Building buyer personas

How can you use AI to build fact-based buyer personas?

1250 € per session, excl. VAT

In short

“Building buyer personas” is a private in-person session of half a day for salespeople and sales managers or marketing teams and business developers. It helps you gather the available sources on buyers and assess their reliability. Groups of up to 12 participants, in French, with exercises on your own work cases.

Why this training?

Personas are often imagined portraits that teams rarely use. Those produced quickly with AI have the same flaw: they seem credible, but are based on nothing. This session starts with what your team actually knows about its customers: interviews, incoming enquiries, reasons for lost deals. AI helps to structure the information, identify gaps and formulate targeted messages. Running case study: ‘Verdana’, a fictional distributor of laboratory equipment, wants to target its prospects more effectively. Participants receive a set of fictional information (verbatim comments, enquiries, reasons for lost deals) to build its personas. Transfer to the workplace: The team checks the outstanding points during its next interviews and updates the personas after a month of use.

Objectives of this training

  • Gather the available sources on buyers and assess their reliability
  • Structure a persona by role, objectives, barriers, selection criteria and information sources
  • Distinguish what has been observed from what still needs to be verified
  • Write a key message and three discovery questions for each persona
  • Define how to update the personas using feedback from the field

Who is it for and what are the prerequisites?

Roles and tasks concerned

  • Salespeople and sales managers
  • Marketing teams and business developers

Prior skills

  • Have already used a generative AI assistant for a few simple tasks (AI Fundamentals level or equivalent).
  • Know your company’s sales cycle and main offerings.

What you will work on

  1. Where does the information about our buyers come from?

    Objective: Assess the available sources. Internal and external sources; reliability; common biases; what AI cannot know.

  2. Structuring the personas

    Objective: Obtain fact-based personas. Persona template; asking AI to group information without inventing any; identifying empty fields.

  3. Testing and completing

    Objective: Test the robustness of the personas. Having AI play the role of a buyer to challenge the persona; identifying questions to ask real customers.

  4. From persona to message

    Objective: Make the personas useful for prospecting. Key message, evidence, discovery questions and channels for each persona; updating rule.

What you take away

  • Map of sources on buyers
  • Two structured buyer personas
  • Usage sheet for each persona (key message and questions)
  • Rule for updating the personas

Method and assessment

  • Short inputs followed by immediate practice on the running case study.
  • Individual work followed by work in pairs, with peer review of the outputs.
  • Guided group discussion: what works, what needs correcting and what remains a human decision.
  • Preparation: Gather anonymised material: interview notes, incoming enquiries, reasons for won or lost deals. Identify two types of customer the team frequently encounters.

Observable criteria: Each element of the persona is linked to a source or marked ‘to be verified’; The personas are clearly differentiated by their objectives and selection criteria; The messages and questions can be used directly in prospecting; A simple updating rule is defined.

Frequently asked questions

Can personas be created without data?

Yes, but they remain assumptions. The session teaches you to mark them as such and verify them in the field.

Is customers’ personal data needed?

No. The information is aggregated and anonymised; no personal data is needed.

How many personas are needed?

Two to three are generally enough for a sales team; beyond that, they are rarely used.

Are the personas also useful for marketing?

Yes, they can be shared with marketing, provided the same source of truth and the same updating rule are maintained.

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