Personas

A persona in Leed is a written description of one kind of buyer, plus one structured field: a list of job-title keywords. The writing is for your team. The keywords are for the product — they are the only part of a persona that anything mechanical matches against, and they decide which contacts carry the persona.

Personas live in the Personas section of Engage: open Engage in the left rail and pick Personas from the section picker, or go straight to /engage/personas. The section does not auto-select anything, so it opens on the prompt Select a persona, or create one to segment your audience.

What a persona holds

Nine fields. One is required, one is mechanical, and the other seven are free text that nothing validates and nothing parses.

Field	Purpose	Counts toward Definition coverage	Hint shown when empty	Acted on by the product
Name	What you call this buyer — “VP of Engineering”, “Solo practitioner”	—	Persona name (on the create form)	Shown everywhere; searchable
Title keywords	The words and phrases in a job title that tag a contact with this persona	—	cfo, chief financial, controller — comma separated (on the create form)	Yes — this is the whole mechanism
Summary	Who they are and what they care about	Yes	No summary yet. Describe who this persona is and what they care about.	Only as context for Suggest keywords
Goals	What they are trying to achieve	Yes	No goals captured yet.	Only as context for Suggest keywords
Pains	The problems that motivate them	Yes	No pains captured yet.	Only as context for Suggest keywords
Triggers	What makes them start looking	—	What makes them start looking.	No
Objections	Why they might say no	—	Why they might say no.	No
Preferred content	Formats they engage with	—	Formats they engage with.	No
How we measure them	Signals of progress (stored as `kpis`)	—	Signals of progress.	No

“Acted on by the product” is a column worth reading twice. Nothing matches Summary, Goals, Pains, Triggers, Objections, Preferred content or How we measure them against contacts, compares them to your pages, or feeds them to the scoring pipeline. The only thing that reads any of them is Suggest keywords, which sends the name, summary, goals and pains to the model as context for proposing title terms. They exist so that everyone writing for this buyer is writing for the same person.

Creating a persona

The + button at the top of the left panel opens the create form, and so does the URL /engage/personas/new directly. Creating needs contact:write, whose minimum role is Content Publisher — a stronger requirement than editing a form carries, and one of the asymmetries roles and permissions explains. Below that role the + is not rendered.

The form is one screen: a Persona name field, a Title keywords field that takes a comma-separated list, a Summary textarea, then the six block fields two to a row with their own hints. Keywords typed here are applied the moment the persona is saved.

The persona create form with the name field, the committee-role select open showing all six values, and the six block textareas

Editing a persona

A persona reads as a document rather than a form. The summary sits at the top as running prose, the Title keywords card sits beneath it, and the six blocks follow, each with its own colored rule and heading.

Every one of them edits in place. Click a block, type, click away — each field saves on its own, with no edit mode, no dirty state and no Save button. An empty block shows its italic hint instead of nothing, which is the difference between “we decided not to write this” and “this is broken”. Editing needs the same contact:write as creating; without it the whole body is read-only text.

A written-out persona showing the summary, the role chip and four filled blocks, with the Definition coverage donut in the right rail

Reading the list

The left panel lists every persona under the group label Personas · N, showing the persona’s name, a subtitle counting its title keywords (or No keywords · manual only), and — on the right of the row — the number of contacts currently carrying it. Search matches the name and the keywords, nothing else. A selected persona’s header repeats both numbers as chips: matched contacts and title keywords.

Personas do not auto-select. Unlike Accounts and Contacts, opening the section leaves the center card empty until you pick one.

The Title keywords card

The card under the summary holds the keyword list as chips, each showing how many contacts it currently tags, with Matches N contacts at the top right. Type a keyword and press Enter to add it, or select a chip’s × to remove it. Every change saves the whole list and re-tags your contacts straight away. Keywords are stored lower-cased and trimmed, duplicates are dropped, and each is limited to 64 characters.

Try a title at the foot of the card runs the same matcher the server uses. Type a title and it shows the keyword that matches, or No keyword matches this title. — the quickest way to check a keyword before you add it.

Suggest keywords asks Leed for title terms the list is missing. It sends the persona’s name, summary, goals and pains, its current keywords, and up to 150 distinct titles that no persona tags yet, and returns up to eight suggestions, each with the number of contacts it would newly tag. Nothing is applied until you click a suggestion, or Add all. The button needs ai:write on top of contact:write.

The one thing a persona actually does

A persona tags every contact whose job title contains one of its keywords as a whole word or phrase, ignoring case. cfo matches “Group CFO” and “CFO / COO” but not “Cofounder”; vp never matches “VPN”; chief financial matches “Chief Financial Officer” as a phrase. When several keywords hit, the longest is recorded as the reason, and that is the keyword the contact’s record shows.

Personas do not compete for contacts. A contact can carry any number of them — a CFO can be both Financial and C-suite — and two personas that share a keyword both tag the same people. There is no first-persona-wins rule and no limit on how many personas a workspace can usefully hold. Nor does a persona have anything to do with buying-committee roles any more: roles are set by people on the contact and account pages, and neither implies the other.

A persona can also be applied by hand. The Personas section of a contact’s record lists every persona the contact carries with its reason — Title contains and the keyword that hit, or Added by hand with the date — and an + Add persona picker for the rest. Removing a hand-added persona deletes it; removing a title match marks it excluded for that contact, so later syncs never put it back. Contacts describes the section.

Why nobody matches my persona

Work down this list in order — it is roughly the order of likelihood.

The persona has no keywords. The list subtitle reads No keywords · manual only. Add some, or use Suggest keywords.
Your contacts have no titles. No title means no keyword match; only a hand-added persona reaches them. Look at a handful of contacts you expect to match and see whether the Title field is filled at all.
Their titles do not contain a keyword as a whole word. vp does not match “VPs”, and “Solutions Architect” matches nothing unless a keyword says so. Paste a real title into Try a title to see.
The contacts arrived or were retitled since the last sync. Run Recompute scores on Contacts or Accounts, or save the keyword list again.
Somebody removed the persona from them. A title match removed by hand stays excluded for that contact.

Definition coverage is a donut with three checkbox rows beneath it, reading N of 3 core fields filled (summary, goals, pains). It turns green at 60% — which, over three fields, means two of them.

Matches lists the contacts currently carrying this persona, most ready first, with a count badge on the facet. Each row shows the keyword that tagged that person, or manual for a hand-added persona, and jumps to their record in Contacts. The list loads a page at a time with a + N more link. Empty, it reads No contacts carry this persona yet — add title keywords, or tag contacts by hand.

Campaigns lists the campaigns whose audience targets this persona, each with a status dot — gray for draft, amber for scheduled, green for active. Empty, it reads No campaigns target this persona yet. Targeting is done from the campaign side, in campaigns and deliverables, and needs the Growth plan like the rest of campaigns.

Actions is currently empty. Its one button, Draft a campaign for this persona, opened Chat with a prompt naming the persona, and Chat is hidden for now, so the button is not rendered.

Deleting a persona

The Delete action sits in the header beside New persona and needs contact:write. It removes the persona immediately, together with its keywords.

It also removes the persona from every contact that carried it, title matches and hand-added tags alike, so it disappears from contact records and from the persona clusters in Contact filters at once. There is nothing to recompute afterwards.

Personas from an AI client

Three persona tools are available over MCP, all subject to the same contact:* permissions as the screen:

Tool	What it does
`list_personas`	Lists every persona in the workspace
`create_persona`	Creates one; only `name` is required, and `keywords` sets its title keywords
`update_persona`	Updates a persona by id; only the fields you supply change, and a `keywords` array replaces the whole list

Deletion is deliberately not among them. delete_persona exists but is marked high-risk and assistant-only, so the in-product assistant can offer it behind an approval step while an external MCP client cannot reach it at all. The campaigns and personas tool reference has the argument shapes.