Marketing personas

Three templates for buyer personas that stay useful past the workshop they were made in. Fill in the fields in your own words; the prompts are there to stop you reaching for stock phrases.

How to use these

Pick the template that matches how your product is actually bought, not how you wish it were bought.
Answer each field from one real customer you know. Composite personas invented out of thin air are a waste.
Cut anything you couldn't defend in a sales call. Demographic padding (“coffee lover”, “works hard, plays hard”) almost always goes.
Re-write it three months later with a sharper second customer in mind. Personas age fast; refresh them.

B2B SaaS buyer

For selling software into mid-market or enterprise. Skip if you sell to individuals or tiny teams — their journeys are different.

Role & seniority: Job title, how long they have held it, how many direct reports.
Budget authority: Do they sign the contract, recommend it, or only influence it?
The problem they own: One sentence, in their words, about the thing they are accountable for.
What "good" looks like this quarter: The metric their performance review will turn on.
Who else sits in the room: Champions, gatekeepers, detractors. Name the functions.
Where they learn: Podcasts, newsletters, Slack groups, conferences. Be specific.
The last tool they bought: What it was, who it beat, and what finally tipped the decision.
Words they would never use: Vocabulary they roll their eyes at. Use the list as a style filter on copy.

Consumer purchase

For a product sold direct to individuals, not businesses. Emphasis on identity and trigger moments, less on org politics.

Who they are: Age range, life stage, a one-line identity statement ("parent going back to work", "solo founder past first hire").
The trigger: The specific event that makes the problem real enough to act on.
What they tried first: The free / cheap / obvious workaround before considering your category.
Why the workaround fails: The exact friction that makes them keep looking.
Who they trust: Friend, review site, specific creator, therapist. Trust source shapes the channel.
Objection of last resort: The doubt they still have the moment before hitting buy.

Internal change champion

Not a buyer — an ally you recruit inside the organisation to drive adoption. Useful for AI rollouts, new internal tooling, process change.

Why they are leaning in: Career motivation, curiosity, frustration with status quo. Be honest about mixed motives.
Political capital: How much they can spend before it costs them. Be realistic.
The team they influence: Size, function, and whether that team is upstream or downstream of the change.
What they need from you: Language, evidence, cover. Usually it is cover.
What failure looks like for them: The specific outcome that would make them regret backing this. Design against it.