Buyer persona

A buyer persona describes the person, an `ICP` describes the company. The ideal customer profile says which organisations fit at all: sector, size, maturity, budget, triggers at organisational level. The persona says who is in the room: which role, which goals, which evaluation criteria, which objections, which language. Both questions need answering separately, because the right company with the wrong person closes just as rarely as the reverse.

A persona only becomes useful through the parts you can act on: the trigger that makes somebody start looking; the words they search with; the three criteria they compare on; the objection that reliably comes up; the personal risk of getting the decision wrong; and who else has a say without being in the meeting. Age, hobbies and a stock photo are decoration. They do not change a single sentence in your proposal.

Provenance decides the value. A persona built in a workshop reflects the assumptions of the team. A persona built from sales calls, support tickets, search queries and above all lost deals reflects the market. The workable rule: every sentence needs a source or it goes. And because triggers and objections shift with the market, the profile should be held against the last twenty conversations once a year.