaches or playbooks may work better for different personas, and creating assets unique to each persona enables your reps to take a more personalized approach to sales.
6Turn Buyer Personas Into a Revenue Strategy
Turn Buyer Insights Into a Scalable Go-To-Market Strategy
Building buyer personas is only the first step. The real impact comes when those insights shape how your teams target accounts, segment audiences, and execute go-to-market strategies.
According to the State of HubSpot report, top-performing companies are significantly more likely to report improvements in their understanding of their ideal customer profile (ICP). In fact, 85% of top performers say HubSpot helps them better understand their ICP or target market, compared to just 70% of their peers.
That deeper understanding enables organizations to deliver more focused messaging, stronger alignment between sales and marketing, and more effective go-to-market execution.
But identifying your ideal buyers is only part of the equation. Organizations that work with a HubSpot Solutions Partner are also more likely to see measurable performance improvements.
Companies working with partners are:
- 9 points more likely to report increased bookings and revenue
- 9 points more likely to improve their understanding of their ideal customer profile
- 9 points more likely to use AI more regularly and effectively
As HubSpot becomes a platform powering full-funnel operations, organizations increasingly rely on partners to support strategic initiatives like AI adoption, cross-team alignment, and revenue operations.
Ready to Align Your ICP, Personas, and GTM Strategy?
New Breed helps B2B companies translate customer insights into scalable revenue strategies. Through our Growth Strategy Workshops, we work with leadership teams to:
- Define and refine Ideal Customer Profiles
- Develop actionable buyer personas
- Align marketing, sales, and RevOps around a shared go-to-market strategy
- Build the systems and processes needed to scale
Whether you're building personas for the first time or refining an existing strategy, our team can help you turn customer insights into measurable growth.
Learn more about New Breed’s Growth Strategy Workshops.
Additional Frequently Asked Questions about Creating Buyer Personas
1. How many buyer personas should a company have?
Most B2B organizations typically have three to five core buyer personas for each Ideal Customer Profile. These personas often represent different roles involved in the buying process, such as executive sponsors, technical evaluators, and operational users.
The exact number depends on the complexity of your buying cycle and the number of stakeholders involved in purchasing decisions. The goal is to capture the key perspectives that influence buying decisions without creating so many personas that they become difficult to use.
2. Who should be involved in creating buyer personas?
Buyer personas are most effective when they are created collaboratively across revenue teams. Sales, marketing, and customer success teams often provide the most valuable insights because they interact directly with prospects and customers.
Organizations may also gather input from:
- Customer interviews
- Sales call recordings
- Support tickets and feedback
- CRM and behavioral data
Combining these sources helps ensure personas reflect real customer behavior rather than assumptions.
3. How are buyer personas used in marketing and sales?
Buyer personas help revenue teams deliver more relevant experiences throughout the buyer’s journey.Marketing teams use personas to shape content strategy, messaging, campaign targeting, and marketing automation workflows. Sales teams use them to tailor outreach, conversations, and sales collateral to the priorities of different stakeholders.When used effectively, buyer personas help organizations personalize engagement, improve lead qualification, and align marketing and sales around a shared understanding of the customer.
4. Are buyer personas still relevant in modern B2B marketing?
Yes. Buyer personas remain a critical part of modern B2B strategy because buying decisions often involve multiple stakeholders with different priorities.
While data and automation have improved targeting capabilities, organizations still need structured insights into how buyers evaluate solutions and what challenges they are trying to solve. Buyer personas help translate customer insights into actionable strategies for marketing, sales, and customer experience.
5. If you have, how about one that has five questions?
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