Buying Roles & Personas: Setup, Filtering, and CRM Sync

Buying roles and personas help you identify the right stakeholders in an account. Buying roles mark an individual contact's part in a deal, like Economic Buyer or Champion, while personas group contacts by profile, like VP of Engineering, so you can track engagement across a whole target audience.

Contents

• What are buying roles and personas

• Assign buying roles to a contact

• Configure your buying role and persona taxonomy

• Filter by buying role, persona, function, and seniority

• How buying roles sync with your CRM

• Need help?

What are buying roles and personas

A buying role is a tag applied to one contact that describes the part they play in a deal or account, such as Economic Buyer, Champion, Decision Maker, Technical Buyer, Executive Sponsor, Evaluator, Influencer, or Business User. The exact list of available roles is specific to your org — if your team has Salesforce connected, this list commonly reflects the values in your Salesforce Opportunity Contact Role picklist. A contact can hold more than one buying role at the same time, and a role can be set for the account as a whole or scoped to just one opportunity, which is useful when a contact's role differs from deal to deal.

A persona is a target buyer profile your org defines by combining a Function (the contact's department, such as Engineering, Finance, or Sales) with one or more Seniority levels (such as VP+, Director, Manager, or IC). Once a persona is defined, Centralize automatically computes persona engagement by matching each contact's Function and Seniority against your org's configured persona definitions. Personas let you track how well you're engaging a type of stakeholder across your whole book of business, rather than tracking one named contact at a time.

Note: Function and Seniority are individual contact attributes, while a persona is a saved combination of the two that your org tracks as a group. A Function should describe a department or job category; a Persona should describe a specific target profile — department plus seniority — you want to measure engagement against.

Assign buying roles to a contact

1. Open the contact you want to tag, from the account's Stakeholder Map or from an opportunity's Key Contacts section.

2. Click Add buying role on the contact.

3. Select one or more roles from your org's buying role list, such as Economic Buyer, Champion, or Technical Buyer.

4. Save your changes.

Note: You can also assign a role at the opportunity level instead of the account level, which is useful when someone is an Influencer on one opportunity but the Economic Buyer on another.

Configure your buying role and persona taxonomy

Your org's list of available buying roles, and the order they appear in an opportunity's Key Contacts section, are managed in Settings. If your team also uses Salesforce, this list commonly includes the same role values from your Salesforce Opportunity Contact Role picklist.

Personas are also configured in Settings, by combining a Function with one or more Seniority levels. Your org can add custom Functions and Seniority levels beyond Centralize's defaults, and can override a persona's Function or Seniority for a specific account when that account's org structure doesn't match the default definition.

Filter by buying role, persona, function, and seniority

Buying Role is one of the filter modules available on the Account Map, alongside Function and Seniority — use it to narrow the stakeholders shown on an account down to contacts with a specific assigned role. See "Account Map Filters" for the full list of Account Map filter options.

Function and Seniority are also available as filters on the Contacts tab for building lists across your full book of business. See "Contact Filters" for the full list of Contacts filter options.

Persona is available as a filter on the Account Metrics and Usage Metrics dashboards, commonly used to focus reporting on a specific stakeholder profile — for example, filtering the Touchpoints by Persona report to see engagement with your VP of Engineering persona specifically. See "Dashboard Filters" for the full list of dashboard filter options.

How buying roles sync with your CRM

If your organization has Salesforce connected, buying roles set on a Salesforce opportunity's Contact Roles sync into Centralize automatically, and the buying role options available in Centralize typically mirror the values in your Salesforce Opportunity Contact Role picklist. You can also assign or adjust buying roles directly in Centralize for contacts and opportunities that aren't tied to a synced Salesforce record.

Note: If you notice a contact showing fewer buying roles in Centralize than they have in Salesforce, or another mismatch between Salesforce and Centralize buying roles, contact support@usecentralize.com so the team can look into it.

Need help?

If you're having trouble assigning buying roles, setting up personas, or you're seeing a mismatch between Salesforce and Centralize buying roles, contact support@usecentralize.com for assistance.