The Right Title Doesn’t Make Them the Right Person

Part 3 of a four-part series on modern prospecting.

The name that makes the account feel real

“We found someone who could say yes before we understood why anyone would.”

There’s a small moment in prospecting that feels bigger than it probably should. You find the name. The executive with the right title, sitting inside the company you’ve decided deserves your attention. Maybe there’s a mutual connection. Maybe you’ve even got a good email address. The account suddenly feels a little less theoretical, like something has opened up.

You can already picture the conversation with your manager. You’ve identified the decision-maker. You have a path into the account. There’s a plan.

Then comes the part where you have to explain why that person would want to talk to you, and somehow the language gets less specific. They’re responsible for transformation. They care about efficiency. They must be thinking about AI. All perfectly reasonable things to say about a senior executive, and all things you could probably say about the next twenty people with the same title.

I understand the attraction. A senior name makes the account feel important, and getting access feels like progress. We’ve spent enough time trying to work our way through organizations that finding a route to the top can feel like skipping several difficult chapters.

But somebody having the authority to buy doesn’t tell you whether there’s anything they want to buy. We found someone who could say yes before we understood why anyone would.

The person who could explain the whole thing

“The person closest to the consequence may be nowhere near the top of your contact list.”

Picture an account where the business is expanding, the systems are struggling to keep up, and you have a plausible reason to believe your product could help. You’ve done the work from Part 2. There’s more here than a recognizable logo and a hopeful account plan.

Your attention goes to the executive responsible for the function. Fair enough. Their organization owns the outcome. But somewhere underneath that person is somebody trying to make the current arrangement survive another week. They know which process breaks, who gets called when it does, and what happens when the workaround stops working. They might also know that the problem you’re excited about was solved six months ago, which would be a useful thing to learn before building a campaign around it.

That person may have a less impressive title. They may have no budget authority at all. They could still give you a more accurate understanding of the situation in fifteen minutes than you’ll get from another evening reading executive interviews.

There’s a strange habit in sales of calling somebody “too low” before we know what they understand. Sometimes that’s a fair assessment of whether they can move a decision. Sometimes it’s a convenient way to dismiss the person who could tell us whether there’s a decision worth pursuing.

The executive still matters. So do the people who experience the effects, own the dependencies, or would have to make a change work. The person closest to the consequence may be nowhere near the top of your contact list.

That’s the question running through this week’s free field guide, The Right Title Doesn’t Make Them the Right Person: what connects this person to the conversation beyond the words underneath their name?

Then somebody visits the website

“A company showing interest doesn’t mean the person you wanted has shown interest.”

Now add a signal. Somebody from the account has been on your website, looking at something relevant. After weeks of trying to create a conversation, here’s a little evidence that the interest might be coming from the other direction.

Of course that gets your attention. It should. The trouble starts with what we do in the space between seeing the signal and deciding what it means.

We already have an executive in mind, so the activity quietly becomes part of the story about that executive. The company is researching. The executive must have an initiative. Our timing must be good. We can make that journey remarkably quickly without ever establishing who actually visited.

It might be someone on the team investigating a real problem. It might be a person comparing approaches for a future project. It might be somebody doing general research who has no involvement in the situation we’ve identified. A company showing interest doesn’t mean the person you wanted has shown interest.

Even when you know who the person is, there’s still some interpretation left. Reading an educational article and examining how a product would fit into an existing environment can suggest different things. A single visit and a pattern of relevant activity give you different amounts to work with. None of those actions tells you the whole story.

I think the useful response is a little interest of our own. There may be something worth understanding here. We don’t have to turn it into a buying decision before the customer has had a chance to tell us what they’re doing.

The quiet people are still there

“Visibility is uneven. Need doesn’t always announce itself where you can see it.”

There’s another trap waiting on the opposite side of all this. Once the signals start arriving, the people who generate them can begin to look like the only people worth knowing. At least they’re doing something we can see.

Meanwhile, the person accountable for the outcome may be in internal meetings all day. Somebody else is doing the research. The executive might be reading material a colleague sent, talking to a peer, or working through a problem without ever touching a page your systems can identify.

Visibility is uneven. Need doesn’t always announce itself where you can see it.

That’s why I wouldn’t want a seller to abandon their understanding of the account just because a different name appeared in an alert. The activity adds something to the picture. It may reveal a person you hadn’t considered or strengthen your reason to investigate. It doesn’t erase everyone whose responsibilities still connect to the consequence.

And an interested person isn’t automatically a champion. Being willing to read your material, take a call, or say the product looks interesting is a long way from spending internal credibility on your behalf. Most experienced sellers have learned that distinction the expensive way.

There’s value in holding both things at once: what someone appears responsible for and what their behavior actually demonstrates. The free field guide puts those questions side by side, because neither one deserves to disappear underneath the other.

A better view of the people inside

“The signals become more useful when you can connect what the business needs, who it affects and what those people are doing.”

This is where I like the possibilities of the modern tools. There’s a lot to keep straight inside one enterprise account, never mind a territory full of them. Responsibilities overlap, people move, initiatives cross functions, and the person you knew last year may now be doing something completely different.

Professional networks and relationship intelligence, such as LinkedIn Sales Navigator, can give you a place to investigate responsibilities, history and possible introductions. Account monitoring, such as Rox, can help keep relevant changes in view. Available engagement signals in a platform such as Common Room can add another perspective on who appears to be paying attention.

Individually, those things can be interesting. Overlay them and you may start to see something worth pursuing. The business has announced an initiative that could create a problem you solve. A particular team appears responsible for making it work. Someone on that team is showing a pattern of interest in the issue. You’re beginning to connect a business priority, a person’s responsibilities and behavior that may suggest they’re investigating a way forward.

That gives you a stronger basis for believing a buying conversation could develop than any one of those facts would provide alone. You haven’t discovered a guaranteed buyer. You have a more credible explanation for why this account, these people and this moment may belong together. That’s the kind of buying propensity worth paying attention to, provided the connections hold up.

The signals become more useful when you can connect what the business needs, who it affects and what those people are doing. But three disconnected facts don’t become evidence just because a tool puts them on the same screen. The initiative could affect another division. The person could be researching for a different project. Several alerts could trace back to the same underlying activity.

That’s where I’d want an AI tool such as Claude helping examine the interpretation. What actually connects these findings? What contradicts the story? Whose perspective is missing? It’s useful to have something challenge the picture before your enthusiasm turns it into an opportunity.

For a rep carrying a larger territory, that can change where the next hour goes. You can bring a clearer reason for a regional campaign, give business development and marketing a more useful starting point, and focus attention where several pieces of evidence support the same hypothesis.

The size of the contact list might barely change. Your understanding of where a useful buying conversation could emerge can change considerably.

What it feels like on the receiving end

“The customer shouldn’t have to invent the connection between your message and their work.”

Imagine opening an email from somebody who has your title right and your situation wrong. It happens often enough that you probably don’t need much imagination. They’ve decided what you care about based on the role, then written as though they understand your priorities.

There’s a different feeling when the sender has a plausible reason for approaching you and leaves room to be corrected. They’ve noticed something that could affect your work. They have a perspective that may be useful. You can understand why the conversation might belong with you, even if the answer turns out to be that someone else owns it.

The customer shouldn’t have to invent the connection between your message and their work. And they certainly don’t need a report on every digital breadcrumb you think you’ve found. Knowing someone read something can help you prepare a useful approach without making the approach about the fact that you watched them read it.

I think that’s part of the maturity customers are asking from us. They have enough information coming at them already. They need better judgment from the people asking for their attention, including the judgment to recognize when an interest signal is too thin to carry the conversation we want.

Getting that right helps both sides. The seller has a better basis for the approach, and the customer has a better chance of receiving something relevant instead of another interruption wearing their job title.

Take the title off the screen

“If you removed their title, could you still explain why this person belongs in the conversation?”

That question leaves you with the actual substance of your thinking. What does this person appear responsible for? What consequence might reach them? What have they demonstrated? What could their perspective help you understand?

You might discover that the senior executive still belongs at the top of the list. You might realize that your first conversation should be somewhere else. You might have a person with clear relevance and no visible activity, alongside somebody showing interest whose connection to the decision remains uncertain. That’s a more honest picture than pretending either one comes with all the answers.

Part 1 of this series was about building intelligence that develops between meetings. Part 2 was about letting evidence change which companies deserve your attention. This part brings that judgment inside the account. In the final part, we’ll get to what you can say once you have a credible reason to approach a particular person.

For now, the free field guide is here if you want to reconsider five names in a priority account. You may already have the right people. It’s worth being able to explain why.

A name and a title can get someone onto your screen. Understanding how the problem reaches them is what gives you a reason to start a conversation.