Create a Buyer Persona and Journey

Make it easier to market, sell, and achieve product-market fit with deeper buyer understanding.

Executive summary

Pain Points

B2B marketers without documented personas and journeys often experience the following:

• Contacts fail to convert to leads because messaging fails to resonate with buyers.
• Products fail to reach targets given shallow understanding of buyer needs.
• Sellers’ emails go unopened, and attempts at discovery fail due to no understanding of buyer challenges, pain points, and needs.

Without a deeper understanding of buyer needs and how they buy, B2B marketers will waste time and precious resources targeting the incorrect personas.

Obstacles

Despite being critical elements, organizations struggle to build personas due to:

• A lack of alignment and collaboration among marketing, product, and sales.
• An internal focus; or a lack of true customer centricity.
• A lack of tools and techniques for building personas and buyer journeys.

In today’s Agile development environment, combined with the pressure to generate revenues quickly, high tech marketers often skip the steps necessary to go deeper to build buyer understanding.

Info-Tech’s Approach

With a common framework and target output, clients will:

• Align marketing, sales, and product, and collaborate together to share current knowledge on buyer personas and journeys.
• Target 12-15 customers and prospects to interview and validate insights. Share that with customer-facing staff.
• Activate the insights for more customer-centric lead generation, product development, and selling.

Clients who activate findings from buyer personas and journeys will see a 50% results improvement.

Tip!

Buyer personas and buyer journeys are essential ingredients in go-to-market success, as they inform for product, marketing, sales, and customer success who we are targeting and how to engage with them successfully.

Buyer personas and journeys: A go-to-market critical success factor

Marketers – large and small – will fail to optimize product-market fit, lead generation, and sales effectiveness without well-defined buyer personas and a buyer journey.

Critical Success Factors of a Successful G2M Strategy:

• Opportunity size and business case
• Buyer personas and journey
• Competitively differentiated product hypothesis
• Buyer-validated commercial concept
• Sales revenue plan and program cost budget
• Consolidated communications to steering committee

“Companies using personas are 2x more likely to exceed their revenue goals.”

– Flori Needle, HubSpot, 2026

Documenting buyer personas enables success beyond marketing

Documenting buyer personas has several essential benefits to marketing, sales, and product teams:

• Achieve a better understanding of your target buyer – by building a detailed buyer persona for each type of buyer and keeping it fresh, you take a giant step toward becoming a customer-centric organization.
• Team alignment on a common definition – will happen when you build buyer personas collaboratively and among those teams that touch the customer.
• Improved lead generation – increases dramatically when messaging and marketing assets across your lead generation engine better resonate with buyers because you have taken the time to understand them deeply.
• More effective selling – is possible when sellers apply persona development output to their interactions with prospects and customers.
• Better product-market fit – increases when product teams more deeply understand for whom they are designing products. Documenting buyer challenges, pain points, and unmet needs gives product teams what they need to optimize product adoption.

“It’s easier buying gifts for your best friend or partner than it is for a stranger, right? You know their likes and dislikes, you know the kind of gifts they’ll have use for, or the kinds of gifts they’ll get a kick out of. Customer personas work the same way, by knowing what your customer wants and needs, you can present them with content targeted specifically to their wants and needs.”

– Emma Bilardi, Product Marketing Alliance, 2020

Buyer understanding activates just about everything

Without the deep buyer insights that persona and journey capture enables, marketers are suboptimized.

Buyer Persona and Journey

• Product Design
• Customer Targeting
• Personalization
• Messaging
• Content Marketing
• Lead Gen & Scoring
• Sales Effectiveness
• Customer Retention

“Marketing eutopia is striking the all-critical sweet spot that adds real value and makes customers feel recognized and appreciated, while not going so far as to appear ‘big brother.’ To do this, you need a deep understanding of your audience coming from a range of different data sets and the capability to extract meaning.”

– Plexure, 2020

Does your organization need buyer persona and journey updating?

“Yes,” if experiencing one or more key challenges:

• Sales time is wasted on unqualified leads
• Website abandon rates are high
• Lead gen engine click-through rates are low
• Ideal customer profile is ill defined
• Marketing asset downloads are low
• Seller discovery with prospects is ineffective
• Sales win/loss rates drop due to poor product-market fit
• Higher than desired customer churn

Tip!

Marketers developing buyer personas and journeys that lack agreement among Marketing, Sales, and Product of personas to target will squander precious time and resources throughout the customer targeting and acquisition process.

Outcomes and benefits

Building your buyer persona and journey using our methodology will enable:

• Greater stakeholder alignment – when marketing, product, and sales agree on personas, less time is wasted on targeting alternate personas.
• Improved product-market fit – when buyers see both pain-relieving features and value-based pricing, “because you asked vs. guessed,” win rates increase.
• Greater open and click-through rates – because you understood buyer pain points and motivations for solution seeking, you’ll see higher visits and engagement with your lead gen engine, and because you asked “what asset types do you find most helpful” your CTAs become ”lead-gen magnets” because you’ve offered the right asset types in your content marketing strategy.
• More qualified leads – because you defined a more accurate ideal customer profile (ICP) and your lead scoring algorithm has improved, sellers see more qualified leads.
• Increased sales cycle velocity – since you learned from personas their content and engagement preferences and what collateral types they need during the down-funnel sales discussions, sales calls are more productive and sales cycles shrink.

Info-Tech’s methodology for buyer persona and journey creation

Our approach provides interview guides and templates to help rebuild buyer persona

Our methodology will enable you to align your team on why it’s important to capture the most important attributes of buyer persona including:

• Functional – helps you find and locate your target personas
• Emotive – deepens team understanding of buyer initiatives, motivations for seeking alternatives, challenges they face, pain points for your offerings to address, and terminology that describes the “space”
• Solution – enables greater product market fit
• Behavioral – clarifies how to communicate with personas and understand their content preferences

Functional – “to find them”

Emotive – “what they do and jobs to be done”

Decision Criteria – “how they decide”

Solution Attributes – “what does the ideal solution look like”

Behavioral Attributes – “how to approach them successfully”

Buyer journeys are constantly shifting

If you didn’t remap buyer journeys in 2021, you may be losing to competitors that did. Leaders remap buyer journeys frequently.

• The multi-channel buyer journey is constantly changing. Today’s B2B buyer uses industry research sites, vendor content marketing assets, software reviews sites, contacts with vendor salespeople, events participation, peer networking, consultants, emails, social media sites, and electronic media to research purchasing decisions.
• COVID-19 has dramatically decreased face-to-face interaction. We estimate a B2B buyer spent 20-25% more time online in 2021 than pre-COVID-19 researching software buying decisions. This has diminished the importance of face-to-face selling and given dramatic rise to digital selling and outbound marketing.
• Content marketing has exploded, but without mapping the buyer journey and knowing where – by channel –and when – by buyer journey step – to offer content marketing assets, we will fail to convert prospects into buyers.

Tip!

Marketers are advised to update their buyer journey annually and with greater frequency when the human vs. digital mix is effected due to events such as COVID-19 and as emerging media such as AR shifts asset-type usage and engagement options.

“~2/3 of [B2B] buyers prefer remote human interactions or digital self-service.
And during Aug. ‘20 to Feb. ‘21, use of digital self-service to interact with sales reps leapt by more than 10% for both researching and evaluating new suppliers.”

– Liz Harrison, Dennis Spillecke, Jennifer Stanley, and Jenny Tsai McKinsey & Company, 2021

Our approach helps you define the buyer journey

Because marketing leaders need to reach buyers through the right channel with the right message at the right time during their decision cycle, you’ll benefit by using questionnaires that enable you to build the below easily and quickly.

Insight summary

Overarching Insight

Buyer personas and buyer journeys are essential ingredients in go-to-market success, as they inform for product, marketing, sales, and customer success who we are targeting and how to engage with them successfully.

Align Your Team

Marketers developing buyer personas and journeys that lack agreement among Marketing, Sales, and Product of personas to target will squander precious time and resources throughout the customer targeting and acquisition process.

Blueprint deliverables

This blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you gather team insights, interview customers and prospects, and summarize results for ease in communications.

Buyer Persona Creation Template

A PowerPoint template to aid the capture and summarizing of your team’s insights on the buyer persona.

Buyer Persona and Journey Interview Guide and Data Capture Tool

For interviewing customers and prospects, this tool is designed to help you interview personas and summarize results for up to 15 interviewees.

Buyer Persona and Journey Summary Template

A PowerPoint template into which you can drop your buyer persona and journey interviewees list and summary findings.

Phases & Steps

Make it easier to market, sell, and achieve product-market fit with deeper buyer understanding.

Make it easier to market, sell, and achieve product-market fit with deeper buyer understanding

Phase 1

Document Team Knowledge of Buyer Persona and Drive Alignment

Phase 2

Interview Target Buyer Prospects and Customers

Phase 3

Create Outputs and Apply to Marketing, Sales, and Product

Document Team Knowledge of Buyer Persona and Drive Alignment

Phase 1

Document Team Knowledge of Buyer Persona and Drive Alignment

• Step 1: Establish team and align on shared vision.
• Step 2: Document team knowledge of buyer persona.
• Step 3: Validate with industry and marketing analysts.
• Step 4: Identify buyer interviewees and prepare for interviews.

Outcome

• Develop an understanding of what comprises a buyer persona and journey, including their importance to overall go-to-market strategy and execution.
• Sample outputs.

Phase 1: Document Team Knowledge of Buyer Persona and Drive Alignment

Step 1.1 Establish team and align on shared vision

Total duration 60 minutes

Objective

Align the working team on the purpose of the buyer persona and journey initiative. Confirm key participants and establish a shared vision for what the work should achieve.

Output

• Communication of team members involved and the make-up of steering committee and working team
• Alignment of team members on a shared vision of “Why Build Buyer Personas and Journey” and what key attributes define both

Participants

• Initiative Manager (individual leading the buyer persona and journey initiative)
• CMO/Sponsoring Executive
• Working Team (typically representatives in Product Marketing, Product Management, and Sales)
• Info-Tech Analyst

Tools

Create a Buyer Persona Executive Brief

1.1 Establish team and align on shared vision

(60 min.)

Schedule inquiry with working team members and walk the team through the Buyer Persona and Journey Executive Brief PowerPoint presentation.

Optional: Have the Info-Tech analyst walk the team through the Buyer Persona and Journey Executive Brief PowerPoint presentation as part of your session.

Phase 1: Document Team Knowledge of Buyer Persona and Drive Alignment

Step 1.2 Document team knowledge of buyer persona

Total duration 2-3 sessions of 60 minutes each

Objective

Capture the team’s existing knowledge of the target buyer persona. Build an initial persona draft that can be refined through collaboration and validated in later steps.

Output

• Initial draft of your buyer persona

Participants

• Initiative Manager
• CMO/Sponsoring Executive (optional)
• Working Team

Tools

Buyer Persona Creation Template

1.2 Document team knowledge of buyer persona

(2-3x 60 min.)

Schedule meeting with working team members and, using the Buyer Persona Template, lead the team in a discussion that documents current team knowledge of the target buyer persona.

Lead the team to prioritize an initial, single, most important persona and to collaborate to complete the template (and later, the buyer journey). Once the team learns the process for working on the initial persona, the development of additional personas will become more efficient.

Place the PowerPoint template in a shared drive for team collaboration. Expect to schedule several 60-minute meets. Quicken collaboration by encouraging team to “do their homework” by sharing persona knowledge within the shared drive version of the template. Your goal is to get to an initial agreed upon version that can be shared for additional validation with industry analyst(s) in the next step.

Phase 1: Document Team Knowledge of Buyer Persona and Drive Alignment

Step 1.3 Validate with industry and marketing analysts

Total duration 90 minutes

Objective

Validate and refine the buyer persona by identifying gaps, challenging assumptions, and incorporating expert feedback from industry and marketing analysts.

Output

• Further validated buyer persona

Participants

• Initiative Manager
• CMO/Sponsoring Executive (optional)
• Working Team
• Info-Tech Analyst

Tools

Bring your Buyer Persona Creation Template to the meeting to share with analysts

1.3.1 Discuss with team which persona areas needs further validation

(30 min.)

Schedule meeting with working team members and discuss which persona areas require further validation from an Info-Tech analyst who has worked closely with those buyers within your persona.

1.3.2 Validate with industry and marketing analysts

(60 min.)

Schedule an inquiry with the appropriate Info-Tech analyst/advisory analyst to share current findings and see:

1. Info-Tech analyst provide content feedback given what they know about your target persona and product category.
2. Info-Tech advisory analyst provide feedback on persona approach and to coach any gaps or important omissions.

Tabulate results and update your persona summary. At this point you will likely require additional validation through interviews with customers and prospects.

Phase 1: Document Team Knowledge of Buyer Persona and Drive Alignment

Step 1.4 Identify interviewees and prepare for interviews

Total duration 1-2 Weeks

Objective

Identify and recruit interviewees who represent key buyer segments. Prepare to validate assumptions and close remaining gaps in buyer persona knowledge through interviews.

Output

• List of interviewees

Participants

• Initiative Manager
• Working Team

Tools

Interviewee recording template on following slide

Buyer Persona and Journey Interview Guide and Data Capture Tool

1.4 Identify interviewees and prepare for interviews

(1-2 wks.)

Identify the types of customers and prospects that will best represent your target persona. Choose interviewees that when interviewed will inform key differences among key segments (geographies, company size, mix of customers and prospects, etc.).

Recruit interviewees and schedule interviews for 45 minutes.

Keep track of Interviewees using the slide following this one.

In preparation for interviews, review the Buyer Persona and Journey Interview Guide and Data Capture Tool. Review the two sets of questions:

1. Buyer Persona-Related – use to validate areas where you still have gaps in your persona, OR if you are starting with a blank persona and wish to build your personas entirely based on customer and prospect interviews.
2. Buyer-Journey Related, which we will focus on in the next phase.