Buying Personas Are Broken. Here’s How to Fix Them

Buying personas are a description of who buys from you, built from research, behavioural data, and direct customer insight. Done well, they shape messaging, channel strategy, and product positioning. Done badly, they become a slide deck exercise that nobody references after the kick-off meeting.

Most personas sit in the second category. Not because the concept is flawed, but because the execution skips the hard part: understanding why someone buys, not just who they are when they do.

Why Most Buying Personas Fail Before They Start

Early in my career, I sat through a persona workshop where we spent two hours naming fictional customers and debating whether “Marketing Mary” preferred LinkedIn or Instagram. We gave her a job title, a salary band, two kids, a commute, and a preference for artisan coffee. What we never established was what made her actually buy, what objections she had, or what she needed to hear before she trusted a vendor enough to sign a contract.

That workshop produced a beautiful document. It influenced nothing.

The problem is structural. Most persona frameworks are built around demographic and psychographic profiling, which tells you who a person is, not how they make a purchase decision. Those are different questions with different answers, and conflating them produces personas that feel comprehensive but have no commercial utility.

A buying persona that does not change how you write an ad, structure a landing page, or sequence a sales conversation is decorative. It is a strategy artefact rather than a strategy tool.

What a Buying Persona Actually Needs to Contain

If you strip a buying persona back to what is commercially useful, you need to answer five questions with specificity.

First: what triggers the buying process? Most purchases do not start with a product search. They start with a problem becoming urgent enough to act on. Understanding that trigger, whether it is a failed audit, a new hire, a competitive threat, or a budget cycle, tells you when and where to be present.

Second: what does the person need to believe before they buy? Every purchase involves a set of beliefs that have to be in place. They need to believe the problem is real, that your category solves it, that your brand is credible, and that the timing is right. If you do not know which of those beliefs your audience currently holds, you are guessing at your messaging.

Third: who else is involved in the decision? B2B buying in particular is rarely a single-person process. The person who uses the product, the person who approves the budget, and the person who blocks the deal are often three different people with three different concerns. A persona that treats the decision as individual will produce messaging that works for one and fails with the other two.

Fourth: what are the real objections? Not the polite ones people give on a sales call, but the ones they voice to colleagues when nobody from your company is listening. Price is rarely the actual objection. It is usually risk, switching cost, or internal politics dressed up as a budget conversation.

Fifth: what does success look like for them personally, not just professionally? People make rational decisions with emotional inputs. A procurement manager approving a six-figure contract is also thinking about how that decision reflects on them. A CMO choosing an agency is partly thinking about whether they can defend that choice upward. Build that into your persona or your messaging will always feel slightly off.

If you want to build a go-to-market strategy that actually holds together, the Go-To-Market & Growth Strategy hub covers the frameworks and thinking that connect persona work to commercial outcomes across the full planning cycle.

The Difference Between Existing Buyers and Target Buyers

One of the most commercially damaging mistakes I see in persona work is treating existing customers as the only valid input. You interview the people who bought, you build a profile from those conversations, and you optimise your marketing to attract more of the same. It feels rigorous. It is often a trap.

When I was running an agency and we started growing the team from around 20 people toward 100, we had to make a deliberate decision to stop optimising for the clients we had and start building for the clients we wanted. The profile of our existing client base reflected where we had been, not where we needed to go. If we had built our new business strategy purely from existing client personas, we would have kept attracting the same type of work at the same fee levels.

The same logic applies to any growth-oriented marketing programme. Your existing buyers represent captured demand. They found you, they evaluated you, they bought. If your entire persona strategy is built from that group, you are essentially optimising for people who were already going to buy from someone like you. That is not growth. That is retention dressed up as acquisition.

Growth requires reaching people who do not yet know they need you, or who know they have a problem but have not yet considered your category as the solution. Those people have a different profile, different triggers, and different objections. They need a different persona and a different message.

BCG’s work on understanding financial needs across an evolving population makes a related point in financial services: the customers who will drive future growth often look quite different from the ones generating revenue today. Building strategy purely from your current base is a structural constraint on what you can become.

How to Build a Buying Persona That Has Commercial Weight

The research phase is where most persona projects either earn their keep or waste everyone’s time. There are three inputs that matter: direct customer interviews, behavioural data, and sales team intelligence. You need all three, because each one shows you a different part of the picture.

Customer interviews give you the narrative. They tell you the story of how someone went from problem to purchase, in their own language, with their own logic. That language is worth its weight in gold for copywriting. When a customer tells you they chose you because you “felt like a team that had done this before,” that is a positioning line, not just a data point.

Behavioural data gives you the pattern. What content did people consume before they converted? What pages did they visit? What search terms brought them in? Tools like Hotjar’s feedback and behaviour tools can show you where people hesitate, where they drop off, and what they actually do on a page rather than what they say they do. That gap between stated and revealed behaviour is often where the real insight lives.

Sales team intelligence gives you the friction. Your best salespeople know exactly which objections come up in every deal, which stakeholders kill proposals, and which messages land. Most marketing teams do not mine this systematically. They should. A monthly 45-minute conversation with your top two salespeople will improve your persona work more than a quarterly survey ever will.

Once you have those three inputs, the build process is straightforward. Group buyers by trigger, not by demographic. Someone who buys because they just hired a new CMO has a different context and different needs than someone who buys because a competitor just launched a new product. Both might be 42-year-old marketing directors in mid-market SaaS companies. The demographic similarity tells you almost nothing useful. The trigger tells you everything about timing and message.

Personas Across the Buying Cycle, Not Just at the Top

One of the structural weaknesses in most persona frameworks is that they treat the buyer as a static entity. The person who first becomes aware of a problem is not the same person, psychologically, as the one who is comparing two vendors on a shortlist. Their questions are different, their anxieties are different, and the messages that move them are different.

I spent a long stretch earlier in my career overvaluing lower-funnel performance. We would look at conversion data and conclude that certain audiences were working because they were converting at the bottom. What I eventually understood was that a lot of that conversion was going to happen anyway. The person who searches for a specific product by name on the day they are ready to buy was not created by our bottom-funnel activity. They were created by everything that happened before it, the awareness, the consideration, the trust-building that we often were not measuring or crediting properly.

Buying personas need to reflect this. You need a version of your persona at the problem-aware stage, a version at the solution-aware stage, and a version at the vendor-evaluation stage. Each version has different content needs, different channel preferences, and different conversion triggers. Collapsing all of that into one persona produces messaging that is too vague to be effective at any stage.

Vidyard’s research on pipeline and revenue potential for GTM teams points to a consistent finding: the biggest untapped revenue opportunity is not in the bottom of the funnel. It is in the middle, where buyers are actively considering but have not yet been engaged with the right content or the right message. That is precisely where a well-constructed buying persona earns its keep.

The Validation Problem

A persona built from a workshop is a hypothesis. It might be a well-informed hypothesis based on years of market experience, but it is still a hypothesis until you have tested it against real buyer behaviour.

The fastest way to validate a buying persona is to use it to make a specific, falsifiable prediction. If your persona says that this buyer type responds to social proof from peers rather than analyst endorsements, run a test. Create two versions of a landing page or email sequence, one leaning on peer validation, one leaning on authority signals, and see which one performs. If the persona is right, you will see it in the data. If it is wrong, you have learned something more valuable than the original assumption.

Most teams skip this step. They build the persona, present it to stakeholders, get approval, and then use it as a fixed input for the next 18 months without ever checking whether it was accurate. Markets move. Buyer behaviour shifts. A persona that was valid two years ago may be pointing you in entirely the wrong direction today.

BCG’s thinking on go-to-market strategy and long-tail pricing in B2B markets makes a useful point about buyer segmentation: the buyers who look the same from the outside often have meaningfully different price sensitivities and decision criteria once you get into the detail. That variation is exactly why persona validation matters. Your assumptions about what drives a segment will not hold uniformly across every buyer within it.

When Personas Connect to Growth Strategy

Buying personas become strategically valuable when they connect directly to growth decisions: which segments to prioritise, which channels to invest in, which messages to lead with, and which product features to emphasise. Without that connection, they are a research exercise rather than a planning tool.

I judged the Effie Awards for a period, which gives you a particular perspective on what effective marketing actually looks like in practice. The campaigns that won were not the ones with the most sophisticated audience segmentation. They were the ones where the team had a clear, specific understanding of what their buyer needed to believe and feel, and built everything around closing that gap. The persona work was invisible in the final output, but you could see it in every decision.

That is the standard worth aiming for. Not a persona document that impresses in a presentation, but a buyer understanding so embedded in your team’s thinking that it shapes every brief, every channel decision, and every piece of copy without anyone having to reference a slide.

Resources like Semrush’s breakdown of growth strategy examples and Crazy Egg’s analysis of growth tactics show how the best-performing growth programmes share a common thread: they are built on a precise understanding of who the buyer is and what moves them, not on tactical experimentation disconnected from buyer insight.

Persona work sits at the centre of effective go-to-market planning, and the broader frameworks that connect it to channel strategy, messaging architecture, and growth investment are covered in depth across the Go-To-Market & Growth Strategy hub. If you are building or rebuilding a GTM strategy, that is a useful place to start.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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