Why your technical buyer persona is useless (and how to fix it)
If your technical buyer persona just says “CTO at a mid-sized SaaS company”, congratulations—you’ve built a completely useless persona.
Job titles don’t tell you how technical buyers think, what influences their decisions, or how they actually evaluate software.
That’s why most B2B companies struggle to sell to technical buyers—they’re using personas that are too vague, too shallow, and completely disconnected from how buying decisions really happen.
Let’s fix that. In this article, I’ll break down:
The biggest mistakes in technical buyer personas (and how to fix them)
Who’s actually involved in the decision-making process (it’s never just one person)
How to create a persona that actually helps your team close deals
Why your biggest competitor is often ‘DIY’—and how to combat it
By the end, you’ll have a real, actionable framework for building a technical buyer persona that actually helps you sell.
Why Most B2B Buyer Personas Fail
The biggest problem with most personas? They assume the buyer makes the decision alone. In technical sales, that’s never true.
Here’s how a real-world technical buying process works:
End Users (Engineers, Developers, Architects) take a thorough look at usability, documentation, and flexibility. If they love your product, they’ll push leadership to consider it.
Technical Decision-Makers (CTOs, VPs of Engineering, IT Directors) care more about scalability, cost, and integration. They’re going to ask the end users questions about long-term fit. Then they’ll investigate costs, ROI, scalability, and other business concerns.
Procurement, Security, and Compliance Teams care about risk, contracts, and vendor lock-in. These teams can kill a deal late in the process if they’re not involved (or educated) early enough.
You need to account for all of these groups. When building your persona, define who influences the decision, who approves the purchase, and what each stakeholder cares about. Below is the framework I use for persona development.
How to Build a Buyer Persona That Helps You Sell
Step 1: Understand What Technical Buyers Actually Care About
Technical buyers aren’t interested in flashy marketing. They don’t make decisions based on hype—they’re focused on feasibility, integration, security, support, and flexibility. They’re also highly logical, skeptical of vendor claims, and usually pressed for time.
When evaluating solutions, they ask questions like:
• Does this integrate with our existing tech stack?
• Is this product secure, compliant, and reliable?
• What kind of support will we get when something inevitably breaks?
• Will this solution actually make my team’s job easier, or will it create more headaches?
If you’re not addressing these concerns head-on, your messaging will fall flat. The best way to ensure you’re hitting the right pain points? Talk to real customers and prospects. If you’re guessing, you’re already off track.
Step 2: Identify the Key Decision-Makers and Influencers
Just because someone is evaluating your product doesn’t mean they have the final say. In many cases, technical buyers are gathering information and need to get buy-in from other stakeholders.
For example, the engineers and developers who will actually use the product care about usability, documentation, and flexibility. Meanwhile, CTOs, VPs of Engineering, and IT Directors are more concerned with scalability, cost, and integration with the company’s long-term plans. On top of that, procurement, security, and compliance teams will scrutinize risk, contracts, and vendor reliability.
If your marketing and sales materials only speak to one of these groups, you risk stalling deals. A developer might love your product, but if the security team has concerns or leadership doesn’t see the ROI, the deal won’t go anywhere. Understanding all the players involved will help you create content and messaging that addresses everyone’s priorities.
Step 3: Build a Persona Snapshot
To make your persona truly useful, you need to go beyond job titles and clearly define who your buyer is, what motivates them, and how they make decisions. This isn’t about creating a fictional character—it’s about capturing the patterns and behaviors of real buyers in a way that helps your sales and marketing teams engage them effectively.
A strong persona snapshot should include details like their background, career path, and level of industry expertise. It should also outline demographic factors such as the typical company size and team structure they work within. More importantly, it should define their decision-making style—do they make independent calls, or do they need consensus from multiple stakeholders? Are they risk-averse, or do they embrace cutting-edge technology?
Understanding their motivations is just as critical. Some buyers are driven by social factors like their industry reputation. Others make decisions based on fear of failure, prioritizing security and compliance above all else. Then there are those who are purely functional in their thinking, focused on efficiency and cost savings.
A persona should also outline what success looks like to them. Are they looking to reduce costs, improve system integrations, or cut down on security risks? The better you define these success metrics, the easier it becomes to position your product as the solution they need.
Step 4: Define Their Buying Journey
One of the biggest mistakes sales teams make is focusing only on the decision phase. But technical buyers often spend months researching and evaluating solutions before they’re ready to commit.
Their journey typically starts with the awareness phase, where they recognize a problem that needs solving. From there, they move into the consideration phase, where they begin exploring different solutions and uncovering potential concerns or objections. This is when they start asking questions like, What solutions are other companies using? What challenges do they face with those options?
Finally, they reach the decision phase, where they’re weighing their options. But it’s not just a matter of choosing between you and your direct competitors. They’re also considering open-source alternatives, AI-generated solutions, and DIY fixes. If your messaging isn’t strong enough to convince them that your solution is the best fit, they might choose an option that costs them nothing.
If your marketing and sales teams aren’t aligned with each stage of this journey, you’ll lose deals before you even realize they were on the table.
Step 5: Understand Their Daily Pain Points
If you want your messaging to land, you need to understand what your buyers deal with on a daily basis. What does an average day look like for them? What are their biggest frustrations?
For some, it’s being buried under compliance paperwork. Others spend their time dealing with outages that impact customers and put them under immense pressure. Many have to constantly justify software purchases to non-technical executives who don’t fully understand the problem they’re trying to solve. And almost all of them have had painful experiences with vendors who overpromise and underdeliver—especially when it comes to documentation and support.
When your messaging speaks directly to these frustrations, it immediately resonates. If a buyer feels like “this company actually understands my challenges,” they’ll be far more likely to engage with your content and sales team.
Step 6: Use LinkedIn to Find Real People Who Match Your Persona
The best way to make sure your persona reflects reality is to study real people. LinkedIn is a goldmine for this.
Start by searching for job titles like Director of Engineering or VP of DevOps within your target industries. Look at where these people have worked and what their career paths have looked like. Read their posts and comments to see what topics they care about and what challenges they discuss. This will give you invaluable insight into how they think and what influences their decisions.
You can also use this research to build lookalike audiences—groups of similar prospects who are likely to have the same needs and pain points. When your persona is built on real-world data instead of assumptions, your marketing and sales strategies will be far more effective.
Make Your Persona a Real Sales and Marketing Tool
A great technical buyer persona isn’t just a document that sits in a folder—it’s a tool that actively improves your sales and marketing efforts. When done right, it helps you write better sales emails that resonate, create more relevant content that speaks to real pain points, and build targeted campaigns that reach the right people at the right time.
If you get this right, everything else—marketing, sales, and conversions—becomes easier.
Next, we’ll dive into the technical buyer’s journey in more detail, breaking down exactly what makes them tick and how to create content that guides them through their decision-making process. Stay tuned.
