A buyer persona is a research-based, semi-fictional profile of an individual decision-maker inside the target customer. It captures role, goals, pain points, success criteria, information sources, objections, and typical buying behavior, used to shape messaging, content, sales scripts, and product decisions around how that specific role actually buys. It differs from ICP in scope: ICP describes the account or household; the persona describes the human inside it.
A useful persona is built from real customer research, typically a combination of 10 to 20 structured interviews with closed-won customers (the actual buyers), churned customers (the buyers whose problem you didn't solve), and lost prospects (the buyers who chose a com...