What is a Buyer Persona

A Buyer Persona is a detailed profile of an example buyer that represents the real audience – an archetype of the buyer that the company hopes to persuade to choose its products, services or solution. While buyer personas may include other details, the Five Rings of Insight are the essential components of buyer personas that are equipped to guide strategic marketing decisions, including messaging, launch planning, demand generation and sales enablement.

Attend the Discovering Persona Insights workshop to learn how to acquire these Insights. Download the Core Buyer Persona and Product Persona Connection templates to record these Insights.

Five Rings of Insight for Buyer Personas

Priority Initiatives

This Insight identifies the three-to-five problems or objectives where this buyer persona is dedicating time, budget or political capital, without regard to your business with them.^[1]

Tips and Examples

• Avoid general statements that simply restate an aspect of this persona’s role or job description.
• Also, do not confuse Priority Initiatives with pain points that are reverse-engineered based on the capabilities of a particular product or service. For example, a marketing executive could have a Priority Initiative to identify which marketing activities have the most significant impact on revenue growth. While this is a pain point addressed by marketing automation systems, it is not an Insight unless buyers describe it as a top 5 Priority.
• This Insight is very important for B2B buyer personas, but is typically not useful for B2C buyers as their priorities are relatively diverse and unpredictable.

Success Factors

For any Priority Initiative that you will target in your marketing, this insight identifies the tangible or intangible rewards this buyer persona associates with success.^[2]

Tips and Examples

• It is very helpful if the buyer has tangible metrics for success, such as growing revenue by X or reducing operating costs by Y. For a B2C buyer, a tangible Success Factor might be driving to work in a car that gets 25 mpg, reducing the gas bill by $200.
• But even if the buyer doesn’t have a measurable objective to achieve, there is something at stake. For example, for B2B buyers, the wrong decision could result in job loss, while the right decision could enable a promotion or major career move.
• For both B2C and B2B buyers, examples of intangible successes include impressing peers, widening their sphere of influence, or increasing their ability to control something specific in their environment.
• Success factors resemble benefits, but benefits are reverse-engineered from the capabilities the product can deliver, while success factors are results that actual buyers describe.

Perceived Barriers

This insight captures the buyer’s reasons to question whether your solution or company is capable of achieving the targeted Success Factors.^[2]

Tips and Examples

• The most useful part of this insight relates to the personal or business obstacles that this buyer sees as interfering with their chance to achieve success. For B2B buyers, examples might relate to the need for business process change, gaining acceptance from end users, or other politically-charged issues. For B2C buyers, a fisherman might be concerned about making a case to his wife that a new boat is wiser than remodeling the kitchen.
• Other Perceived Barriers may result from this buyer persona’s prior experiences with your product or company, or with other products that have similar functionality. Peer or expert feedback about your company or products is another source of Perceived Barriers.
• Expect to gain Insights into product or company-specific Perceived Barriers that are no longer (or never were) factually correct.

Buying Process

Identify the process this buyer persona will follow to explore and select the product, service, or solution that can overcome the Perceived Barriers and achieve the Success Factors.^[2]

Tips and Examples

• These insights are best detailed through a table that begins with the business triggers that cause this buyer to commence a search for this type of solution, and ends with a satisfied reference customer.
• At each step in the buying process, identify each of the buyer persona(s) who are critical to the decision to proceed to the next step, what role each plays, and the resources each consults to find answers to their questions.
• Note that this Insight details the buyer’s process to arrive at a decision, not the selling process that the sales people may have defined.

Decision Criteria

As this buyer persona navigates the Buying Process, this insight specifies the aspects of the product, service, solution or company that the buyer will assess as they evaluate each of the alternative solutions.^[2]

Tips and Examples

• An insight into Decision Criteria avoids jargon, e.g. “easy-to-use” or “scalable”. Decision Criteria Insights reveal details about the buyer’s expectations for the capabilities they consider most important, plus an explanation of how the buyer arrived at their conclusions.
• For the “easy-to-use” example, the Decision Criteria Insight would specify which aspects of the solution this persona expected to be “easy to use” and how they determined that the chosen solution is the easiest.
• For useful buyer personas, it is critical to include Decision Criteria insights from buyers who chose you as well as those who chose a competitor, plus those who chose to do nothing at all.

^[1] This is a Core Buyer Persona Insight, which means that it should not be influenced by the solutions you hope to market to this buyer.

^[2] This is a Product Persona Connection Insight, meaning that it will differ depending on the product, service or solution you will market to this buyer.