If You're Talking to Everyone, No One Can Hear You

Imagine walking into a room where everyone is talking at once. No one's listening, no one's connecting, and the noise just compounds. That's what it feels like to be on the receiving end of marketing that isn't targeted.

It's also what it feels like to run marketing that isn't working — the activity is there, but nothing is landing. In almost every case, the root cause isn't the creative or the channel or the budget. It's that the message isn't built for anyone specific.

The fix is focus. And customer personas are one of the most practical tools for getting there.

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Why Specificity Is a Competitive Advantage

Most B2B companies I work with have a version of the same problem: their messaging tries to speak to every possible buyer, which means it resonates with no one in particular.

This is understandable. When you're close to your own business, it's tempting to hedge — to keep the language broad enough that you don't accidentally exclude someone who might buy. But broad messaging doesn't feel inclusive to a buyer. It feels generic. And generic doesn't earn attention or trust.

The businesses that grow consistently are the ones that have made a deliberate choice about who they're for. Their messaging speaks directly to a specific type of buyer in a specific situation, which makes it feel relevant — and relevant content gets read, shared, and acted on.

Customer personas are how you operationalize that specificity across your entire organization.

What a Customer Persona Actually Is

A customer persona is a detailed profile of a specific type of buyer your business serves. It goes well beyond basic demographics. A useful persona captures:

• Who they are — title, industry, company size, where they are in their career or business lifecycle
• What they're responsible for — the goals their performance is measured against
• What keeps them up at night — the problems, pressures, and risks they're actively managing
• How they make decisions — who else is involved, what their process looks like, what concerns need to be resolved before they commit
• What they value in a partner or vendor — speed, expertise, trust, proven results, something else entirely

The goal isn't to create a fictional character. It's to distill what you know about your best clients into a profile that can guide how you market, sell, and serve.

Why Personas Matter More in B2B

In B2B, buying decisions are rarely made by one person. They involve multiple stakeholders, longer timelines, and higher stakes. That means the cost of misaligned messaging is higher — a campaign that attracts the wrong type of buyer wastes not just marketing budget but sales time.

Personas help by giving your entire team a shared language for who you're trying to reach and why. Marketing uses them to target campaigns and build content. Sales uses them to personalize outreach and anticipate objections. Leadership uses them to make product and positioning decisions. When everyone is working from the same understanding of the customer, the whole organization becomes more coherent.

B2B Persona Examples Relevant to Growth-Stage Companies

Rather than generic archetypes, here are the types of personas I commonly encounter when working with fintech, financial services, and B2B companies:

The Growth-Minded Founder Typically leading a company with $2M–$15M in revenue, this person has built something that works and is now trying to scale it. They've been doing marketing themselves or relying on a generalist, and they've hit the ceiling of what that approach can produce. They're not looking for more activity — they're looking for clarity on what to prioritize and confidence that their marketing investment is tied to revenue outcomes. They move quickly when they trust someone.

The Financial Services Executive Under Pressure This buyer is leading marketing — or overseeing it — at an RIA, broker-dealer, or fintech company. They operate in a compliance-heavy environment where every external communication requires review, which slows everything down. They're trying to build brand, generate qualified leads, and demonstrate ROI to leadership, often without a large team. They need strategic thinking more than execution capacity, and they value partners who understand their regulatory constraints without having to be educated on them.

The B2B Revenue Leader This is often a VP of Sales or a CEO who owns both sales and marketing in a company that hasn't yet separated the functions. They know their pipeline isn't as strong as it should be and suspect marketing could be doing more — but they're not sure what "more" should look like. They're skeptical of marketing that doesn't connect clearly to pipeline and revenue, and they respond to specificity and proof over theory.

These are starting points, not universal templates. Your personas should be built from your actual client data, your sales conversations, and your own pattern recognition — not borrowed from a generic framework.

How to Build Personas That Are Actually Useful

Start with your best clients. Look at the clients you've worked with who got the most value from what you do, who were easiest to work with, and who you'd clone if you could. What do they have in common? What problem were they trying to solve when they found you? What made them ready to move?

Talk to them. The most useful persona data comes from real conversations, not assumptions. Ask your best clients what they were struggling with before working with you, how they found you, what made them decide to move forward. Their words will do more for your messaging than any framework.

Identify the patterns. Look across your client base for common roles, industries, company stages, and problem types. Where do you see clustering? Those clusters are your personas.

Document the buying process. For each persona, map out how they typically make decisions: who else is involved, what questions they ask, what concerns come up late in the process, what would make them walk away. This turns your persona from a profile into a sales tool.

Revisit them regularly. Markets shift, your business evolves, and the clients you want to attract in year three may be different from year one. Personas aren't a one-time exercise — they're a living document.

How to Put Personas to Work

Once you have clear personas, everything downstream gets easier:

Content and messaging — You know what to write about, because you know what your buyers are actually thinking about. You can address their specific concerns rather than speaking in generalities.

Channel selection — You know where to show up, because you know where your buyers spend their attention and how they research decisions.

Sales conversations — Your team can personalize outreach and anticipate objections because they understand the buyer's world before the first conversation starts.

Lead qualification — You have a clear picture of who fits and who doesn't, which means less time spent on conversations that were never going to close.

Product and service development — You can make decisions about what to build or offer based on what your best buyers actually need, not what seems broadly appealing.

The Bottom Line

If your marketing feels like shouting into a void, the problem usually isn't the volume — it's the aim. Getting specific about who you're talking to, what they care about, and what they need to hear is the single highest-leverage thing most B2B companies can do to improve marketing performance.

Clarity on the customer creates alignment across the business. And alignment is what turns marketing activity into momentum.

If you're not sure your personas are as sharp as they could be, let's talk.

Originally published March 2023. Updated May 2025.

Katie Godbout is a fractional CMO with nearly 20 years of B2B marketing experience, specializing in financial services, fintech, and SaaS. She helps growth-stage companies build marketing strategy that connects directly to revenue.