This article is for the persona believers and practitioners, and there is not going to be a debate on why personas may not work. Because they always do. When done right.

Thanks to Alan Cooper, personas are now firmly rooted in the conscience of product managers and have long been a powerful means to learn about those on whom the business success depends.

In the world of B2B

As the saying goes, there is always a first time…

When I first happened to create the B2B design personas, I realized they are quite different from the B2C personas I was so accustomed to at a time.

Now, the persona should have been representing not an individual but the entire organization and also cover the people staying beyond the name — those who rule the business (the decision makers) and those who actually utilize the product (the end users). And there I were, clueless about how to glue it all together.
A frustrating experience, isn’t it?

“OK, Google, how do I create the B2B design persona?”
In a moment, I’ve got a huge roster of articles about the B2B buyer personas... Not a trace left of my excitement at that point.

Removing the word design from the search query did not help either: the results were still all about the marketing.

“OK, Google, don’t you know that marketing targets are often not the design targets?”
It seems we confuse the terms so often we’ve managed to teach Google the wrong things.

Design persona vs marketing persona

There is no direct correlation between marketing and design personas.
The possible difference in the audience segmentation emerges from the purpose: marketing is about promoting and selling, while product design is about problem-solving and creating value for the clients in a way that creates value for the business.

For instance, in B2B, you might want to sell your product through classic resellers, consulting agencies, and VARs.
From the marketing perspective, they are all distinctive buyer types worth creating separate (marketing) personas.
From the product design perspective, only VARs are of interest as they are the only ones actually consuming the product and therefore having the needs to be addressed by it.
Besides, depending on your product specifics, you might want to segment the VARs even further down to help focus the design.

Things that make up the B2B design persona

Armed with the experience, the results of my studies and interviews, and with Google, I drafted a persona template which I kept refining, and which proved its effectiveness with time.

You might want to add some more details to your version of persona, but just don’t let yourself get carried away by plunging too deep into the details. The excess of information blurs the focus on real needs, added to making the personas hard to tell apart.
Remember, the key aspect of persona development is figuring out the core differences.

In the B2B persona, you need to represent two perspectives — the business you are targeting and the people holding the power of making strategic decisions.

BUSINESS CONTEXT

• Company identity
  Company name, logo and optionally, motto.
  Being simple and easy-to-remember, they allow for quick visual identification and recognition among other personas.
  Additionally, motto gives insight into company mission.
• Firmographics and Background help you set the B2B persona context, sort of draw an outline for the organization, explaining what it is, how big it is, what it does, and where it operates.
  Firmographics is the basic characteristics of the typical organization of this kind: business domain, market geography, company size, revenue.
  Background is about what the company does, what products and services they offer, and basically how they make their money.
• Goals and Challenges clarify on what the business is after and what keeps them up at night.
  There may be many goals and challenges. Only consider those you want to address and those helping you make design decisions.
  Goals focus on what the business could get out of using the product that addresses the pressing challenges.
  Ensure your solution ultimately contributes to achieving the goals stated.
  Challenges describe the needs the business must fulfill to meet the strategic targets.

DECISION-MAKING CONTEXT

We sell to businesses, but at the end of the day, it is people who make decisions. And the more you know about who they are and what their role is, the easier it will be to connect with them.

In business, strategic decisions are made collectively (this could be the Board or the executive team). Rather than trying to identify and depict everyone involved, try and single out who has the most influencing power and consider the rest as validators.

• Position info and Demographics
  Thinking B2B persona, you first want to know who (the role) you should get the buy-in from, and only then study their personality. That is why Position info goes first. It sheds light on where the role is in the organizational chart, what expertise they possess, and what duties they carry.
  Demographics adds some more personality helping build a visual image of a person: picture, name, age, educational background.
• Psychographics & behavioral brings in the details about personal traits, mindset, and attitude.
• Individual goals & motivations pinpoint what the persona is strategically focused on and what drives them (can be both the intrinsic and external drivers).
• Why I won’t buy includes the factors that contribute to making a no-go decision on your product.
• Validators assess and challenge the suggested solutions, thereby influencing decision making.

Another piece of information I like to include in the B2B persona is the list of its prominent real-life representatives.
It proves the persona’s validity by anchoring it to the specific names while also makes it easy for anyone to see the correlation between the composed “collective portrait” and the reality.

The list of the three to five clickable logos linked to the company websites would suffice. On the above figure, it is the Typical representatives with the blurred logos, right beneath the grid.

What about the end users?

Right. B2B products are sold to the businesses but ultimately head towards the consumer shore — the end users of your product.

You’ve got to design the product that not only helps businesses to achieve their strategic goals but also proves usable to its end users. High consumer adoption strengthens your relationship with the client and significantly reduces the likelihood of them switching to another vendor.

To effectively manage the end user experience with your product, you need to know your users well. Personalizing the user profile leads to deeper insights into their character, environment, work burden, everyday needs and frustrations, making it easy to walk in the user's shoes.

My compilation of the consumer persona was inspired by the Behavioral Archetypes Toolkit, though does not precisely follows it.
You are welcome to choose your own way of creating the user personas, but I very much recommend you take advantage of the behavioral archetypes and contextual scenarios.

I would split my version of user persona into four parts:

• Title information is to catch your eye and set your mind.
  Use a picture you think best fits the persona and provide a few bright quotations that help reveal the character.
• Profile covers persona’s demographic data, personal traits, skills, highlights the attitude, and also outlines the range of job responsibilities.
  Feel free to add what matters in the context of your design.
  For my persona, I’ve included information about the device usage emphasizing the importance of staying mobile.
• Scenario is “a day in the life” excerpt that reveals the persona’s behavioral pattern.
  Cover one of the key contextual scenarios, accompanied by the persona’s thoughts, feelings, and actions relative to that context.
• Behavioral archetype elaborates more on the personality and indicates their individual goals, needs, and frustrations.

Build personas into your company’s DNA

Personas are a powerful design and communication tool that facilitates alignment among the stakeholders.
Personas remind everyone of who we are designing for, and what is essential for these people and organizations in the context of your product design and the market.

Ensure anyone involved has unimpeded access to the design personas. Store them on a shared resource (internal wiki would do) and make them easy to find.

To eliminate any excuse for not familiarizing with personas as well as for the better persona adoption, print them out and put on the office walls :)
You might want to cut on some details, so the copy is easy and quick to run one’s eyes over and catch the gist.
Here is how I did it:

Keep alive

Personas are contextual creatures that live here and now and heavily depend on the environment. And so I encourage you to practice periodic reviews of your personas and apply some ‘face-lifts’ for them to keep pace with reality.

Market evolution and strategic pivots may redefine the target audience for your business or result in its different segmentation, giving you just the reason to get your personas a good makeover. Otherwise, they are doomed to death.

I wish your personas live long and serve you well!