How to Create a Persona
A step-by-step guide to building effective sales practice personas in ST300 — covering every field, the AI builder, and how to write a prompt that produces realistic, challenging simulations.
What is a persona?
A persona is the AI-powered buyer you practise selling to. Every time you start a scenario, you are placed in a conversation with a persona — they have a job title, a company, a budget, objections, and a clear set of conditions under which they will accept or reject your pitch.
The quality of your practice is directly tied to the quality of your personas. A generic persona gives generic conversations. A specific, well-constructed persona gives you something that feels like a real deal.
Step 1 — Fill in the basic fields
When you navigate to Personas → New persona, you will see a form with the following fields. Each one shapes how the AI behaves during the simulation.
Persona fields — what each one does
Use a realistic full name that matches the locale you are practising.
Be specific — "IT Manager" creates a generic conversation; "General Manager, IT Planning" creates a realistic one.
A real-sounding company name makes the simulation feel grounded. Include the industry in the name when possible.
Drives the objections and vocabulary the persona uses. Match your target market.
Tells the AI about local business culture, language expectations, and time-zone context.
Chat personas tend to give shorter, faster responses. Email personas are more deliberate and formal.
Step 2 — Set the level of interest
The Level of interest controls how hard the persona is to close. It is the single most important difficulty dial in the system. Start with High when onboarding new reps, and work down toward Low as their skills develop.
Level of interest — difficulty guide
Eager buyer, few objections. Good for practising discovery and closing.
Interested but hesitant. Needs reassurance on one or two concerns.
Open-minded. You must build value before they commit.
Sceptical. Strong objections, slow to trust. Good for mid-level reps.
Very resistant. For advanced reps practising difficult conversations.
Impossible to close by design. Tests whether reps can read a dead end gracefully.
Step 3 — Set the method of contact
The method of contact tells the AI how to frame the conversation and calibrate the length and formality of its replies.
Method of contact
Chat
Shorter replies, faster back-and-forth. Reflects a live messaging or website chat scenario. Better for practising concise pitches and quick objection handling.
More deliberate, detailed responses. Reflects cold email follow-up or an async evaluation thread. Better for practising written communication and structure.
Step 4 — Fill in the structured fields
Below the basic fields, you will find four structured sections that significantly sharpen the simulation. These are optional but strongly recommended for any persona you plan to use repeatedly.
- Background — Why is this persona in the conversation? What problem are they trying to solve? What have they already tried? This context stops the AI from inventing its own backstory.
- Budget — The actual number, including authority limits. If you write “$18,000/year pre-approved, flexible to $22,000”, the AI will honour that range during negotiation.
- Negotiation style — One of Direct, Collaborative, Analytical, Formal, Pragmatic, Blunt, Aggressive, Polite, or Warm. This governs the persona's communication tone throughout the simulation.
- Objections — List the objections the persona will raise, one per line. Being explicit here prevents the AI from improvising objections that do not match your target market.
- End conditions — The conditions under which the persona accepts or rejects the deal. Add both an accept and a reject condition. The more specific, the better.
Step 5 — Pick simulation languages and tags
Each persona declares which languages it can be practised in. Tick every language your team wants to run scenarios in — currently English, 日本語, and Filipino are supported. The scenario creation dialog will only let reps pick a language the persona supports.
If you select a language other than English, a Localized prompts section appears below the main prompt. Paste a translated prompt for each non-English language — leave it blank to fall back to the English prompt. Translating the prompt (rather than relying on the AI to translate live) gives the most idiomatic, culturally accurate simulations.
Tags (if your organisation has any defined) let managers group personas by product line, market segment, or training programme. Tags are filterable in the persona list and on the management dashboard.
Step 6 — Write the prompt
The prompt is the full instruction set the AI receives at the start of every scenario. It is the most powerful lever in the system. A well-written prompt produces a persona that is consistent, realistic, and genuinely challenging to sell to.
Every effective persona prompt follows the same eight-section structure:
Prompt structure — eight sections
Identity
Opens every prompt. Sets name, title, company, and context.
Background
Explains why they are in this conversation and what they know already.
Level of Interest
Describes their emotional state and buying urgency.
Budget
Sets the financial reality. Include authority limits.
Negotiation Style
Governs how the persona communicates — critical for cultural personas.
Method of Contact
Explains how the conversation started and the persona's initial disposition.
Objections
Explicit list of objections. Number them so the AI raises each one during the conversation.
End Conditions
The AI uses these to decide when to accept or reject the deal. Be specific.
💡 Using the AI persona builder
- Click Send to assistant at the top of the form.
- The assistant asks 5 yes/no questions to fill in details your fields did not cover. Click Yes or No on each.
- When the assistant returns a complete prompt, click Import from chat to pull it into the prompt field.
- Edit any part of the result. The best personas are tuned, not generated.
Tips for a great persona
- Mirror your real target market. Copy the job title, company size, and industry from an actual deal you are working on. The more the persona matches reality, the more transferable the practice.
- Add cultural context to the prompt. If your buyer is in Japan, Korea, or Singapore, describe the communication style explicitly in the Negotiation style and Background sections. Generic personas behave like generic Western buyers.
- Write specific end conditions. Avoid "accept if the salesperson makes a good pitch." Write "accept if both objections are addressed with specific numbers and the price is under $20,000."
- Include a reject path. Personas that only accept deals do not build resilience. Every persona should have at least one reject condition that a rep can genuinely trigger.
- Reuse personas across reps. The same persona can be assigned to multiple team members — each rep gets their own independent practice session. A scenario is a single session from start to finalization; create a new scenario to practise with the same persona again.
Next steps
Once you have created your persona, head to Scenarios → New scenario to put them into a simulation. Read the scenario guide →
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