19 buyer persona survey questions for strategy insights

A buyer persona is a carefully researched and fully thought-out customer profile that explains who your target customer is, what they do, the challenges they face, the goals they have, and how they make decisions.

To create a useful customer persona, or set of them, you will need to select insightful buyer persona survey questions that uncover the details that matter. Here are some tips for creating multiple buyer personas for your brands. 

Why are buyer personas important?

Creating an accurate buyer persona is a great way to truly understand your target audience and share that understanding across teams.

All too often companies talk about themselves, what they make and what they do. It is easy to talk about what you know. Such an approach does not really connect with an audience. To be customer-centric, you’ll need to know your ideal customer as well as you know your own company.

That is where multiple buyer personas come in.

Engineers in product development can better create solutions to potential customer needs and sales reps can better turn prospects into buyers with this kind of information. Marketing can better understand how to reach and persuade new and current customers. A customer persona helps you to truly stand in your customers’ shoes and appeal to them in a genuine and relevant way.

It is not uncommon for a business to manage multiple buyer personas, particularly for complex products. Many voices can be part of the buying process, from users to executives with budgets to purchasing specialists. It is helpful to understand each one and to know how they interact and influence buying decisions.

What is a buyer persona survey?

While you can glean some B2B data about customers from your databases, talking to sales reps, and exploring LinkedIn profiles, you will only be scratching the surface. For real insights, you will need to talk to actual customers and explore their wants, needs, and motivations. You can use different types of survey questions to get answers to insights you need, like customer retention survey questions, win loss survey questions, and of course buyer persona survey questions. 

Buyer persona surveys will ask questions that will elicit detailed insights that bring your profiles to life and that reveal information that can give you a competitive advantage. The specific personal survey questions you will ask will depend on your existing knowledge and your business, however here are some ideas to get you started.

Essential buyer persona questions to clarify your target audience

Capture professional information over personal information

For B2B customer profiles, you don’t need to know things about spouses, children, income or other personal demographics. What matters more is professional information such as::

• In what industry and company do you work?
• What is your job title and role?
• Where did you start in your career and what is your future career path?
• What training and skills do you have?

Typical activities and responsibilities

You will want to know what their work life is like.

• Describe a typical day.
• Who do you report to?
• Who do you manage?
• Please describe your main responsibilities and common tasks.

Goals and challenges

You want to understand personal motivations as well as professional ones.

• What are your personal and career goals and priorities?
• What metrics do you use to measure success?
• What are your current and upcoming needs? What challenges do you face?
• What is important to you professionally? 
• When making decisions about products and services like ours, what are the key factors?

Information habits

Your sales and marketing efforts will be more effective if your messaging finds the ideal customer where they spend their time and attention.

• Where do you get information about your business and useful products and services?
• How do you communicate internally and externally (with customers, partners, suppliers)?
• What technology and tools do you use in the course of your work?
• What media do you regularly access?
• What events do you attend?
• Of what association are you a member?

Uncovering deep insights from persona surveys with NewtonX

Creating a set of buyer personas is both an art and a science. You’ll find it both efficient and effective to work with a team that specializes in B2B market research services and can keep your persona surveys focused. NewtonX can help you find the right people and ask the right questions. Contact us today if you have any questions about buyer persona surveys that can support high performing strategies across your business.