Best Examples of Personas for Perfect Customer Modeling

Do you know who your customers are?

Before you can launch an email campaign, you need to know who you’re talking to.

Personas are a useful way to learn about who your customers are, what motivates them, their pains, and their needs.

With this knowledge in hand, you’ll be able to tailor content so that it resonates with your potential customers.

What is a persona?

A persona is a fictional representation of a group of real people who share certain traits. 

For example, a customer persona tries to model your actual and potential customers by highlighting the traits that make people buy your product or service. They’re also the same traits you need to appeal to if you want to make a sale.

What is a good example of a persona?

Here’s one of many: Olivia, Director of Operations at a mid-sized SaaS company, has specific goals and challenges, is motivated by clear ROI and automation, and is looking for a solution. 

Is she real? No. But she’s a really good representation of a potential buyer to focus on.

Types of personas

There are many types of personas, each of which has a different purpose. In fact, chances are you’ve encountered some of them already.

The most common personas include:

• Customer persona — Represents someone interested in your product and likely to interact with your company during the customer journey. It’s also possible for them to be involved in the buying process.
• Buyer persona — Represents someone interested in buying your product and likely to be heavily involved in the buying process. They might buy it for personal use, for their company, or for another person.
• Marketing persona — Represents someone who receives your marketing communication. They should model your content’s target audience. It’s possible for them to not be buyers or customers.
• User persona — Represents your product’s target user. Target users may or may not be the actual buyers.
• Proto persona — Represents early product-audience hypotheses to provide initial guidance. Generally speaking, this is the persona you have before you collect enough research data.
• Sales persona — Represents someone whose job is to sell your product or service to your ideal customer.

These personas are relatively similar, but each has its nuances.

To illustrate this point, imagine you’re selling a new children’s toy.

The user persona would be the small child who plays with the toy. The buyer persona would be the parent, guardian, or another family member. You might even have a separate marketing persona for the child and the person buying the gift. As for the sales persona, it would be the specialist responsible for the ads that make people want to buy.

What data do personas need?

Let’s assume you’re not selling toys but rather you’re selling product management software for large companies.

Your buyer persona might be product managers or COOs while your marketing persona covers product managers, project managers, and even team leads. If the latter finds your product interesting, they’ll forward it to the buyer for review and consideration. 

However, the best personas are built using data, not just hypotheses (excluding the proto-persona, which is supposed to be hypothetical).

When building a persona, you should include this information:

• Demographics (age, gender, location, position, income)
• Behaviors (how they obtain information and make decisions)
• Motivations and goals (what they want to achieve)
• Challenges and pain points (what prevents them from achieving their goal—that’s what your product can help them tackle)

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Benefits of personas

A good persona can be the difference between succeeding versus failing in sales. That’s because good personas include enough info and guidance on how to engage and retain customers.

Here are a few of the other benefits of good personas.

Increased sales efficiency

Relevant personas boost your sales efficiency since they help you:

• Prioritize leads – By pursuing leads that match your persona, your sales team is more equipped to close deals since their info at hand is more relevant.
• Customize offers – By addressing your persona’s needs and pain points, you can strike the right chord and appeal to possible buyers.

Improved lead retention and conversion

With existing customers and leads, you can use personas to:

• Make offers more relevant – Knowing your persona’s motivations and goals, you can offer exactly what your leads are looking for with just the right discount or perk, making them more likely to convert.
• Send emails with more meaningful personalization – Messages that contain surface-level, cookie-cutter personalization won’t help you close more revenue. Leveraging personas to deepen personalization will show leads you’ve done your research, which they’ll likely appreciate.

Better targeted marketing

Using personas allows you to focus your marketing efforts and go-to-market strategies by giving you a clear picture of who you’re speaking to. Looking at examples of target personas can make it even easier to tailor your messaging, offers, and channels to the right audience. 

Personas help you:

• Choose effective communication channels — If your messaging is sent using your persona’s preferred channel (e.g. email, social media platform, call), people are more willing to engage and you’re likely to see better results.
• Create appealing content — Content created with the right persona in mind will appeal more to real people who share the same interests and pains as the persona.

Examples of personas

Now that we’ve covered which types of personas exist and some of the advantages of using them, here are some examples of personas that you could see in action.

Customer persona

Imagine you sell inventory-management software to large corporations. You know that 60% of your customers work in manufacturing, and 75% of customers are led by male CEOs aged 45-60 years.

Your customer persona might look like this:

To pinpoint your customers’ motivations and challenges, ask them directly whenever possible. When that’s not an option, you can use industry media and market research reports to gain insight into their thinking.

Having strong buyer persona examples helps you speak the prospect’s language and shape the offer in the most valuable and appealing way.

Buyer persona

When creating a buyer persona, you need to know who the decision-maker is that gives the final say for buying products. Let’s say that in 40% of companies, this decision is made by the COO. With that in mind, your buyer persona might look like this:

If your buyer and customer persona are C-level managers, reaching them directly will be challenging. You’ll likely run into a gatekeeper, which is where a marketing persona can come in handy.

Marketing persona

A marketing persona should generally align with the buyer persona since they’re the ones who will need to bring your product to the buyer’s attention. Such a persona might look like this:

When targeting Emily, you’ll want to phrase your offer in a way that encourages her to forward it to Claire.

User persona

The end user of your product is a staff employee. They’re not the ones who get to decide whether or not to buy your product, but if the decision-makers know employees are unhappy and dislike using your product, the company may stop doing business with you.

A user persona might look like this:

A user persona can greatly benefit your product design and, in turn, sales. When in doubt about whether to add this or that feature, think about whether Michael will need it.

Proto persona

What if you’re a new company and don’t yet have any customers?

That doesn’t mean you should resort to guesswork. Instead, explore market research reports for your industry produced by reputable organizations and look at who’s buying from your closest competitors.

You can use this data to create a proto persona that helps you make initial decisions, engineer a GTM strategy, and get a minimum viable product up and running. Once you have more of your own data, you can use the proto persona as the foundation to build your customer, buyer, marketing, and user personas.

Let’s say you’re offering a workflow automation tool for startups. Your research of competitors shows that CEOs often purchase automation tools directly. 

As a result, this might be your possible proto persona:

Keep in mind that your proto persona might not be 100% accurate. After all, it’s main purpose is to give you something to start with. Just remember that you’ll need to update it once you have more information.

Key takeaways: Why use personas

Personas turn abstract audience data into clear profiles that drive better sales, marketing, and product decisions. 

Here’s why you should use them:

• Sales teams focus on the right leads instead of chasing everyone.
• Offers are shaped around real goals and pain points.
• Customers stay engaged with messaging that feels relevant.
• Emails and outreach become truly personal, not cookie-cutter.
• Marketing zeroes in on the right audience through the right channels.
• With AiSDR, personas turn into action, powering outreach that adapts as your market changes.

FAQ

How to segment B2B audiences for persona modeling?

When you segment a B2B audience, focus on:

• Company type (industry, size, revenue)
• The company’s pain points and challenges
• Decision makers and end users
• Behavior signals such as what content they engage with and where they spend time

In AiSDR, you can define your ICP and audience segments while setting up your campaigns. The platform uses intent signals (like job postings, industry news mentions) to automatically find prospects that fit those segments.

How to create a customer persona?

To create a customer persona:

• Gather data on demographics, role, pains, and goals
• Map how this persona interacts with your product
• Define the communication style that resonates (formal, friendly, technical, simple)
• Keep the persona updated with real interactions and feedback
  

With AiSDR, you just provide details about your product and audience. The platform turns that into a working persona that drives outreach. You can update it anytime and let the AI instantly adapt your messaging.

What is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is the person who holds the power to say “yes.” They decide if, when, and why the purchase happens. They may not be the end user, but they control the budget and approvals.

In AiSDR, you can set buyer personas as your target and the AI shapes messaging to speak their language. Instead of generic emails, they get communication that reflects their priorities and decision-making style.

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What is a marketing persona?

A marketing persona is the audience your campaigns need to resonate with. They may not purchase directly, but they influence buyers by sharing content, forwarding emails, shaping perception, and championing change to make the case for your solution.

With AiSDR, you can build different personas such as marketing, buyer, and user, and run campaigns tailored to each. The AI automatically adjusts tone and style depending on who you are addressing.