David Keene, European CMO at Wipro, on why the persona model cannot scale to complex B2B buying groups, how to map influence structures within large organisations, why the RFP is usually too late to win, and why engaging before the requirement is written is the only reliable path to large enterprise deals.
"Marketers have been trained to think about personas. When the buying decision is complex, you are targeting many."
Why the persona model is dead in complex B2B sales and how buying group mapping changes everything
David Keene spent his career at Google, SAP, Salesforce, and Oracle before joining Wipro as European CMO, giving him a rare vantage point across both the technology platforms that power modern B2B marketing and the large enterprise sales environments where that marketing has to operate. His diagnosis of the central problem in B2B marketing is precise: the industry has been trained to think in personas, which are single-buyer abstractions, in a world where buying decisions are made by groups with different roles, different motivations, and different cultural norms.
In this conversation Keene explains how mapping the influence structure within a target account, identifying sponsors, detractors, and coaches rather than just decision makers and budget holders, changes what marketing is asked to produce and how it is measured. He makes a direct argument that any company responding to an RFP they did not help shape has probably already lost the deal. The implication is that the role of marketing in complex B2B is to engage early enough to influence how the requirement is written, not to produce collateral that responds to requirements already written by someone else's preferred vendor.
"Marketeers have been trained to think about personas. When you talk to a marketeer and you're like, what are you doing on this activity? They're like, I'm running an event for a particular persona. When you get to anything that's large and where the buying decision is complex, you're targeting many and you've got to figure out how those many personas fit together."
Keene's critique of the persona model is not that personas are wrong but that they are insufficient for the complexity of enterprise B2B. A persona assumes a single buyer with unified motivations. A buying group is a collection of people with different functional interests, different budget authorities, and different cultural norms, all participating in a shared decision process. Marketing built for a persona either narrows its focus to one member of that group or generalises to the point of being irrelevant to all of them.
"You need to switch your organisation to thinking about the customer in terms of the macro view of the customer. Customers typically structure by industry and by size. So your segmentation needs to drive this buying group, buying committee kind of approach. The key is to start to figure out not the personas, but the roles that these people play. Some people will be sponsors. Some people will be detractors. Some people will be coaches."
The influence map reframes the question from who is the decision maker to what role does each person play in the decision. A sponsor advocates internally for a solution. A detractor has reasons, sometimes legitimate, sometimes political, to oppose it. A coach is inside the account and is willing to guide the vendor through the process. Marketing for each of these roles is fundamentally different. The sponsor needs validation. The detractor needs reassurance or an alternative solution to their concern. The coach needs tools to advocate internally.
"If an organisation has decided they've got a problem, decided how they want to fix it, formulated the buying group, written up the criteria for win-loss, and it's been influenced by the people who have particular commercial connections to particular vendors, then unless you're the vendor they're promoting at this point, you've probably lost that engagement."
The RFP process in large enterprise sales is often a formal expression of a decision that has already been made or heavily influenced. The criteria were written by people who have been in conversations with vendors for months before the formal process started. A vendor showing up for the first time at the RFP stage is effectively trying to win a competition whose rules were written by someone else. The answer is programme-level engagement that builds relationships with target accounts before requirements are formalised, with the goal of being part of the conversation that shapes what those requirements say.
"I'm putting that programme level above campaign because I think campaigns is kind of a dead term. Programmes to me are where you're sitting above that and you're thinking about a customer area of pain in a particular industry. And then you're thinking about what are the moments that matter inside that programme that's going to run maybe across the whole year."
Campaign thinking produces time-limited activities optimised for a specific message or product. Programme thinking produces a year-long structure built around a customer area of pain, within which specific campaigns and activities are designed as moments that matter within that larger arc. The programme holds the buying group engagement strategy, the account identification and de-anonymisation work, the sales alignment, and the measurement framework. Campaigns are executed within that structure rather than independently of it.
"I think we're on a cusp here of how do we tackle the variety of people influencing these deals, the variety of roles, personas, characters, cultures, and how do we plug them together into a structure where we can manage that buyer journey moving forward."
The multi-dimensional complexity of enterprise B2B marketing, multiple stakeholders, multiple messages, multiple cultural contexts, long time horizons, overlapping account structures, is currently managed imperfectly by humans with spreadsheets and CRM systems. AI capable of tracking and orchestrating across those dimensions simultaneously would allow the kind of account-level personalisation and influence mapping that Keene describes as the ideal without requiring the manual effort that currently makes it impractical at scale.
"The programme level sits above the campaign. Campaigns is kind of a dead term."
Host Tell me what you do at Wipro and how you think about marketing there.
Keene B2B marketing clearly is very different to B2C marketing. We need to think about B2B in a different way in terms of how we get to a particular buyer and then more and more how we get to a group of buyers. The big change we see in the market is things are moving away from, let's target a VP of IT or an HR director, to which groups are getting together inside the organisation to make a buying decision, where does the money sit, and how does the decision get made. The influence map inside a large organisation is really critical to the way we think about marketing.
Host A lot of people have got to the idea of a buying committee targeted with specific messaging. But going beyond that to people who have influence but are not directly responsible is really interesting. How do you approach that?
Keene Marketeers have been trained to think about personas. When you talk to a marketeer and you're like, what are you doing on this activity, they're like, I'm running an event for a particular persona. When you get to anything that's large and the buying decision is complex, you're targeting many and you've got to figure out how those many personas fit together. You need to switch your organisation to thinking about the customer in terms of the macro view, to figure out not the personas but the roles these people play. Some will be sponsors, some detractors, some coaches.
Host How do you approach structuring your programme thinking?
Keene I'm putting the programme level above campaign because I think campaigns is kind of a dead term. Programmes are where you're sitting above that and you're thinking about a customer area of pain in a particular industry. Then you're thinking about what are the moments that matter inside that programme that's going to run maybe across the whole year. You start to build up your upper funnel for nurture. You start to convert those groups. You start to identify the accounts that are coming in using de-anonymisation software to identify those accounts, understanding what IP ranges are interacting with your website, starting to use AI on things like naming of laptops connecting to your website so you can then reverse map back to a particular account structure.
Host Tell me more about the RFP challenge.
Keene If an organisation has decided they've got a problem and decided how they want to fix it, formulated the buying group and written the criteria for win-loss, and it has been influenced by people who have particular commercial connections to particular vendors, then unless you're the vendor they're promoting at this point, you've probably already lost that engagement. The key is to engage before the RFX comes in and to have those relationships with your target accounts. Better still, to frame the requirement and understanding the customer pain. If you look at techniques like challenger selling, you're looking to have a point of view around industry constructs that align back to real pain points, complex pain points that individuals in the organisation have.
Host How will AI change the complexity of managing multi-stakeholder B2B marketing?
Keene I think there is a whole set of new tooling in the marketing world, particularly in the B2B space, that's going to start to emerge where we use AI that's able to deal with these kind of multifaceted interactions in a way that people right now struggle to do. We're on a cusp of how do we tackle the variety of people influencing these deals, the variety of roles, personas, characters, cultures, and how do we plug them together into a structure where we can manage that buyer journey moving forward.
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