Introduction
According to Statista – “Consumer Goods market is projected to amount to US$4.54tn in 2025”. Many people are now finding and researching brands through online channels like social media platforms and community forums. After reading through multiple reviews and observing how the brands interact with their customers online, they are approaching a brand to learn more about their services and products. This is both a boon and a curse for consumer-packaged goods (CPG) brands looking to create buyer personas. These customer personas will help them create strategies to increase sales and revenue.
A McKinsey research shows – “an increase in social media use for product research (32 percent, on average, compared with 27 percent in 2023). In emerging markets, the figure is especially high: Roughly half of surveyed consumers in India research products on social media before they make a purchase. Meanwhile, 29 percent of surveyed consumers in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States say that they have purchased a brand that they learned about through social media.”
Simply having a great product isn’t enough. You need to understand who you’re selling to. This is where creating a buyer persona becomes essential. To learn how to create a buyer persona, you need to have unfragmented data on demography, their motivation, their challenges and understanding how your business can solve their problems or provide them with a solution that they did not know they wanted.
Creating a buyer persona can improve your sales strategy. It will help you tailor your marketing, messaging, and product development to meet your target audience’s specific needs. If you’re looking for strategies to increase sales, creating a buyer’s persona is the way to go!
In this blog, we’ll explore how to create a buyer persona in just five clear steps. You’ll learn how to gather relevant data, segment your audience, and build detailed profiles that help you develop a sales strategy that resonates and performs leveraging Salesforce Agentforce.
Why Do Consumer Goods Companies Need to Create Buyer Personas?
CPG) companies need to reconfigure their business model that will be more ‘customer-centric” rather than “revenue-centric”. With consumers’ demands and feedback dominating the major success of a brand, CPG companies need to understand their customers better. They need to figure out how they can connect with customers across channels without compromising customer service.
Source: McKinsey
Creating buyer personas enables CPG companies to:
- Segment customers meaningfully
- Prioritize high-value opportunities
- Tailor messaging across product lines
- Understand what drives purchases
Positive vs. Negative Buyer Personas
A positive buyer persona represents someone who aligns perfectly with your product and brand values. For instance, if you’re a plant-based snack company, your ideal customer might be a health-conscious customer who values sustainability and is willing to pay a premium for organic ingredients. They are a good fit for your business as they will not only buy your product, but also, they will advocate for it.
On the other hand, a negative buyer persona might be someone who finds your product too expensive, isn’t concerned with ingredients, or prefers convenience-store brands. These customers aren’t just unlikely to convert; they could strain your support teams, leave poor reviews, or will add negative value to your brand.
Key Benefits of Creating Buyer Personas for CPG Companies
Precision Targeting & Smarter Marketing Spend
One of the most immediate advantages of creating buyer personas is improved targeting. When you know exactly who you’re speaking to, you can easily tailor all your marketing and outreach efforts to satisfy the needs of your customers. Instead of creating marketing campaigns or your sales team spending time on useless sales conversations, you can focus on what truly drives your customers to make a purchase. For example: You can target creating marketing ad campaigns or tailor sales pitches to a customer who values organic products, instead of sending ad campaigns to a customer who has no interest in organic food or products. This kind of focused targeting improves ROI and boosts your ability to increase sales without wasting your budget on useless marketing.
Hyper-Personalized Communication at Scale
Consumers expect more than just generic ads; they want personalized campaigns that create some value for them. Creating and understanding buyer personas enables you to tailor your messaging and make them relevant. By focusing on the buyer’s unique challenges and solving them, you foster trust and build brand loyalty.
Unlocking New Growth Opportunities
As you build and refine your personas, you may discover entire segments you hadn’t considered before. For instance, a gluten-free granola brand may initially target people with dietary restrictions but eventually find a growing market among travelers or outdoor activities enthusiasts who need nutrient-rich, portable food options. Developing a sales strategy around these newly identified groups can open doors for your business to untapped markets, helping you create new product lines or build new retail partnerships.
Stronger Sales Performance and Measurable Results
After you create a buyer persona, you need to understand how you can leverage it and harness it for increasing operational efficiency, improved performance of your sales teams and closing more deals successfully. Whether it’s a higher number of repeat purchases, better retail sell-through rates (a higher percentage of the retailer’s inventory is being sold), or increased direct-to-consumer conversions, buyer’s personas help you sell smarter.
By consolidating data from diverse sources in your CRM platform like Salesforce, it enables you to have better A/B testing, campaign optimization, and streamlined sales pipeline, allowing you to continuously refine and scale what works for your business.
How to Create a Buyer Persona in 5 Easy Steps
Gather Real-World Data to Identify Your Audience
Start by segregating into your existing data. Look at your CRM, customer purchase history, website analytics, and industry reports to uncover trends in demographics, like job titles, industries, company sizes, and locations. This gives you an understanding of how you can build customer personas backed by data, instead of only relying on your intuition.
Understand Their Day-to-Day Work
To truly understand your audience, you need to know what their job is like. You need to research job descriptions, talk to your sales team, and run surveys to find out what responsibilities your target personas handle, what tools they use, and what success looks like in their role. This helps you position your product or service as a solution that fits into their workflow.
Discover What Drives and Challenges Them
What motivates your ideal customer? What keeps them up at night? Through interviews with actual customers, feedback from support teams, and discussions with subject matter experts, you can learn about their goals, pain points, and preferred ways of solving problems. These insights will help you create messaging that will resonate rather than failing to communicate what your brand is about.
Build a Persona Profile That’s Easy to Use
Take everything you’ve learned and create a visual persona that’s quick to understand. Include a fictional name, a photo, job role, goals, challenges, preferred content types, and buying behavior. Keep it short and make them as user-friendly as possible, without involving any complicated infographics. This will help your sales and marketing team practice sales pitches and personalize ads.
Put Personas into Action—and Keep Them Fresh
Buyer personas are only useful if they’re actually used. Refer to them during campaign planning, content creation, and sales training. As your business grows and markets evolve, revisit your customer personas regularly. Update them based on new data or customer feedback, so your sales and marketing teams can continue to refine their strategies.
How Salesforce Agentforce Helps Consumer Goods Companies Create Buyer Personas
Understanding your customers is crucial for the success of every business. CPG businesses can create a buyer persona effortlessly with Salesforce Agentforce—a robust AI-powered platform designed to help businesses create, refine, and activate highly accurate buyer profiles.
By integrating advanced artificial intelligence models, real-time data, and automation, Agentforce enables consumer goods brands to deeply understand who their customers are, what drives them, and what are the best ways to engage with them.
Let’s explore how Salesforce Agentforce transforms the way CPG brands build and leverage buyer personas.
Building Rich Buyer Profiles Using First-Party Data
If you create a buyer persona by consolidating data from reliable sources, developing a sales strategy becomes easy. Agentforce taps into your business’s first-party data, which is the information collected directly from customer interactions across touchpoints like websites, emails, purchase behavior, and service calls and analyzes them to create clear stages for your sales team to follow through.
By consolidating this data in Salesforce CRM, Agentforce helps you build comprehensive customer profiles. These include demographic traits (e.g., age, location, company size) and behavioral patterns (e.g., purchase frequency, product preferences). As a result, brands get a full 360-degree view of their customers.
Showing Buyers’ Intent
Beyond knowing who your customer is, it’s equally vital to understand what they want. Agentforce uses behavioral analytics to monitor how users engage with digital content, what are the pages they visit, time spent, product views, cart abandonment, and more.
For example, if a customer frequently visits pages about sustainability, Agentforce recognizes this behavior and updates the persona to reflect environmental values. This insight informs product recommendations, marketing messages, and even packaging strategies. It ensures every touchpoint is aligned with what matters to the customer.
Creating Hyper-Personalization with AI-Driven Insights
By integrating Agentforce with your business model you can create hyper-personalized strategies and campaigns for your customers. With the combined data you can create a buyer persona that will show you what your customers expect out of your business. Agentforce’s AI Agents are not your regular chatbots. These AI Agents enable brands to tailor every interaction, whether it’s product recommendations, email content, or in-store promotions.
For instance, a customer who frequently buys organic snacks might receive personalized offers for new organic products or recipes. These targeted experiences improve engagement, conversion rates, and enhance customer satisfaction, driving long-term brand loyalty.
Aligning Sales and Marketing Around the Same Customer Vision
Disjointed teams create fragmented customer experiences. Agentforce bridges the gap between sales and marketing by providing shared access to buyer personas. Both teams use the same updated profiles to create strategy, messaging, and outreach. Sales teams can better understand what resonates with each persona and tailor pitches accordingly, while marketers can craft campaigns that speak directly to a persona’s motivations, challenges, and buying triggers.
Enabling Real-time Customer Engagement
Agentforce also empowers brands to deploy intelligent AI agents that can engage with customers in real time based on their persona insights. These agents can:
- Answer product-related questions
- Recommend relevant items
- Help customers navigate product catalogs
- Assist with returns or support inquiries
Providing Actionable Insights to Guide Strategic Decisions
With Agentforce you don’t simply create a buyer persona, you can get insights into creating better marketing and developing sales strategy. Now customize dashboards and reports, and get deep insights into customer segments, engagement trends, and performance metrics. This helps both sales and marketing teams to test new strategies and monitor results in real time, helping them make smarter, faster decisions, and more effective resource allocation.
Ensuring Ethical Use of Customer Data
Salesforce Agentforce is designed to comply with regulations like GDPR and CCPA, ensuring that customer data is handled responsibly. By masking sensitive data and giving customers control over how their data is used, Agentforce builds trust between the brand and the customers.
Conclusion
Did you create a buyer persona for your CPG business but not seeing enough results? Probably, because your buyer’s persona is incomplete. To create a comprehensive buyer’s persona, you need unfragmented data that will show you what interests your customers and what are the challenges they are facing that you can eliminate with your products or services.
Creating accurate, insightful buyer personas serves as a powerful tool to unlock the true motivations, preferences, and behaviors of your target audience. By investing in building detailed customer profiles, you can craft more focused marketing messages, develop products that resonate, and design sales strategies that directly address your customers’ needs. This targeted approach reduces marketing messages that do not resonate and expense, allowing brands to spend smartly and sell more effectively.
Since customers’ demands and the economic situation are constantly changing, you need platforms like Salesforce Agentforce, that will help you get real-time data and create personalized strategies. This means your teams can always make decisions based on the most relevant insights.
