Buyer personas are valuable sales and marketing tools that provide composite profiles of who you sell to, including their typical background and job responsibilities, their pain points/frustrations relevant to what you sell, their success metrics, their buying criteria, and their purchase influence power. These tools help ensure all marketing messaging and content resonates with your target buyers and that your sales team understands how to speak to buyers’ challenges and buying criteria. In complex B2B sales processes for which multiple people and departments are involved in the purchase decision, multiple buyer personas are developed to ensure Sales and Marketing can speak to the varying needs and criteria of the different participants and that each persona’s role in the process and purchase decision influence is understood. Buyer personas are also valuable onboarding tools for new marketing and sales hires to train them about who you’re selling to and their needs. The process to develop accurate, quality buyer personas that aren’t biased by assumptions, involves engaging actual customers in the discovery process, which is best performed by a neutral third party.