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Buyer persona templates are documents that help businesses create customer avatars to guide their sales and marketing efforts. The templates usually include sections like goals, hobbies, and any others that sellers and marketers use to personalize their efforts to their ideal customers’ needs and identify high-quality customers. Businesses often also use templates to create negative buyer personas so salespeople can easily recognize and disqualify bad-fit leads.
We’ve created a free general buyer persona template that any salesperson can use to build their buyer persona, regardless of their industry or business type. The template contains sections for a name and image, demographics, goals and motivations, challenges or pain points, fears, hobbies and interests, and communication channels. Feel free to tailor the template to fit your business’s specific needs, then fill in the blanks by interviewing customers, sending surveys, reviewing CRM data, and similar methods.
There are certain components that are often included in buyer persona templates — these sections are represented in our free general template. Within each section, the finished buyer persona will have anywhere from 3–8 bullet points. But some buyer personas might use a table or paragraph format instead. Let’s dive into each of the components to learn more about why they’re important and what intel they reveal:
Most marketers will give their persona a name that relates to their buying behavior or key trait. Names could be Technology Tristian for an IT professional or Runner Rebecca for a running hobbyist. They’ll also include a stock image, either animated or of a real person, to give life to the persona. The name and image help make your persona seem more human and realistic.
Demographics tell you the age, location, gender, occupation, income, and marital status of the fictional ideal buyer you’re creating. Unlike the demographics in a customer profile, where you’d find age ranges and multiple locations, the buyer persona specifically describes one person, so you’ll write an exact age and a single location. This section helps you know the buyer as an individual rather than a set of data points.
Hobbies and interests explain what a person likes to do or learn about in their free time. Hobbies could be surfing or going out to expensive dinners with colleagues. An interest might be improving as a content marketer or a home cook. The more marketers know about their lifestyle, the better marketing content they can create. Sales reps can also freshen up on their hobbies for small talk purposes.
Motivations represent the deep desires driving a person to take action, either in their personal life (B2C) or professional life (B2B). For example, a marketing manager's motivation may be to excel in her career. Her goal would then serve that motivation, such as doubling sales revenue from her social marketing efforts. Once you know a person’s motivations and goals, you can craft messaging that grabs their attention.
This section describes the common issues your ideal buyer is suffering. It could be challenges blocking them from reaching their goals or just nagging pains they want gone. Knowing the problems on top of mind for your ideal buyer will help you focus your pitch on how you’ll eliminate these struggles.
Fears represent the worries weighing on your ideal buyer.. Think of the specific outcomes that they dread. In the B2B space, this could be losing their job, failing to hit quota, or missing out on their promotion. For B2C, an ideal buyer might fear getting old or losing their house. If you know the buyer’s fears, you can position your product or service as something that precludes these frightening and undesirable outcomes.
This describes which social media and communication channels the person usually uses and how they get their information. Knowing where your buyer is active online will enable you to meet them with your marketing content, ads, and other sales material. And, knowing how and when they like to be contacted will give reps the best chance of connecting with them.
Think about how you’d describe a good lead and a bad one using the above components. That way you can create positive and negative buyer personas. For example, a negative buyer persona might list a challenge that many leads incorrectly think your company solves. Having the sketches of the profiles of both an ideal buyer and an unfavorable one will help you better qualify leads.
Different types of companies will find different categories of data helpful to them. While a B2C financial services rep would want the specifics of an individual’s financial situation, a B2B SaaS brand would not. So it’s important to use an industry-specific buyer persona template alongside your generic one. You could also take the best parts of two and mix them together. Below are seven templates you can use to create your positive and negative buyer personas.
Who Should Use It: B2B product or service companies that want an easy-to-read buyer persona that helps salespeople see the basic challenges, goals, and attributes of an ideal buyer.
Why It Works: This brief and simple template is designed for easy reference. It includes a bulleted background section that lists the buyer’s age, gender, occupation, marital status, education, and location, and a paragraph explaining the person’s professional goals and challenges. Though surface level, this information enables the salesperson to form a solid understanding of how to best position their product or service to an ideal buyer.
Who Should Use It: B2B businesses that want to take a deep dive into a professional’s job responsibilities and capture their motivations and objections to purchasing your product or service.
Why It Works: This buyer persona template allows you to create an exhaustive profile of a potential buyer with its many sections: demographics, job responsibilities, professional goals, challenges, lifestyle, fears, and common objections. Knowing the job responsibilities of an ideal buyer helps salespeople and marketers create more relatable content. And understanding potential concerns helps sellers prepare effective rebuttals to overcome the common objections.
Who Should Use It: B2C product or service companies that want a document that their salespeople can quickly reference to gain insight into the psychological makeup of an ideal buyer.
Why It Works: This template is focused on sharing the basic information about an ideal buyer that would help a B2C salesperson sell and persuade them. It does so by highlighting a hobby that the person loves, their hobby-based goal, and the struggles they’re having reaching it. With that data, the seller can easily understand the wants of the buyer and craft messaging that demonstrates how you’ll help them get these wants.
Who Should Use It: B2C product and services businesses that need an in-depth description of their ideal buyer to make better marketing, product, and sales decisions.
Why It Works: This buyer persona template tells you how, where, and when to market and sell to your target buyer by capturing an individual’s demographics, finances, daily life, hopes and desires, worries, influences, and online activity. The influence section is especially handy for marketers and advertisers, as it tells you how and where to reach leads in a way that motivates them to take action and buy. And sellers can use the social media section for social selling.
Who Should Use It: B2C financial services companies wanting a comprehensive description of an ideal buyer that includes sections detailing their financial life.
Why It Works: This template focuses on the financial aspects of a potential buyer, including sections for demographics, financial situation, money habits, financial goals, challenges, and financial fears. All these sections make it easy for salespeople to spot and qualify potential leads. And with fields like risk averseness and spending habits, sellers can get into the minds of their potential buyers and plan more personalized calls and presentations.
Who Should Use It: B2B SaaS product companies looking to create a comprehensive buyer persona that takes into account a buyer’s technological situation.
Why It Works: This template includes sections for documenting a buyer’s demographics, lifestyle, professional goals, challenges, technology use, and communication channels. Within the technology section, you’ll list an ideal buyer’s current tech stack, complementary tools, and knowledge of your software type. With this information sales reps can pinpoint leads who would be a good fit and practice talking technology during mock sales calls.
Who Should Use It: Product or service sales professionals in fitness, health, supplements, or wellness industries looking to outline their ideal buyer’s lifestyle and health-related problems and desires.
Why It Works: Focusing on the health of an ideal buyer, this template has sections for demographics, health desires, health pain points, wellness data like BMI, lifestyle, and health-related fears. Knowing things like your ideal buyer’s chronic conditions or eating and exercise habits will help you spot them during lead generation activities. It will also help you come up with a plan that helps them reach their health goals.
If one of these templates matches your industry, feel free to use the template verbatim. If not, start with our free general template, then add or swap out sections according to the information in the templates above that would be most helpful for your business to know about your buyers.
If you create your own buyer persona template from scratch, there are some best practices to follow to ensure you create a template that’s easy to fill out and effective once complete. These tips are to add specialized sections, update the template regularly, craft more than one buyer persona, and reference your customer profile during the creation process.
If you follow the above steps, you should have one or multiple templates that help your marketing, sales, and product teams understand their target buyer. It will also help you perform more productive lead generation activities like outreach and qualification.
Buyer personas — categorical descriptions of an ideal buyer — help businesses understand their customers and make more strategic, customer-focused decisions. To streamline the creation process, businesses often use buyer persona templates that come with common sections like demographics, challenges, fears, and goals. If however, you want to start from scratch, check out our article on creating your buyer persona for further instruction.
Sam is a former SaaS sales rep turned freelance writer. He spent his career selling real estate technology to C-suite executives before switching over to blogging, where he now covers sales, marketing, and small business topics. Sam specializes in lead generation, lead nurturing, and deal closing articles for Selling Signals. When he’s not researching the latest sales trends, he’s either penning short stories, hiking, or reading in NYC’s Washington Square Park.
Selling Signals delivers actionable advice for sales and marketing professionals. Learn strategies that help you hit targets, strengthen customer relationships, and win more business. Get expert advice on lead generation, sales processes, CRM software, sales management, and account management directly to your inbox.
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