How to Create B2B Buyer Personas That Don't Suck

Let's be honest. Most buyer personas are garbage. That classic "CTO Charlie likes golf and reads TechCrunch" model is a dusty relic from 2015. For agencies selling complex, high-ticket services like custom software development, these profiles are completely useless. If your persona is just a collection of demographic bullet points, it’s not a business tool—it's a marketing distraction.

The reality is you're not selling to an individual. You're trying to navigate a complex buying committee within an organization, a group bogged down by internal politics, budget constraints, and a whole lot of fear. In 2025, the average B2B buying group has somewhere between 6 to 10 people,[1] each with their own agenda. A persona for the CTO is worthless if it doesn't also account for the CFO holding the purse strings and the Product Manager who has to live with your code.

The Shift from Demographics to Psychographics and Intent

It's time to move away from demographic-based personas and start building profiles grounded in psychographics and intent. If your persona doesn't tell you why a buyer is terrified of hiring the wrong dev shop, it’s worthless.

• From Demographics to Jobs-To-Be-Done: Instead of "Age: 45," think "Job: Needs to launch an MVP in 3 months to secure Series B funding."

• From Interests to Fears: Instead of "Likes: Golf," think "Fear: Hiring the wrong dev shop will create spaghetti code, forcing a rewrite that costs me my job."

This approach recognizes a critical truth: your biggest competitor isn't another agency. It's the status quo—the internal team convinced they can handle it, or the sheer paralysis that comes from the fear of making a catastrophically bad decision. This guide will show you how to build personas you can actually use.

1. Ditch Demographics for Jobs-To-Be-Done

Stop listing demographics. If your persona document has a line for "Age" or "Gender," you're building it for 2015. For high-ticket B2B services, that data is just noise. It tells you nothing about why a CTO with a multi-million dollar budget would choose your dev shop over another.

The real shift is moving from who the buyer is to what job they are trying to get done. This is the Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD) framework. A VP of Engineering isn't "hiring a dev agency." That’s your service. Their actual job is something far more specific and painful.

They are "hiring risk mitigation for a legacy system migration." Or they are "hiring speed to hit a Series B product milestone." You might even find they're "hiring a reliable team to prevent developer burnout." One describes what you sell; the other describes their urgent, expensive problem.

Your persona should be built around the outcome the client is buying. Replace demographic fields with JTBD statements. Instead of "Title: CTO," use "Job: Needs to launch an MVP in three months to secure the next funding round." This single change forces you to frame everything around their success, not your capabilities.

2. Define the Risk Profile for Each Buyer

Once you nail their job, you need to understand their fear. In the agency world, trust is the product. The emotion driving a seven-figure deal isn't excitement. It's the fear of making a catastrophic mistake that could cost them their job.

Each person on the buying committee has a unique risk profile tied directly to their role.

• The CTO's Fear: "The new agency will deliver spaghetti code that my internal team will have to rewrite, doubling the cost and timeline. I'll look incompetent."

• The CEO's Fear: "They will miss the launch deadline, causing us to lose first-mover advantage and jeopardizing our quarterly targets."

• The CFO's Fear: "The project will go over budget due to scope creep, and I'll have to explain the variance to the board."

This is the source code for your messaging. When your website content and sales decks directly address these fears, you stop sounding like a vendor and start sounding like a partner who gets what's at stake.

3. Segment by Technical Maturity, Not Just Industry

Segmenting by industry alone is lazy. "Healthcare company" isn't a useful segment. A "healthcare company still using on-prem servers" is one buyer. A "cloud-native healthcare SaaS with a mature CI/CD pipeline" is a completely different buyer.

Your personas must be segmented by technical maturity. The sales pitch and proof points you use for a "digital native" company should be radically different from what you use for a "digital immigrant" organization. Getting this nuance right is a huge part of modern market intelligence. You can learn more about what is market intelligence in our detailed guide.

By focusing on jobs, fears, and technical maturity, you create a persona that becomes a strategic tool for winning high-value clients.

4. Map the Buying Committee (The 6-10 Person Rule)

In high-stakes B2B sales, you're never just selling to one person. You're selling to a committee of 6 to 10 people. Your job is to map this complex human landscape. For most software deals, the committee boils down to three archetypes.

• The Economic Buyer (CFO, CEO): This person signs the check. They live and breathe ROI and business risk. They care about the tangible cost of doing nothing.

• The Technical Evaluator (CTO, VP of Engineering): This is your technical gatekeeper. They have nightmares about spaghetti code and vendor lock-in. They need to see that your team is competent.

• The End User (Product Manager, Head of a Business Unit): This person has to live with your software. Their world revolves around usability and hitting their own project deadlines.

Your most valuable ally is your internal champion, often the Product Manager or Technical Evaluator. Your job is to arm them with a "Champion's Kit" to sell your agency for you to the rest of the committee.

• For the CFO: A one-page business case with a simple ROI calculation.

• For the CTO: A concise technical brief and relevant case studies.

• For their Team: A straightforward project plan that minimizes disruption.

5. Build an Anti-Persona to Repel Bad Clients

Knowing who you want is only half the battle. You must know who you don't want. "Bad revenue" from a nightmare client can torch your margins and burn out your best people. This is where the Anti-Persona becomes essential.

An Anti-Persona is a clear profile of the clients you must avoid. It's a checklist of red flags that immediately disqualify a lead.

• "The Feature Creeper": The client who constantly adds to the scope but never the budget.

• "The Equity-Only Founder": The startup with a big vision but zero cash.

• "The Micromanager": The client who wants a seat in your daily stand-ups to question every line of code.

When you define these Anti-Personas, you give your sales team explicit permission to say "no." This powerful filter protects your business and is a practice that's catching on fast, with 44% of companies already using personas and another 29% planning to adopt them soon, according to recent stats on the rise of buyer persona adoption.

6. Mine the Dark Funnel for Raw Insights

Your most valuable insights aren't in surveys. They're in the "dark funnel" where buyers do their research anonymously. We're talking about private Slack communities, niche subreddits, and industry-specific Discord servers. In 2025, as much as 80% of the B2B buyer's journey happens here.

This isn't an invitation to spam these groups. It's about becoming a silent observer. If you sell DevOps services, lurk in the r/DevOps subreddit. Pay attention to the language they use and the problems they complain about.

What you'll uncover is the raw, unfiltered voice of your customer.

• Their Actual Language: Note the acronyms and specific phrases they use. Your marketing copy needs to mirror this.

• Unspoken Pains: You'll see what truly frustrates them about their current vendors. This is a roadmap for your messaging.

7. Use AI for "Voice of Customer" Analysis

Your sales call recordings are a graveyard of buried insights. Manual note-taking misses the nuance. This is where AI tools are a game-changer.

Platforms like Gong, Fathom, or Otter.ai can transcribe and analyze hundreds of hours of conversations in minutes. This turns persona creation from a subjective art into an objective science.

1. Feed the Machine: Gather transcripts from your last 50 sales calls, especially the losses.

2. Ask the Right Questions: Use a Large Language Model (LLM) to analyze the text with specific prompts.

Prompts You Can Steal:

• "Analyze these transcripts. What are the top 3 objections raised by CTOs in the final closing stage?"

• "What specific words do prospects use when describing their frustration with their current process?"

The answers become the bedrock of your new, data-driven personas.

8. Focus on Trigger-Based Personas and Intent Data

A "perfect fit" client isn't always a buyer.[2] They become a buyer only when a Trigger Event happens. This is when a simmering problem becomes a crisis.

Building your personas around these moments is a game-changer. For a software agency, triggers often look like:

• Fresh Funding: "Recently raised Series B."

• Key Personnel Change: "CTO just quit."

• Compliance & Security Issues: "Compliance audit failed."

Add a "Triggers" section to your persona. Use intent data tools like Apollo or 6sense to monitor for these signals at scale, ensuring your outreach is perfectly timed. Getting this right is a key part of learning how to analyze market trends.

9. Remember the Status Quo is Your Biggest Competitor

You often aren't losing to another agency. You're losing to "we'll just keep doing it in-house" or "we'll do nothing."

Your persona must explicitly list the "Cost of Inaction." What happens if they don't hire you? (e.g., "Technical debt bankrupts the product roadmap"). Your marketing must make the pain of staying the same greater than the pain of change.

Businesses that use this kind of data-driven personalization see up to 5 times higher click-through rates and 18 times more revenue from targeted emails. You can discover more insights about persona-based personalization on G2.

10. Your Persona Has a 6-Month Shelf Life

The market moves too fast for static personas. AI trends change what buyers value overnight. A persona document older than a year is garbage.

Schedule a "Persona Audit" every six months. Revisit your personas, review recent sales trends, and ask, "Is this still true?" This disciplined iteration is what keeps your strategy sharp.

The "How-To" Execution Guide

Forget the 20-page decks. This is a lean, three-step sprint.

Step 1: The "30-Minute Extraction" Get your Head of Sales and Head of Delivery in a room together. Ask: "Who is the easiest client to work with?" and "Who is the most profitable?" The sweet spot is where they overlap.

Step 2: The "Sales Call Scrape" Feed transcripts from lost deals into an LLM. Ask it to extract common phrases and pain points to find the real voice of your customer.

Step 3: The "One-Pager" Create a cheat sheet that fits on one screen. It must include the Job-To-Be-Done, primary fears, buying triggers, and the cost of inaction. No 20-page decks.

The Bottom Line

Personas are not a "marketing exercise"; they are a business strategy. Correctly defined personas allow you to charge premium rates because you are speaking directly to the painful, expensive problem the client is desperate to solve.

Go audit your last 5 lost deals. Did you lose them, or were you selling to a persona that doesn't exist?

At 100Signals, we distill complex market trends, intent signals, and competitive analysis into a concise report that helps dev shops build a predictable sales pipeline. We give you the clarity to know who is in-market and how to position your offers right now. Learn more about how we help agencies win better clients.