You know both of them, even if you have never met them.
They have the same job title, in the same industry, at a company of the same size. Same tidy little sentence on LinkedIn about being passionate, strategic and results-driven.
If you built a target list this afternoon, they would land in the same segment of the same campaign. Same email at 10:07 on Tuesday morning, because apparently that is when business people are most emotionally available.
And yet one of them is on fire. The other is having a perfectly normal Tuesday.
One has inherited a critical process held together by a spreadsheet, three Slack messages and the institutional memory of someone called Martin who left in February. The other has a system that works.
Identical titles with opposite situations. The business card cannot see the difference. So we send both of them the same watered down, job-title-related message about “unlocking scalable efficiencies” and wonder why neither one feels understood.
The person on fire does not recognise the fire. The person who is fine would like us to stop emailing. Excellent. We have alienated the entire segment.
The problem is that we define people by what they are. We reach for job title, seniority, company size, industry. These things feel reassuringly scientific because you can select them from a dropdown menu.
Look at that. We chose “51 to 200 employees.” Marketing has occurred.
These fields feel like an audience because you can count them, you can filter them, upload them and watch a large number appear on the screen. “Look,” someone says. “There are 38,416 of them.” Wonderful.
Then we call it data because “a list of strangers we intend to bother” would make the plan feel a tad less sophisticated.
So, 38,416 it is.
But a number is not a person and a filter is not a reason.
None of those fields tells you why someone would care about what you sell. They tell you that the person is maybe (and maybe is doing a lot of heavy lifting here) allowed to receive the campaign. They do not tell you whether the person is currently whispering, “Please, God, let there be software for this.” Because the difference between the buyer who is on fire and the buyer who is fine is not part of your spreadsheet.
It is something they are doing. Or something that just happened.
One is keeping an important process alive in a spreadsheet only they understand. The other is not.
One just missed a target. The other just exceeded one. One hired six people and discovered that the process described as “pretty straightforward” was actually Claire remembering everything, but Claire is now on maternity leave. Congratulations to Claire.
So the audience built aims at both buyers and lands somewhere between them, in the warm beige territory known as “relevant to no one but technically inoffensive.”
I did this for years, so I am not observing the crime from behind the yellow tape. I would open a document and write: “Decision-makers at B2B SaaS companies with 50 to 500 employees.”
There it was. My audience. I had nouns. I had numbers. I had said “decision-makers,” which is what you say when you do not know who makes the decision but would still like to get paid at the end of the month.
I mean, it looks like an audience. It walks like an audience. It quacks like an audience.
But it’s not an audience.
All it does is tell you how to find them on LinkedIn. That is useful for the media plan. It is useless for deciding what to say once you find them.
The fix is almost disappointingly simple. Describe your audience by what they are doing and the situation they are in, not by what they are. Start with the behaviour. Not “a team lead.” That is a title. Try “Keeping a critical process alive in a spreadsheet only they understand.” That is a Wednesday. The problem lives inside the Wednesday. Then name the trigger. What changed that made the problem urgent now? A new hire exposed the mess. A target got missed. A tool stopped working. The company raised funding and “we have always done it this way” was suddenly promoted from charming anecdote to operational risk.
The problem may have existed for years. The trigger is what made somebody open to your message.
Then write down the observable signals. The things a stranger could actually spot from the outside.
They posted about the problem. They are using a workaround tool visible in their stack. They hired someone for a role that exists largely because the problem exists.
“Has the problem” is not an observable signal, is it. But “hired an operations manager in the last six months” is.
Write the signals clearly enough that another person could use them without first attending a 90-minute alignment meeting (this makes the rest of your marketing easier for months). Now you have a targeting brief.
This does not mean demographics are useless btw. You still need company size, industry and seniority because, eventually, you have to locate these people. So keep the filters, but label them honestly. Otherwise the filter wins, because it is measurable and available in a dropdown. The actual human situation is messier, so naturally we delete that and keep “VP level or above.” Very efficient.
So the next time someone asks who your product is for, pay attention to the answer. If it fits on a business card, you have described who is allowed onto the list. You have not described who has the problem.