Bye Bye, Buyer Persona

Somewhere in a shared drive at almost every B2B company, there is a document called something like "Buyer Personas 2021." It has a stock photo of a person who doesn't exist. It has a name like "Engineer Eric" or "Procurement Paula." It has a list of goals, frustrations, and preferred content formats that someone compiled from a handful of interviews three years ago and has not touched since.

And the entire marketing team is still making decisions based on it.

I want to be fair here. Buyer personas were not a bad idea. When they emerged as a framework, they were solving a real problem: marketing teams were building campaigns in a vacuum, with no structured way to think about who they were actually talking to. Personas forced a conversation. They created shared language. They made "the customer" feel like a person instead of a demographic.

That was genuinely useful. For about six months after the document was written.

The problem is what happened next. The persona got finalized. It got presented to leadership. It got added to the brand guidelines. And then it stopped being a living hypothesis and became a fixed truth, a document that nobody questions because it represents work that was already done and decisions that were already made.

And markets kept moving. Buyers kept changing. The persona didn't.

Here's what a static persona actually is: a snapshot of what your customers looked like at a specific moment in time, filtered through the assumptions of whoever ran the interviews, shaped by whoever synthesized the findings, and frozen in place the moment it got turned into a PDF.

That's not customer understanding. That's customer archaeology.

The gap between "Engineer Eric" on the slide deck and the actual engineer evaluating your product today is often enormous, and the longer it's been since the persona was built, the wider that gap gets. New pressures emerge. Priorities shift. New technologies hit the market. New companies enter the space, meaning more choices and more noise for buyers to navigate. The way buyers research, evaluate, and decide evolves constantly. A document built in 2021 has almost nothing useful to say about how someone is making a purchase decision in 2026.

And yet here we are, writing messaging for Engineer Eric like he's a real person who definitely still cares about the same three things he cared about four years ago.

The deeper issue is that personas create false confidence. Once the document exists, the question "do we understand our buyers?" gets answered with a yes, because look, we have a persona. The research was done. The box is checked. Nobody asks when the last time was that someone actually talked to a customer just to understand them, with no agenda beyond listening.

That conversation, unhurried, unscripted, not tied to a campaign or a product launch, is where real audience intelligence comes from. And it's the first thing that gets cut when the calendar fills up.

So what do you replace the persona with? Not another document. Not a more detailed template. Not a persona with more fields and a prettier format.

What you replace it with is a practice.

Talk to one customer a month with no agenda. Not a sales call. Not a satisfaction survey. A conversation where the only goal is to understand how they think, what they're worried about, what they're reading, what's changed in their world recently, what they wish vendors understood about their job. Twenty minutes. No slide deck. Just questions and listening. Do this consistently for six months and your messaging will change more than any persona refresh ever produced.

Keep a running "what we're hearing" document. Not a formal research report. A living, informal record of patterns that emerge from customer conversations, sales calls, support interactions, and community discussions. What objections keep coming up? What questions does every prospect ask? What assumptions do new customers arrive with that turn out to be wrong? This document should be ugly and constantly updated, the opposite of a polished persona deck.

Treat your assumptions as hypotheses, not facts. Every belief your team holds about your buyers, what they care about, why they choose you, what almost made them not choose you, should have an expiration date. Not because those beliefs are wrong, but because markets move and assumptions don't update themselves. Build a habit of asking "is this still true?" before building a campaign around it.

The problem was never the persona itself. It was what we did with it. We turned a thinking tool into a deliverable and then stopped thinking.

Your buyers are not a document. They're not a stock photo with a name and a bullet list of frustrations. They're people in jobs that are changing, making decisions under pressures that didn't exist three years ago, getting information from places your persona never accounted for.

The only way to keep up with them is to keep asking. Not once. Not annually. Constantly.

Engineer Eric can stay in the shared drive. Just stop letting him run your marketing strategy.

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