Getting to Know Your Customer
Getting to Know Your Customer tests whether you can turn research - not assumptions - into buyer personas and a clear picture of the buying committee.
Personas are research artifacts
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer built from real interviews, sales-call notes, form data, and CRM records. HubSpot's persona framework asks you to document role and job title, goals, challenges and pain points, watering holes (where the person consumes information), and common objections. A persona is only useful if it is specific enough to change a headline.
The buying committee
In B2B one persona is rarely enough. Map the economic buyer, the champion, the end user, and the blocker - each asks different questions and needs different content. A negative persona (who you explicitly do not serve) is as valuable as a positive one because it prevents wasted spend.
Jobs to be done
Beyond demographics, describe the progress a buyer is trying to make: "When I ___, I want to ___, so I can ___." This keeps content focused on the problem rather than the product.
Worked example
A payroll provider interviews 40 customers and hears two distinct stories: a 12-person startup founder who wants the fastest possible setup, and a 200-person HR manager who wants compliance reporting. Reasoning: these are different personas with different search terms and different demo requirements. The team writes two persona sheets and splits the blog cluster accordingly instead of averaging them into one vague "HR professional."
Traps
Inventing personas in a conference room; relying on demographics alone; confusing a segment (a list) with a persona (a model); writing persona documents that never reach the content brief.