Do buyer personas help?

There have been some interesting conversations out there about buyer personas.  There's some real sense in this - after all, buyers are people, and thinking about the person at the other end of the wire is a great way to focus communications.  It's also a great way to get different players in a marketing team reading off the same script.

There are dangers as well, of course.  The problem is that personas can be taken too literally, and can lead us to know more about our prospects than we actually do.  Deterministic models tend to limit our our view of reality.  Perhaps we should establish a rule that says that personas become stale after, say, 30 days, and need to be refreshed.  This would force team members to spend more time creating personas based on their experiences with real people.