The right job titles were bringing the wrong projects.
The consultancy sold €25,000 to €60,000 engagements to senior finance leaders. LinkedIn reached relevant titles and generated leads, but many lacked urgency, budget or a defined project. Audience relevance was being mistaken for a buying situation.
A relevant job title is not a buying situation.
The audience combined role, company fit and a current reason to act. The diagnostic offer then helped identify prospects with a problem the service could solve.
- Buyer fit
- A relevant role with a plausible part in the decision, rather than seniority alone.
- Company fit
- An account profile the consultancy could serve credibly and economically.
- Business trigger
- An active problem or decision that made the diagnostic useful now.
- Delivery viability
- Enough relevant audience and conversion exposure to evaluate the proposition without excessive fragmentation.
Precision still needed enough reach and outcomes to learn. Tiny audience segments could make an attractive plan difficult to run.
Target a buying need, then keep enough reach to learn
Accepted and rejected leads showed which company profiles and situations produced useful conversations. The diagnostic offer brought the message closer to an active problem than a broad content download could.
Audience size, frequency and results stayed visible. Rejection reasons guided targeting and copy, with cost per accepted lead judging whether greater precision was worth its price.
Improve prospect fit without making audiences too small
Precision had limits. Excessive audience splitting could increase CPMs and frequency while leaving too few outcomes to learn from, so the design sought commercial selectivity without fragmenting delivery into tiny cells.
A higher impression cost could be acceptable if accepted conversations became more efficient. The decision measure therefore followed sales acceptance and its cost, instead of rewarding the cheapest form fill.
Ten weeks of accepted demand
Within ten weeks, sales acceptance rose from 22% to 46%, while cost per accepted lead fell from €510 to €340, approximately 33%. Accepted leads increased from eighteen to thirty-one per month, approximately 72%.
Those outcomes support the audience-and-offer combination, with sales qualification consistency remaining an important interpretation condition.
Buyer fit needed company context and a reason to act now. Keeping the audience deliverable mattered too: precision loses its value when segments are too small to learn from.