Ask Forrester or Gartner to map an enterprise buying process and you'll get seven or eight distinct roles: economic buyer, technical buyer, champion, coach, blocker, and so on. It's accurate. It's also more than most SaaS marketing teams can realistically build content for, especially without IBM's headcount.
The P1/P2/P3 framework, first introduced in the T2D3 book years ago, compresses that complexity into three personas — without pretending the complexity isn't there.
Think of a buyer's journey as climbing a mountain.
P1 is standing at the base, a little scared. They feel the pain in their daily work — they're the one who typed the problem into Google, or now, into ChatGPT or Claude. They haven't committed to climbing yet. They need to feel comfortable, see the map, and know they're not the only person who has ever stood at this base looking up. Their question is simple: why should we care?
P2 is the guide being interviewed for the job of taking the climb. They've already been convinced by a P1 inside their organization that the mountain is worth climbing — now they're comparing guides. Yours, and two or three others. Their question is: why you?
P3 is standing further back, arms crossed, generally agreeing the mountain is real but in no rush. "Sure, we probably need this. Maybe next year — we have other priorities right now." Their question is: why now?
Sometimes P1, P2, and P3 are three completely different people across three different departments. In a smaller company, they might be the same person wearing three different hats over the course of a few weeks. Either way, they still ask three different questions at three different points, and they need three different answers.
This maps to a simple content framework: wow, how, now.
Wow content is for P1. Not "look how great we are" — most B2B homepages already make that mistake, talking about features before anyone's agreed there's a problem worth solving. Wow content says: other people have this exact problem, and it's real. That can be a point of view, a piece of research, or an email subject line that makes someone stop and think, "wait, that's exactly what I'm dealing with." Lead magnets belong here — something specific enough that a P1 can use it to convince someone else inside their company that the problem is worth raising.
How content is for P2. This is where you're allowed to talk about yourself: comparison guides, RFP checklists, ROI calculators, demos, case studies, a genuinely useful "top 10 options" page — even one that includes your competitors. The rule here isn't neutrality, it's usefulness. As long as you're teaching a P2 something they didn't already know, a little bit of bias toward your own strengths is fine.
Now content is for P3. P3 already agrees the problem and the solution are both real. What's missing is urgency. This is where a compliance risk, a security requirement, a case study of a company that waited too long, or a picture of the people who already reached the top of the mountain does the work — showing P3 there's a real cost to waiting, not just a benefit to acting.
This framework predates today's AI tools. There's a reasonable argument for a fourth role now — call it P0 — the AI model itself, crawling and summarizing your content before a human ever reads a word of it. Worth keeping in mind as you build out P1 content especially, since that's exactly the stage where someone is most likely to ask an LLM the question instead of typing it into Google.
Watch the full recording of the webinar below to see this framework mapped out live, along with the anti-persona types worth ruling out before you build any of this.