A modern approach to personas: the Persona Levels framework
In T2D3, Stijn and I shared the P1/P2/P3 model—an alternative to traditional personas and a method for structuring campaign messaging and content.
The Kalungi team has introduced the approach at 200+ software companies, and our book has exposed thousands more to the idea.
Lately, I’ve been socializing the concept in a new setting, which has highlighted some loose ends in the source material and helped me refine some of the ideas in more nuanced (and often more complete) ways.
This is my updated thinking.
Traditional personas (the old way)
Traditional B2B marketing personas often fall short of their promise. Creating them takes a lot of time, and you end up with overly detailed profiles that are built once, rarely referenced, and often snickered at by sellers because they’re kind of close to and often forgotten.
You’ve probably seen these: “Suzy, a Marketing Director who drops her kids off at school at 6 am, yap, yap...” They’re hyper-specific and rigid, and you kind of scratch your head and chuckle at them because they’re basic and don’t give you any real foundation for doing good work.
It’s not my goal to shame anyone for building these. I’ve made them, too. A lot of traditional marketing academia suggests this approach. But over time, I’ve realized its limitations—especially when it comes to adoption.
If there’s anything I’ve learned in my career
Persona Levels (the new way)
“Ok, you just shat on the old way; you better have something good to replace it with,”—I do! It’s called the Persona Levels framework.
It’s simple and flexible—the Occam’s Razored version of persona development.
It promotes the idea that there are three fundamental roles on a B2B buying team:
P1: Hands-on IC users, who prioritize functionality & ease of use
P2: Team leads, who prioritize operational efficiency and team alignment.
P3: Strategic managers, who prioritize significant outcomes like ROI, scalability, and risk mitigation.
The Persona Levels framework does a few things:
It creates a single consistent language that’s shared across teams. When I say “P2,” everyone on my team knows who I’m talking about, and what level of abstraction is needed, regardless of vertical or market segment.
It doesn’t multiply exponentially with market complexity, like traditional personas. You don’t need to rebuild the wheel for every campaign; you just update relevant titles for targeting purposes and adapt messaging to fit each P1, P2, or P3 within the relevant context.
It supports a clear messaging hierarchy. P1 personas need high-level, strategic content. P2 personas respond to tactical, actionable insights. P3 personas require hands-on, practical solutions.
It works for (almost) any program—ad campaigns, content creation, ABM messaging, you name it.