Essay

The Buyer Persona Manifesto

Adele Revella, Buyer Persona Institute Free Beginner

Revella more or less codified the term "buyer persona" for B2B, and this free manifesto is her own definition, not someone summarizing her. It is useful specifically because it draws a hard line between a persona (an individual's buying insight) and firmographic targeting (your ICP), which is the exact confusion our question is trying to clear up. Skim it for the distinction, you don't need the full consulting framework.

  • A buyer persona should be built from what real buyers said in interviews, not from guessed demographics.
  • A persona explains the buyer's decision process, not just their job title.
  • Five buying insights (priority, success factors, barriers, journey, criteria) matter more than a fictional bio.

The question it answers

  1. What's the difference between an ICP, a buyer persona, and a target market?

Read with it

  1. The single best thing ever written on customer conversations. It teaches you to ask about the customer's life and past... momtestbook.com Book · ~130 pages The Mom Test Rob Fitzpatrick
  2. The permission slip to recruit users by hand, do things manually, and deliver 'insanely great' experiences to your first few... paulgraham.com Essay · ~15 min read Do Things That Don't Scale Paul Graham
  3. Market size is meaningless until you know exactly who you're for, and Lenny turns that into a concrete, repeatable ICP exercise... Lenny's Newsletter Article · ~15 min read How to identify your ideal customer profile (ICP) Lenny Rachitsky
  4. A clear, operator-written guide from a respected SaaS-analytics company on defining and using an ICP to focus scarce startup... ChartMogul Blog Article · ~12 min read Without an ideal customer profile (ICP), your growth is just guesswork ChartMogul
  5. One of the few pieces that clearly untangles ICP vs persona vs JTBD without jargon, so founders stop conflating them. Useful as... netretention.io Article · ~14 min read Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs), ABM, JTBD and Personas: knowing your customer Net Retention
  6. The author of Crossing the Chasm explaining beachhead selection in plain, modern language, the fastest way to absorb the... Lenny's Podcast / Lenny's Newsletter Podcast · ~75 min Geoffrey Moore on finding your beachhead, crossing the chasm, and dominating a market Lenny Rachitsky & Geoffrey Moore
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