Create Personas with Salesforce CRM data | Customer Persona by Delve AI

Many B2B marketing and sales teams use Salesforce to manage leads, opportunities, and deal pipelines. But while CRM records are great for tracking transactions, they fall short when it comes to answering deeper questions, like who your customers really are, what motivates them, and why they buy.

That’s where Customer Persona by Delve AI comes in. This integration, available soon, helps you transform your Salesforce CRM data into rich, AI-generated customer personas that reflect actual client behavior, intent, and buying patterns, not just assumptions.

In this article, we’ll learn how to create customer personas using Salesforce CRM data, chat with virtual customers, and get actionable recommendations for marketing, sales, and growth teams.

How to Create a Persona with Salesforce CRM Data in Delve AI

Customer Persona by Delve AI helps you generate personas from your CRM data. Simply connect your CRM or marketing automation platform, or upload a CSV file with your data. Delve AI currently integrates with Salesforce, HubSpot, and Klaviyo, and also supports data from Shopify and Stripe.

What sets this method apart from traditional persona-building approaches is the data it’s built on. Conventional personas often rely on assumptions, opinions, and limited research, which makes them hard to trust and even harder to defend in high-stakes decisions.

Using CRM data, Delve AI creates personas based on how your customers actually behave: how they interact with your business, what they engage with, and what they prefer. The result is a set of personas that are grounded in reality, easy to act on, and far more reliable than generic market research.

Now, we’ll walk you through how to create personas using Salesforce CRM data.

1. Connect your account or upload Salesforce CRM data

Creating a persona using Salesforce CRM data is quite an easy and seamless process. The first step, of course, is to Sign Up or Log In to Delve AI. After you’ve done that, just follow these steps:

• Navigate to Persona Generator > Customer Persona
• Click the Buy Now option on the product page
• Select a subscription plan that fits your needs (starting from $470/month for 1k Contacts)

Next, connect your Salesforce CRM account to Delve AI. You can also upload your client data in a CSV file. In the former, pick Salesforce from the Connect CRM dropdown.

The Salesforce integration is not live yet. However, once it is, sign in to Salesforce and provide the necessary permissions. Once done, Delve AI will pull your CRM data to begin the persona generation process.

Now, here are some of the client and product attributes from Salesforce CRM that Delve AI uses to build customer personas. We’ve listed these attributes, along with their definitions in accordance with Salesforce.

• contact.Id – A unique identifier Salesforce assigns to each contact.
• contact.Name – The contact’s full name.
• contact.Email – The primary email address used for communication.
• contact.Birthdate – The contact’s age or age range.
• contact.mailingaddress.street – The street-level address associated with the contact.
• contact.mailingaddress.city – The city where the contact is located.
• contact.mailingaddress.state – The state or region tied to the contact’s location.
• contact.mailingaddress.country – The country where the contact lives or does business.
• contact.Title – The contact’s job title, indicating their role and level of influence in buying decisions.
• contact.Phone – A direct phone number for reaching the contact.
• account.Website – The company’s official website.
• account.Name – The name of the company or organization associated with the contact.
• contact.LeadSource – How the contact first found your business.
• account.Industry – The industry the company operates in.
• Opportunity.total_expected_revenue – The total projected revenue from opportunities linked to the contact or account.
• Opportunity.total_count – The number of opportunities associated with the contact or account.
• most_recent_opportunity_date – The date of the most recent opportunity, indicating how recently the customer engaged in a deal.
• contact.CreatedDate – The date the contact was added to Salesforce.
• contact.Currency – The currency used for the contact’s deals and transactions.

We also use data points related to your products or services in the customer persona creation process, besides client data.

• product.Id – A unique identifier for each product in Salesforce.
• product.Name – The name of the product associated with an opportunity or deal.
• product.DisplayUrl – A link to the product’s page for additional details.
• product.Description – A brief description outlining what the product does and its key features.
• product.Family – The product category used to group similar offerings together.
• lineItem.UnitPrice – The price of a single unit of the product within an opportunity.

If you’ve connected your Salesforce account to Delve AI, there’s nothing else you need to do; Delve AI automatically pulls and maps the required attributes for you. If you prefer not to connect your account, you can simply export your customer data from Salesforce and upload the file directly to Delve AI instead.

2. Create customer personas with Delve AI

Once your data is uploaded, either manually or automatically, our platform processes and enriches it using relevant publicly available sources. The system then automatically groups customers into segments based on factors like psychographics, demographics or firmographics, technographics, transaction history, behavioral patterns, and geographic location.

Delve AI usually generates three to six buyer personas for your business. After data analysis, your segments are usually labeled as “Contact,” “One-Time Customer,” and “Repeat Customer.”

In this example, the segment highlighted in green represents a B2B customer group (blue is used to distinguish B2C persona segments). The profile shown focuses on a specific persona, Thomas Wood, who is classified as a ONE-TIME CUSTOMER (MID AOV). The summary displays his total spending of $178 along with a payment count of 2 completed transactions.

When you click on Persona details, this AI persona segment reveals key information about customer demographics, psychographics, and purchasing patterns.

The overview begins with essential identifiers such as the name, age, level of urbanization, marketing generation, and the segment they fall into — for example, a one-time customer. This is followed by a short quote that captures their primary goals or expectations from your product or service, along with a map that shows where they are located.

At the top of the page, four core modules provide deeper insights into this persona group, covering a broader set of characteristics and additional attributes, including:

• Profile information – summary, reports to, responsibilities, and jobs to be done.
• Psychological drivers – goals, motivations, and key needs.

• Buying behavior – factors influencing purchase decisions, triggers, role in the buying committee, and role in the decision-making process.
• Key obstacles – core challenges, day-to-day pain points, and perceived barriers.

You also get job profiles, modes of communication, media/news sources, social networks, and brands. In this case, we see that Thomas works in Financial Services as a Partner. He prefers to communicate via social media and stays up-to-date with the Wall Street Journal and Forbes.

After reviewing the communication preferences, you can take a look at the hashtags Thomas follows, the sites he frequently visits, the technologies he relies on, and the types and formats of content he prefers to consume.

We then have a graph displaying his personality traits. Delve AI uses the Big Five personality model or the OCEAN model to depict your clients’ personalities based on five key traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

Similarly, the 2-D valence-arousal model is used to measure emotions. It groups customer emotions into a two-dimensional space – valence (positive to negative) and arousal or intensity (high to low).

These modules are followed by Thomas’s interests (both personal and professional) and events he’s likely to attend. For instance, Thomas’s interests include business, marketing, finance, and technology.

Apart from this, Thomas’s other interests include trade, taxation, and the global economy.

The section in dark grey, Thomas’s Likely Interactions with Your Business, dives into his first interaction with your brand. You see that he’s active on weekdays, particularly at night.

The products/services and topics that resonate with him are also listed. As shown by Resonating products/services, Thomas is on the lookout for Delve AI’s Synthetic Research and Persona Generator Software. Black friday, black friday sale, and marketing strategies are the topics that resonate with him.

The industry-specific insights are derived from the terms customers search for, the pages they visit, and the keywords they mention. Together, they give information about the industry your business operates in.

The second tab, the Distribution tab, offers data grouped into five categories: how, who, where, when, and what.

• HOW: Devices, marketing channels, search engines, organic and paid keywords, and social media channels.
• WHO: Industry, job function, company size, seniority levels, job titles, and organizations.
• WHERE: Urbanicity, territory, city, country, and region.
• WHEN: Day, time, weather, and season.
• WHAT: Resonating topics and keywords.

They show you how customers are spread across the entire persona segment. Within the Where and When sections, two-dimensional charts show how audiences are distributed by factors, such as urbanicity and territory, time of day and day of week, as well as weather and seasonal patterns.

Quick Tip: darker shades indicate higher concentrations of customers or greater levels of activity in those specific categories.

Each auto-generated persona also comes with an Influencers section that highlights the key people and organizations your customers follow and engage with online.

YYou get information, like:

• Names of influencers and organizations.
• A brief description of these influencers.
• Contact channels, including their website and social media handles.

With these details, it becomes easier to identify relevant industry figures for partnerships and influencer marketing campaigns.

You can download individual reports (Persona details, Distribution, Influencers) in JPEG, PPT, and PDF formats using the Export button. To download multiple reports at once, head to Settings > Reports, and quickly export all persona files or have them delivered directly to your inbox.

You’ve Built Customer Personas, What Next?

Automatic segmentation, personas, audience distribution, journey maps, and influencer discovery are just some of the benefits you get with Customer Persona by Delve AI. As you’ll see below, there’s much more you can do with it!

Create custom persona profiles with Filters

Delve AI lets you create custom personas using only a selected portion of your customer data. With Filters, you can include or exclude specific CRM records to generate personas based on set criteria.

Filters can be applied across the following dimensions:

• Location: continent, country, region, or city
• Products or services customers have purchased or shown interest in

Filters are available as an add-on and are not included in the standard Customer Persona subscription. After subscribing, you can purchase the Filters add-on by contacting the sales team.

Once enabled, setting up a filter is straightforward. Select a dimension (for example, Product), choose a condition (such as Exclude), and define a value (like “iPhone”) to generate personas for clients associated with that product.

Please note that filters are not customizable once created. If you need to make changes, you’ll need to delete the existing filter by going to Settings > Filters.

This feature is especially useful for creating niche personas, like product-specific or location-specific segments. For example, you can build country-specific personas by including customers from Germany to better understand their preferences, purchase behavior, and challenges.

Uncover targeting ideas with Compare

Just like real customers, persona segments often overlap in some areas while differing in others. Delve AI’s Compare feature makes these differences easy to spot by visually highlighting how two persona segments vary, whether they’re active customers, one-time buyers, or non-transacting audiences.

To use Compare:

• Visit Customer Persona in the dashboard.
• Choose the persona group you’d like to analyze (e.g., Segment 4).
• Click the Compare icon located beside the Export button.
• Select the segment you want to evaluate against the first (e.g., Segment 1).

The image compares two personas: Michelle Avery, a one-time buyer (Segment 4), and Kim Howe, a passive browser (Segment 1). Each bar in the chart reflects how strongly each persona is interested or engaged in specific categories, with Michelle’s metrics shown in red and Kim’s in blue.

From the chart, it’s clear that both favor English, though Michelle’s overall interaction level is noticeably higher. Michelle also demonstrates a much stronger interest in surfing, while crafts attract both users, with Kim showing a meaningful level of activity in this area. In the HOW section, Michelle stands out for her heavier use of Instagram, even though both personas are quite active on the platform.

These comparisons can potentially help uncover new targeting, keyword, and content ideas that can improve conversions.

Chat with your customers with the digital twin software

Imagine being able to have a real conversation with your customer personas. With Delve AI’s Digital Twin of the Customer, that’s exactly what you can do. It works much like ChatGPT, except the intelligence behind the responses comes from your actual data.

You can talk directly with your personas, ask for opinions on new products, test reactions to marketing initiatives, or explore how different sales strategies might land. For example, if you’re unsure how your followers will respond to a new social media post, you can consult the digital twin for guidance and fine-tune your post to better connect with your viewers.

To access this capability, open the dashboard and navigate to Digital Twin, then choose the persona you’d like to chat with.

Your team can also work with digital twins through collaboration platforms like Slack. By linking your Slack workspace via Settings > Integrations > Slack, everyone can bring these virtual customers into daily workflows. This makes it easier to align decisions around real customer insights, driving outcomes that work for both your business and your audience.

Get marketing recommendations with Advisor

Advisor by Delve AI (coming soon) is our AI-powered marketing suite designed to take the manual work out of campaign planning. Instead of static profiles, Advisor transforms personas into ready-to-use marketing ideas across multiple channels.

It connects customer personas directly to campaigns across content marketing, SEO, PPC, display and media ads, social media, email, events, public relations (PR), and sales. With channel-specific tools, Advisor acts as a centralized resource that saves time and streamlines marketing efforts.

For example, the SEO Advisor automatically finds guest posting and thought leadership opportunities, along with link-worthy content ideas tailored to your audience.

It identifies relevant blogs in your industry, filters them by domain authority and traffic, and suggests topics and related questions worth targeting. Each topic also comes with a detailed outline, including a recommended title, description, and section structure.

These opportunities are curated specifically for audiences that closely align with your ideal customers and focus on keywords and topics relevant to your business.

Beyond SEO, Advisor includes a suite of tools designed to support different teams and channels:

• Content Advisor recommends content topics and formats your audience is likely to engage with.
• PPC Advisor helps optimize ad campaigns and analyze potential ROI.
• Media Advisor assists in reaching the right audiences across platforms like Google, Meta, and LinkedIn.
• Social Advisor surfaces trending topics, hashtags, and influencers relevant to your market.
• Email Advisor suggests email content, testing strategies, and optimal send times.
• PR Advisor identifies opportunities for press coverage and announcements.
• Sales Advisor highlights potential B2B prospects and lead opportunities.

Customer Persona by Delve AI gives you more than just an understanding of your customers. Combined with Advisor, it equips your team with a practical set of tools to turn insights into effective, multi-channel marketing and sales strategies.

Wrapping Up

Customer personas are no longer optional for brands that want to grow. By turning raw customer data into clear, actionable persona profiles, you learn not just who your customers are, but why they behave the way they do. When those personas are built directly from your Salesforce CRM, the result is a richer, more precise understanding of every segment and sub-segment in your audience.

So leverage your Salesforce data with Customer Persona by Delve AI and start building smarter, data-backed personas today!