MCP

Buyer personas

TL;DR

  • The profile picks the company; the persona picks the human. Both are needed, and they fail in different ways.
  • Write personas around the problem the person owns and the language they use for it — not around demographics or invented biographies.
  • Seniority has a measurable cost: C-level recipients are 30.2% less likely to reply than non-executives (2026, 1M+ sales cycles) [1].

What a persona is for

A persona exists to answer one question: what would make this specific person stop and reply? Its useful contents are therefore the problem they are accountable for, how that problem shows up in their week, what they have probably already tried, what they can approve on their own, and the words they would use for all of it.

Its useless contents are the ones that dominate most persona documents: age, tenure, a stock photo, "drinks a lot of coffee". None of them change a sentence you write.

Job title is a proxy, and a poor one

The same title means different things at different company sizes — a head of marketing at fifteen people does the work; at fifteen hundred they approve budgets for people who do the work. So a persona has to be anchored to a company size band, which is why it depends on the profile (Ideal customer profile).

Titles are also inconsistent enough across companies that filtering on them alone produces a list full of near-misses. Where you can, filter on the function — who would own this problem — and use titles as the searchable approximation.

The seniority trade-off

Going higher gets you authority and worse odds. The 30.2% reply-rate penalty for executives is consistent with what a large 2026 corpus finds by role: founders and owners reply most (0.57%), C-level less (0.42%), and VPs least of all (0.32%) [1, 2].

Which suggests a rule with an exception. The rule: aim at the person who feels the problem rather than the person who signs, and let them route you upward — the referral motion in Referrals and "not now" works far better than a cold approach to the executive. The exception: in very small companies the founder is the person who feels the problem, and they are also the most responsive group in the data.

Multiple personas, one campaign

If your profile contains two personas with genuinely different problems, they need different sequences. Sending one email that speaks to both produces copy general enough to speak to neither — the recognizable failure mode being an opening line about "helping teams like yours".

Where two personas share a problem but hold different positions on it — the person who lives with it daily and the person who pays to fix it — keep the problem constant and change the framing: operational detail for one, consequence and cost for the other. That is a messaging-strategy decision rather than a copy one, and it belongs with Messaging frameworks.

Keep them evidence-based

The strongest persona material comes from things the person actually said: sales calls, support tickets, their own posts and talks, review sites. Language lifted from a real buyer outperforms language invented for a fictional one, and it is the raw material for the research step in Research signals.

References

  1. Gong Labs — Do execs really reply to cold email? (1M+ sales cycles, Jan 2026)
  2. Belkins — Cold email response rates (7.5M emails sent in 2025, updated Jun 2026)