Target the week they're having, not the job title on their badge

Why job-title targeting keeps failing

Almost every targeting brief reads like a job advertisement: head of operations, firm of fifty to two hundred staff. That finds people who look like your customer on paper. It doesn't find the ones who are actually ready to act, because a job title says nothing about what's happening in their week.

What actually triggers a purchase is an event: a system fell over, an auditor asked a question nobody could answer, a key person left and took the only working knowledge with them. Write to the moment everywhere, the advertisement, the page, the asset, the first email. The copy isn't describing what you do. It's describing the week the reader is having.

The test that tells a real moment from a mood

Run every candidate moment through a date rule. 'Frustrated with their provider' fails the rule, because it names a mood, not an event. 'Their provider missed a deadline in front of the board' passes, because it names a Tuesday. A second pair makes the same point: 'thinking about switching accountants' fails, 'the accountant lodged the wrong year's figures' passes.

Anything you're inferring rather than hearing goes on a separate list, marked inferred, until a real customer says it to you unprompted.

How to build the list

Pull your last twenty enquiries and write the event that triggered each one, not the job title, with a date attached. Group them. Three or four moments usually cover more than half the list, and twenty is usually enough for a first pass on a narrow population.

Check the inferred pile against the rest. If it holds more than fifteen per cent of your rows, the buyer definition is too broad. Narrow it and re-pull the twenty rather than pushing on with a list that was never describing one buyer in the first place.

• Pull the last 20 enquiries and date each triggering event
• Group into 3-4 recurring moments
• Flag anything inferred rather than heard
• Re-pull if the inferred pile tops 15% of rows

Where this breaks

This matrix row is tagged almost nobody does this, and in practice the gap is exactly the one above: businesses have a buyer persona, not a dated list of triggering events. The persona survives because nobody goes back to the last twenty enquiries and actually writes down what happened the week before each one picked up the phone.