How to bring buyer personas to life

Deeply understanding your buyer personas is an essential part of planning your outreach strategy, and enabling your sellers.

No doubt you have done some research around your personas, and you may even have documented them into some nice slides like this:

But too often I see these slides hidden away in a sales enablement platform or document repository - never to be seen again.

More so, even when they are found, the slides themselves are difficult for sellers to internalise and understand how to incorporate what they learn into their own talk tracks and messaging.

Having done the work to research your personas, I’d encourage you to think about how to bring them to life for your sellers.

Here are a few ideas to consider:

Customer interviews

Having developed your persona, and hopefully validated it with one or two of your existing customers that have that role, ask if they will be happy to be interviewed about their role, their challenges, and the triggers they might encounter.

These interviews could be in person/live on a company all hands or sales meeting, or they could be pre-recorded and hosted where sellers can find them.

The interview can simply follow the flow of your persona document - their team, their role, their KPIs, the tools they use, where they find information, how to get their attention, the challenges they face.

For your sellers, hearing from real customers is the validation of the persona content you’ve developed.

Persona podcasts/videos

If you can’t get an actual customer to go on camera, then consider who else could play that role. If you sell into CHROs then can your head of HR play the part? If you sell into legal then can your General Counsel take it on?

Alternatively do you have a local drama college nearby where you can get an actor to take on the role?

Audio and video bring the same information to life and make it easily consumable while your sellers are commuting or preparing for a meeting.

Persona-based GPTs

Depending on the AI models you are using, load up the information you have captured about your persona into custom GPT (on OpenAI), or a project (on Claude).

Your sellers can then engage with the persona as if they are a real human and practice their messaging and understanding of the role.

Provide sellers with specific questions to ask to guide their conversations.

Persona role-plays

Wherever I am coaching sales teams I hear “I want to do more role-plays”. Sellers know that practicing off the pitch is what helps you perform on the pitch.

Help your sellers by designing structured role play scenarios where one seller takes the role of the customer and one takes the role of the seller. Provide each with a scenario guide and allow them to run the call before they swap roles.

By playing the customer persona and being able to internalise the job, the systems they use and the challenges they face, your sellers will find themselves much more prepared when they speak with a real customer that has that role.

Day in the life videos

An alternative spin on the talking head customer interview is a day in the life video - and this can be even more valuable if the persona you sell into doesn’t have a desk based job.

Imagine following a factory director around their actual factory, or watching a supply chain manager out meeting suppliers.

Getting a view of how they spend their day, the jobs they are trying to complete, and the challenges they face can really bring perspective that a written slide cannot.

Reach out from behind the screen

Whatever you test, try to reach out from behind the screen and create something that uses an alternative medium to your original persona slide.

Enjoy and I’d love to hear how you get on.