How Do You Design Enterprise and Individual Personas?
You design personas in two layers — enterprise personas describing each key segment's needs and characteristics, and individual buyer personas describing the people on the buying team — to optimize demand generation and sales. Modern buying decisions involve multiple decision-makers, so personas have to capture both the organization and the individuals within it.
Start with enterprise personas, one for each key segment. Identify the attributes that best describe each segment's needs, priorities, and other descriptive characteristics. The enterprise persona captures what a target organization in that segment looks like and cares about — the organizational-level picture that guides how you position and target.
Then go a layer deeper with individual buyer personas. Because buying decisions within most organizations now involve more than one key decision-maker, the enterprise persona alone is insufficient. Compile information about the individual members of the buying team to optimize demand generation and sales efforts — understanding the distinct people who influence and make the decision, not just the company they work for.
Treat individual personas as a journey to deeper understanding. Rather than a one-time descriptive exercise, building individual buyer personas is a path to genuinely understanding your ideal customers within each enterprise persona — the goals, concerns, and roles of the specific people you need to reach and convince. This depth is what lets demand generation and sales speak to each buying-team member in terms relevant to them.
The two layers work together. The enterprise persona tells you which organizations to pursue and how to position for them; the individual personas tell you who inside those organizations to engage and how to speak to each. Designing both for every key segment is what makes segmentation actionable — converting analytically-defined target segments into a clear picture of exactly who to reach and what they care about.
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