Title vs Function & Seniority

So you're setting up a Lead-Engine and everything is going smoothly.

Then you get to the point where you put in your decision maker targeting criteria and you don't know if you should use their job title or function and seniority.

So whats the difference?

One word. Precision.

Titles are best when you want more exact matches.

I did a search for "Marketing Director" as the title and left all the other inputs blank. I got about 250,000 results, and the titles looked like this.

Function and Seniority on the other hand are much more broad.

If I use "Marketing" as my Function and "Director" as my seniority I'll get anyone in a marketing role with a director level title.


While this search looks the same as the one above, it found almost 500,000 people and the titles are much more varied.

So which should you choose?

It depends!

If you already know exactly who your target customer is, I would use titles. The list will be a little shorter but you'll be much more precise.

If you aren't sure exactly who to target, Function and Seniority might be a great way to find out. Even at Lead-Engines we weren't totally sure what titles we wanted to target so we started with function and seniority and that's how we learned to target Demand Generation managers (Makes sense, right?).