Personas

A persona is the buyer in a roleplay. It is a configured object, not a prompt someone wrote once, and the fields it carries map directly onto behaviour you will feel in the conversation.

#What a persona is made of

Role and titleWho they are and what they are accountable for. Sets what they care about and what they will happily ignore.

PersonalityHow they behave in a conversation. Brisk, sceptical, discursive, deferential. This is the texture you notice in the first thirty seconds.

Responds well toWhat opens them up. Specific numbers, peer examples, being asked about their own targets, brevity.

Responds badly toWhat closes them down. Feature lists, being sold to before being understood, jargon, an early price conversation.

Industry knowledgeHow much they already know about your category. A buyer who has evaluated three vendors behaves nothing like one who has never considered the problem, and this is the field that decides which you get.

#Where the material comes from

Personas are configured per account, because a persona who is not recognisably your buyer wastes the rep's time.

Good ones are built from things the organisation already has: the titles you actually sell to, the objections that keep coming back, the incumbent you keep displacing, the reasons deals in your business genuinely die, and where relevant a specific live opportunity's own history.

That last case is the strongest. A persona carrying a real deal's history knows what was said on the last call, which turns a rehearsal from theoretical into specific.

#Study the buyer before you practise

The Training Lab lists the personas on your account separately from the roleplay scenarios, and you can open one to read their profile: what they are accountable for, what opens them up, what shuts them down, and the topics they are currently preoccupied with.

Doing this before you run a scenario for the first time is worth the three minutes. Most reps who feel a roleplay went badly went in without knowing who they were talking to, which is not a mistake they would make before a real meeting.

#Choosing one

Pick the persona for the conversation you are about to have, not the one that will go well.

#Personas have faces

A persona can carry an avatar, so it comes up on camera as a person rather than a name. This matters more than it sounds: rehearsing eye contact and reading a face are part of the conversation you are practising for.

#Getting one added or changed

Personas are part of account configuration. If your team is meeting a buyer that no persona covers, or an existing one behaves in a way your real buyers do not, that is a configuration request rather than something changed from the rep surface.

Give your administrator the specifics: the title, what actually opens them up, what shuts them down, and a real objection in the buyer's own words. Those map straight onto the fields above. See Building roleplays.