B2B Personas

I led a self-initiated revamp of B2B personas, auditing existing insights, conducting competitive research, defining an Ideal Customer Profile, and aligning persona-based messaging across the funnel to bring strategic clarity to marketing and product teams.

25%

Faster Content Approval

Less

Review Cycles

01

Key Area

Target Users

Marketing, Sales, Design, Engineers

Timeline

5 months

Process

1. Auditing Existing Knowledge

I started by auditing everything the team had been using to represent “personas”: Slack threads, Notion docs, Ad briefs and internal decks

What I found?

Vague categorizations
No buying motivations or behavior insights
No mapping to the buyer journey

The knowledge was shallow, fragmented, and not actionable for marketing or product decisions.

The knowledge was shallow, fragmented, and not actionable for marketing or product decisions.

2. Competitor's Analysis

With no internal data to rely on, I pivoted to external intelligence:

Studied competitor client lists
Reviewed public case studies, testimonials, and industry blogs

From this, I built an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) that included:

Industry verticals
Team structures
Cloud maturity levels
Key pain points

I then created 10+ initial persona candidates operating within that ICP, including: Platform engineers, DevOps leads, CTOs, compliance officers, finance gatekeepers, etc.

Gartner reports that the average B2B buying group now includes 6 to 10 decision-makers, each with different roles, priorities, and pain points.

Primary personas (e.g., Platform Engineers, DevOps) are the users and champions.
Secondary personas (e.g., CTO, VP of Engineering) may approve or heavily influence, but aren’t hands-on.
Tertiary personas (e.g., Compliance, Procurement) can block a deal, but don’t seek or use the product.

Why Use Persona Levels (Primary / Secondary / Tertiary)?

Because they have different buying triggers, goals, and outcomes
Because Not All Personas Deserve Equal Investment
Because Buyer Journeys Are Nonlinear

By defining both the ICP and buyer personas, we can effectively target the right organizations and engage the key stakeholders within them, enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of its go-to-market strategies.

Source

While ICP defines the right companies; personas define the humans inside them.

3. 3-Point Analysis

To avoid duplicate personas, I created a clustering method based on 3 critical questions:

Q1. What triggers their buying decision?

Q2. What outcomes or features do they care about?

Q3. How do they influence the purchase?

If personas shared at least 2 of 3 answers, they were grouped together.

This resulted in three strategic groups.

Primary: Initiators and strategic influencers (e.g., Platform Engineers, CTOs)
Secondary: Indirect influencers (e.g., SREs, DBAs)
Tertiary: Gatekeepers (e.g., Finance, Compliance, Security)

4. Internal Validation

To test and refine the clusters, I created a structured questionnaire for customer-facing teams:

Sales
Pre-sales engineers
Product marketing

The survey avoided jargon and focused on uncovering:

Real concerns from prospects
Objections heard during sales
Language customers used to describe pain points

Results:

Confirmed key hypotheses
Invalidated outdated beliefs
Uncovered new messaging opportunities

Outcome & Impact

Structured Persona Framework

Replaced ad-hoc labels with a defined, multi-level persona system aligned to real user and buyer behaviors.

Evidence-Based Targeting

Campaign briefs now target specific personas and pain points, enabling more relevant messaging and better engagement.

Clear ICP Foundation

Introduced a robust Ideal Customer Profile that guided audience prioritization and segmentation strategies.

Faster Decision Making

Clear differentiation between product types and quantity breakdowns improved user confidence in meeting regulatory requirements.

Shared Understanding Across Teams

Marketing, sales, and product teams now speak the same persona language, reducing miscommunication and accelerating campaign planning.

Ongoing Alignment Process

Set up a repeatable persona validation and refinement process, reducing ambiguity for future launches and product evolution.