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Our Perspective

What this means for leaders navigating growth, change or transformation in their organisation.

The Real Job

Most teams treat personas as a marketing artefact; the result is fragmented choices and diluted focus. The more useful view is this: personas are a decision system. They should clarify who you serve, what you won’t pursue, and how you’ll prove value at every step. When personas inform offer design, routes to market, and proof points, you cut noise, allocate resources with intent, and create coherence that customers can feel.

That coherence isn’t cosmetic. It determines how fast work moves, how consistently teams hand over, and how confidently leaders back priority bets. Done well, personas are the connective tissue between market opportunity and operational reality.

Decision Architecture

Map personas to the choices that matter most. Start with context, not descriptors. Anchor on situations, triggers, pains, and the outcomes people hire you for. Then translate that into the business decisions you control.

• Market: Where to play, where not to, and which segments merit disproportionate investment.
• Offer: Features to build now, later, or never; the trade‑offs you’re happy to make.
• Motion: Evidence customers need at each moment; timing for handovers across teams.

This approach turns debate into criteria. It also makes it clear what “good” looks like in the next quarter, not just in a slide deck.

Evidence And Signals

The shift is already visible. Forrester argues that sustainable growth comes when organisations organise their revenue processes around delivering customer value across the lifecycle. In other words, the persona work should show up in how you sequence proof, price, and service, not only in how you write a campaign line.

And complexity is real. Gartner notes that typical business‑to‑business decisions bring together 6–10 stakeholders, so your personas need to reflect a collective process rather than a mythical single buyer. Most organisations we work with find that when they embrace this reality, the messaging simplifies, because it speaks to shared moments of risk and reassurance rather than role labels.

Leadership Moves

Make personas a source of conviction, not consensus. Three practical implications follow.

• Choose the edges: be explicit about the contexts you won’t serve and the features you won’t build.
• Rewire proof: define the evidence each persona requires to advance a decision; instrument your pipeline to track it.
• Govern cadence: set a quarterly forum where product, sales, and marketing update personas based on signals, not opinions.
• Fund focus: tie budget to the two or three personas with line of sight to near‑term outcomes and long‑term fit.

As markets tighten and expectations rise, the organisations that embed persona‑led choices into everyday decisions will move faster, reduce friction, and compound advantage over time.

Sources:

• Forrester: To Achieve Sustainable Growth, B2B Firms Must Center Their Revenue Process On Customer Value — Forrester
• Developing Buyer Personas in B2B: The Workshop Guide for Accurate Target Audience Definitions — Gartner

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3. Evolving Your Brand Narrative for Modern Market Demands