How to develop buyer personas for your business
You may be tempted to search the internet for “buyer persona templates,” but at Pragmatic Institute, we’re strong believers in approaching your buyer personas without any preconceived notions. Each company, each product team should consider its own product when determining what’s important to include in its buyer personas and what’s not.

The good news is that buyer personas should be fairly concise—there won’t be a ton of writing involved—and there will be only a handful to complete. We can’t give you a specific number—the number of buyer personas you create will depend on your market and who is involved in the purchasing decision for your product—but it’s common to have somewhere around three to five personas per product.
Here are the steps to developing your buyer personas:
Conduct interviews with potential buyers
Speak one-to-one with people in your market to learn about their roles and responsibilities, what’s important to them, what their challenges are, how they’re currently solving them, why they buy and more. Obviously, you’ll want to ask questions that relate to your product, but be careful not to ask leading questions or give in to the temptation to sell them on your product. This is a discovery mission, not a sales call. Learn our best practices for conducting buyer interviews in our Uncovering Market Problems webinar. In general, you’ll need to conduct 10 to 20 interviews for patterns to emerge.
Identify trends
Once you begin to identify themes from your one-to-one interviews, then you can start grouping types of buyers together. Who has similar job roles, responsibilities, concerns? Which people are facing similar problems? Who is trying to accomplish the same thing as someone else?
Put together an outline of your suspected buyer personas. Next, you’ll test your hypotheses.

Survey customers
Once you have some preliminary buyer personas, now it’s time to confirm (or disprove) them. Surveying current customers via an online tool or with the help of a partner like UserTesting will help you validate your hypotheses. This data, which you can collect more of because it’s quicker than one-to-one interviews, will enable you to create a clearer picture of your target market and help you finalize your buyer personas.
Write persona descriptions
Summarize your findings into three, four, five—however many personas you need to represent the themes you uncovered in your research. Just be sure to not go overboard. Having too many personas may mean you’ve failed to truly identify your target market and may end up leading to further confusion and disorganization.
Gain buy-in
Once you’ve nailed down your buyer personas, you’ll need to gain buy-in from executives and key stakeholders, including sales, marketing, development and so forth. It’s crucial that everyone on the team be on the same page when it comes to who your buyers are. Be sure to present your research along with the personas to illustrate how and why you arrived at the personas you did.
Share, share, share
Finally, share your buyer personas far and wide (internally only, of course; they’re proprietary information). Host meetings, produce written summaries and discuss your personas often. Establish a habit that every member of the team refers to the buyer personas when creating external messaging and making decisions about product development and features.