Stop looking for the highest title. Find the owner of the problem.
Finding the right decision-maker begins with understanding who is responsible for the outcome your product affects. Job title matters. Responsibility matters more.
Why Finding the Right Decision-Maker Is Hard
You've identified a company that's a perfect fit. Now what? You need to find the right person to contact. But who is it? The CEO? The VP? A director? A department head?
The answer depends on what you sell. A VP of Engineering might be your perfect contact at one company and irrelevant at another. Generic titles don't tell you who has the problem you solve. You need to understand the company's structure and how your offering fits into it.
Start with What You Sell
Before you search for a person, define what you're selling and who typically buys it. What problem does your product solve? Who owns that problem inside a company? What role do they usually have?
This is where a Sales Profile helps. By documenting your products, value proposition, and ideal buyer roles, you give yourself a framework for evaluating whether a specific person at a specific company is the right contact.
Research the Company Structure
Once you know the type of person you're looking for, research the company's structure. Look at their team page, LinkedIn, and recent press releases. Understand how they're organized — by function, by region, by product line.
Pay attention to recent changes. A new VP might be rethinking their tech stack. A recently promoted director might be eager to prove themselves. Leadership changes are signals that can help you identify not just who to contact, but when.
Look Beyond the Org Chart
The highest-ranking executive isn't always the right contact. In many companies, the decision is made at the director or manager level, with the VP or C-suite signing off. Sometimes the most influential person is an individual contributor who owns the problem you solve.
Instead of starting at the top and working down, start with the problem. Who owns it? Who would benefit most from solving it? That person is your decision-maker — regardless of their title.
Different Buyer Roles Across Industries
In a software company, the buyer for a security tool might be the CISO or VP of Engineering. In a manufacturing company, the buyer for the same tool might be the Director of IT or even the COO. In a healthcare organization, it might be the Chief Compliance Officer.
The point is that buyer roles vary by industry, company size, and organizational structure. Don't assume the same title is the right contact at every company. Evaluate each account individually.
Verify Their Contact Information
Once you've identified the right person, you need a way to reach them. Don't guess email addresses — generate multiple candidates, verify each for deliverability, and rank them by confidence.
Email verification checks MX records, SMTP validity, and estimated deliverability. A combined confidence score tells you which address is most likely to be deliverable. This helps protect your sender reputation and may improve your reply rate.
Use AI to Scale the Process
Manually researching every company and identifying every decision-maker is time-consuming. AI-powered tools like Intesara automate this process — they read the company context, identify decision-makers based on your Sales Profile, generate and verify candidate emails, and rank each contact by confidence.
The key is that AI evaluates relevance, not just titles. It tells you why a person matters to your specific offering, so you can prioritize the contacts most likely to respond.
This article is published by the Intesara Editorial Team. We write about AI sales intelligence, prospecting, and account research to help sales teams work smarter.
