by Usman SheikhCreating Buyer Personas – Detailed Guide
Most buyer personas are fiction with a stock photo attached. “Marketing Mary, 42, VP of Marketing, enjoys yoga and podcasts, values efficiency.” Nobody has ever made a decision because of that document, and most of them end up in a slide deck that is never opened again.
The reason they fail is not that the research was lazy. It is that they describe the wrong thing. They describe a person. What actually predicts a purchase is a situation.
The shift: stop describing people, start listing triggers
The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute uses the term category entry points for the situations, needs and moments that cause someone to think of a category at all. Jenni Romaniuk’s work on mental availability is built on the idea that a brand grows by being linked in memory to more of these situations, not by being loved more deeply by the same people.
Applied to business buying, that reframes the whole exercise. The useful question is not who the buyer is. It is: what has to happen in their week for them to start looking for what we sell?
For a regulated firm, those triggers might be an examination finding, a new registration category, a competitor launching something, a compliance officer leaving, an audit, a product approval, or a budget cycle opening. For a manufacturer it might be a line failure, a certification renewal, a customer demanding traceability, or a key supplier being acquired.
Those are things you can actually market against. “Enjoys podcasts” is not.
Why this matters more in B2B than most people admit
Business buying is a committee, and the committee is large. Forrester’s 2026 study of nearly 18,000 business buyers found an average of 13 internal stakeholders plus 9 external participants influencing a purchase.
You cannot write a persona for 22 people. You can write a list of the situations that bring those 22 people into a room, and then work out what each of them is afraid of once they are in it. The finance person and the compliance officer are in the same meeting about the same trigger, and they need completely different reassurance.
So the output of this exercise should not be four personality profiles. It should be a table: the trigger, who gets pulled in, what each of them is trying to avoid, and what evidence would settle it for them.
How to actually build it
Interview ten recent buyers, including the ones you lost. The lost deals are where the real information is, because winners rationalise and losers tell you what actually went wrong. Ask what was happening in the business in the month before they started looking. Ask who else got involved and when. Ask what nearly stopped it.
Ask your sales team a different question than usual. Not who the buyer is. What event was happening at the account when the conversation started.
Read your own inbound. The first line of an enquiry usually contains the trigger, and it is usually thrown away in favour of the form fields.
Write it as situations, in the buyer’s words. “Our examiner flagged our marketing materials” is a category entry point. “Seeks compliant growth solutions” is agency language nobody has ever spoken aloud.
What to do with it once you have it
The list of triggers becomes your content plan, more or less directly. Each trigger is a page, and the page should be the most complete answer that exists to the question that trigger produces.
That is also how this feeds into being found by AI assistants. When someone asks an assistant what to do about a situation, the assistant assembles an answer from the pages that addressed that situation properly. A page organised around a real trigger gets used. A page organised around a persona does not, because nobody has ever typed a persona into anything.
The part most teams skip
Write down what would prove you wrong, then check in six months. If the triggers you listed are not the triggers showing up in real conversations, the document is wrong and it should be changed rather than defended.
A persona deck that has not changed in three years is not stable, it is unused.
Sources
- Forrester, The State Of Business Buying, 2026. Survey of nearly 18,000 global business buyers, fielded 2025.
- Jenni Romaniuk, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, work on mental availability and category entry points. Note that the published empirical work on category entry points is largely drawn from consumer categories; the application to business buying is an extension of the concept rather than a separately evidenced finding.
Last reviewed 19 September 2026.
Oil and gas. Manufacturing. Retail. Private equity.
Qualified as a CPA in Canada and the United States. Twenty years across financial planning and analysis, agency ownership and marketing leadership. Previously Senior Director of Performance and Growth at Equiton, a private equity real estate manager with nearly $2 billion under management, running both the retail and the wholesale channel. Earlier, oil and gas, and campaigns across pharmaceutical, insurance and industrial manufacturing.