Let’s stop pretending personas are helping B2B marketing.
They’re not. And deep down, you know it.
Yes, of course we should understand our ICP, if anything, it’s the core of our job, However, because of the way personas are built today, they have almost nothing to do with understanding anyone. They exist to teach new people who that target audience is. They also end up being a kind of organizational comfort blanket, something you can point to in a slide deck and say, “We’ve done the research,” even though everyone in the room knows that document had no real influence on a single campaign that followed.
Personas do everything but help you market to your target audience effectively. Think about the last time you launched anything, a campaign, a webinar, a nurture sequence, even a simple email. Be honest with yourself for a second. Did you open your persona doc before you wrote it? Did anything inside that document actually shape the message, the angle, the hook? Did you use it to create personalized content based on industry or role?
Or did you not even think about and went straight to what you thought would work?
That gap right there is the problem.
Personas, as they’re commonly built, are not tools for decision-making. They are artifacts of process. Deliverables. Proof that marketing did something that looks like thinking.
And they’re built on a set of shortcuts that strip out the very things that actually drive decisions because they need to fit nice and neat on a PowerPoint slide.
We start by reducing a human being to a role, as if their job title is somehow a window into their psychology. “VP of Marketing.” “Head of Demand Gen.” “IT Director.” As if that tells you how they behave under pressure, what they’re afraid of getting wrong, or how they navigate the politics inside their organization. Two Heads of Demand Gen can look identical on paper and operate in completely different realities. One is under a CFO breathing down their neck about pipeline efficiency every quarter, the other is trying to rebuild trust after three failed agency engagements and a CRM that barely works, but the persona flattens both into “focused on lead generation and ROI,” which sounds right and is completely useless at the same time.
Then we move into pain points, which is where things really fall apart because this is usually just a dressed-up version of the job description. “Struggles with attribution.” “Needs more qualified leads.” “Wants better campaign performance.” None of that is insight. That’s the baseline expectation of the role. It’s like saying a restaurant owner “cares about food quality.” You haven’t learned anything, you’ve just restated the obvious in slightly more formal language.
What’s missing in the personas is the psychological understanding and the day to day emotional motivations most marketers don’t capture because it’s harder to get to and a lot less comfortable to talk about.
The part where that Head of Demand Gen knows their pipeline number is being questioned in executive meetings they’re not even in, where sales is quietly dismissing marketing-sourced leads as low quality while still demanding more of them, where they’re expected to show impact on revenue while working inside systems that were never designed to produce clean attribution in the first place. The part where they’re constantly negotiating between what leadership wants to see, what the data can actually prove, and what they themselves believe is true based on experience.
That’s the job. It’s not “needs better leads.” or “cares about ROI.”
And yet, that reality rarely makes it into a persona because it requires actually talking to people, listening long enough to hear what they don’t say in polished language, and sitting with the contradictions instead of smoothing them out into something neat and presentable.
So instead, we add another layer, channels, just to round them out and make them feel complete. “Active on LinkedIn.” “Attends webinars.” “Reads industry blogs.” Which is great, except so does everyone else, and knowing where someone spends time tells you absolutely nothing about why they would stop and pay attention to you once they’re there.
But now the persona looks finished. It checks all the boxes. It feels like something you can circulate internally without anyone pushing back too hard.
They allow marketing teams to operate inside a system that doesn’t fully trust them to think deeply about customers, so instead of saying, “We’ve spent weeks talking to prospects, here’s what we’re seeing, and it’s messy and uncomfortable,” we say, “Here are our three core personas,” and everyone breathes a little easier because it sounds structured, controlled, done.
Do you think I’m being too hard on personas? Do you think they work? Show me the proof, because what I see is some pretty weak marketing.
Campaigns that sound exactly the same as every competitor. Messaging that hits all the “right” notes and still gets ignored. Sales teams that don’t trust marketing inputs but can’t quite articulate why. Endless optimization of subject lines, ad formats, and landing pages while the core message sounds like ChatGPT before ChatGPT ever existed.
So what should we do? If not personas, then what? The personas aren’t the problem, inherently. The information captured in personas is effectively useless.
First of all, because we are dealing with humans they information isn’t static. Secondly, people don’t make decision in vacuums, they make decisions inside situations, and those situations are shaped by pressure, constraints, beliefs, and other people.
If you want something more useful than a persona, start there.
Start with pressure. What actually happens if they get this wrong? Forget the sanitized version that shows up in a case study, but consider the real consequences. The Head of Demand Gen who misses pipeline targets doesn’t just “underperform,” they lose credibility, they lose budget, and eventually they lose their seat at the table. That pressure changes how they evaluate every promise you make.
Then look at constraints. What systems are they stuck with? What budgets are already spoken for? What internal processes slow everything down? You’re not selling into an ideal scenario where the best idea wins. You’re stepping into an environment where good ideas die all the time because they don’t fit the reality of how the organization operates. Where incumbents and existing relationships trump the pain points and cost effectiveness language.
Then get honest about the audience’s internal narrative. What do they already believe about companies like yours? For example, if you’re in SaaS, there’s a decent chance your buyer has been through at least one implementation that took twice as long as promised and delivered half the value, which means every claim you make is being filtered through a layer of skepticism you didn’t create but absolutely have to deal with.
And finally, take note of the social dynamics. Who else is in the room, even when they’re not in the room? The CFO questioning spend. The sales leader pushing back on lead quality. The RevOps person quietly trying to hold everything together behind the scenes. Your buyer is not making a clean, rational decision on their own. They are navigating competing agendas, each with its own version of what “success” looks like.
None of this is going to come from digging into your current database or scrapping websites. You’re going to have to talk to people and ask them questions in order to understand, not just to check boxes. This is real deep work and it’s not easy. But it’s also the real job of marketing. We have to stop hiding behind technology and whatever can be done “quickly and easily”. We can’t run from talking to real people in real life.
When you build your personas this way, your marketing starts to sound different. It finally starts reflecting your audience’s reality and is speaking to something real.
Image how much harder your messaging could hit. What if instead of saying, “Drive more qualified leads with better targeting and automation,” you might say, “Get 1 qualified sale, instead of 50 junk MQLs with one simple process you can implement in minutes.”
That doesn’t just describe a solution. It recognizes a reality.
And recognition is what gets attention, especially in a market where everyone is saying roughly the same thing with slightly different wording.
The same way most buyers feel misunderstood inside their organizations, judged on outcomes without anyone fully appreciating the constraints they’re working within, is exactly how a lot of marketers feel too. You’re asked to deliver results, often with incomplete data, shifting priorities, and internal skepticism about your function.
And yet, when it comes time to understand your own audience, you flatten them into a persona that strips away the very complexity you wish people understood about you. There has to be some empathy or we are going to miss some critical lightbulb moments.
So no, the answer isn’t to “improve” your personas or add another layer of detail to the same broken model.
We have to stop pretending a summarized profile can capture what is fundamentally a dynamic, pressured, human situation.
If your persona doesn’t change how you think, have you questioning your assumptions, how you write, and how you position your offer, then it isn’t insight.
It’s decoration as a slide and that’s not going to help anyone close deals.
Follow Moni Oloyede at https://www.linkedin.com/in/moni-oloyede/
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