Product teams think about user personas very naturally to drive product success. In the case of B2B products, the buyer persona also matters a lot for success. Often these buyers are not easily accessible to the product team, their goals may not be the same as the user goals, and the buyers can change the user personas’ goals. So, consider the following: 

1. Understand the buyer personas and their goals

HBR published an article by Bain & Company’s partners on what business customers want. They identified five categories: table stakes value, functional value, ease of doing business value, individual value, and inspirational value. These values range from the more objective value to the more subjective value, similar to a Maslow’s hierarchy of people’s needs. 

To connect this to product teams, I overlaid the diagram with buyer personas: procurement, legal, compliance, business unit heads, C-suite, and CEO. People make decisions, not organizations. 

2. Use the financial and business words that buyer personas use

Read the annual financial reports, 10-K, of a few of your key public customers. If your customers are in SaaS, check out SaaS business metrics published by the venture capital firm, a16z. 

Read your standard order form and the terms and conditions. This is what procurement negotiates on and legal teams redline.  

3. Connect user’s benefits to buyer’s benefits 

Empower your users to impress their stakeholders—your buyer personas—to connect the value they get from your product to the business metrics that the stakeholders care about. This can get your users promoted and deliver the “individual value” that we all care about. 

Deep understanding of the buyer persona is a key component of a product team’s commercial sense, which then leads to successful products. If you do get to meet with a buyer or an executive, communicate your message in 30 seconds.

PS: Check out more articles on building products. I write to pay it forward and to clarify my thinking.