This article is based on insights from Chapter 1 (“Precision Targeting Starts Here”) of the Marketing Mastery Workbook, 2nd Edition. You can request your copy today.
For decades, the funnel has been the marketer’s favorite metaphor.
Neat, linear, and easy to explain to executives, the funnel promised that if you poured in enough leads at the top, some meaningful percentage would drip out the bottom as customers.
Oh, funnel; how good you were to us.
“Sales-funnel” by Tavin is marked with CC0 1.0.
Fast forward to the present day, and the funnel is all but dead.
As NetLine’s general manager, David Fortino, puts it, “linear progression is absolute vapor.”
“The entire industry has been misled by highly influential analyst firms chasing a conceptual framework that was not attainable nor even existed.”
The Reality of the Modern Buyer’s Journey
Today’s buyers are empowered, distracted, and wildly unpredictable.
As much as it might drive us nuts, they do not discover, evaluate, or purchase in neat stages. They binge content in the middle of the night, crowdsource vendor recommendations from peers, loop in new stakeholders halfway through, and vanish from view just when you think you have them.
In the middle of this chaos, one truth has become clear: precision targeting is the only way to cut through the noise and consistently win attention.
Without it, marketers are left wasting time and money chasing audiences that will never convert, while competitors quietly capture the buyers who are most ready to engage.
Chapter 1 of the Marketing Mastery Workbook, 2nd Edition (pp. 6–23) frames all of this quite plainly, providing a practical framework for understanding:
- Who your best buyers really are
- How to find them faster
- And how to model the journeys they actually take
What follows is a closer look at those lessons—and how to turn them into a strategy that actually works.
Defining Your Universe of Best-Fit Buyers
Every targeting conversation begins with the same question:
Who are we trying to reach?
The instinct is to answer as broadly as possible. After all, more leads should mean more opportunities, right? The problem is that a wide net is almost always the wrong net.
The workbook challenges us to think differently by asking a sharper, more disciplined question:
Who should buy from us?
That subtle but powerful shift reframes targeting away from mere possibility and toward profitability. It is not about every prospect who could theoretically use your solution, but about those who are most likely to find long-term value from it.
That means accounting for more than just firmographics. It requires examining which accounts tend to stick around longest, expand fastest, or generate the most referrals. It means identifying the industries and verticals where your solution is mission-critical rather than “nice to have.”
It also means recognizing that your ideal customer profile (ICP) is not a fixed definition. It should evolve as your product, your market, and your buyers evolve.
Think of your ICP less like a sculpture carved in stone and more like a living organism. It needs constant monitoring, adjusting, and refining if it is going to serve you well.
Pinpointing High-Intent Buyers Faster
Once you’ve defined your universe of best-fit buyers, the next challenge comes into focus:
Who is ready to buy right now?
Within any ICP, only a fraction of accounts are actively in-market. Finding them quickly is the difference between wasted outreach and accelerated pipeline. The danger is that many B2B teams still confuse surface-level activity with genuine intent.
Remember: a single registration for a White Paper or Webinar doesn’t mean a deal is imminent.
Oftentimes, these leads are taken to be “sales-ready” and are passed to sales without proper context or nurturing. This creates a negative experience both for the sellers (who are simply trying to do their jobs) and the registrant who may have been interested but needed to learn more on their own first.
The result is a cycle of frustration that damages marketing’s credibility and strains sales alignment.
The goal of buyer-level intent is to break this cycle by recognizing patterns of engagement that reveal urgency. Some of these patterns include:
- A prospect who returns to your site three times in a week.
- A buying committee where multiple stakeholders begin consuming content.
- An individual who moves from broad thought leadership into late-stage content like case studies or pricing guides.
Each of these signals is more than activity. They are behaviors that communicate readiness.
A Tale of Two Leads
Consider, for a moment, two leads; both request the same White Paper: One registrant returns within 48 hours, explores a comparison chart, and shares a case study with colleagues. The other vanishes.
Which one deserves your team’s energy?
A rhetorical question, certainly. But who knows? Maybe your CRM scores these two leads equally, ignoring the obvious intent signals being emitted. That clarity is why intent becomes the fulcrum of targeting.
ICPs may tell you who could buy. Personas may tell you how to engage. Journeys may tell you when to reach out. But intent tells you who is ready now.
Without it, everything else risks becoming strategy without impact.
Rebuilding Personas for a Signal-Driven World
Personas have long been the backbone of targeting strategies.
Too often, however, they amount to little more than a name, a title, and a stock photo pasted on a slide. These traditional personas are built on assumptions about what someone in a given role might care about, not on real-world behavior.
The workbook urges marketers to rebuild personas around signals via the actual behaviors that buyers exhibit. A “Head of IT” persona, for example, is not just an abstract title. One Head of IT who binge-consumes content about cloud migration is far more valuable than another who casually scans a generic whitepaper.
Likewise, a VP of Marketing who spends hours engaging with pipeline acceleration content should be treated differently from one who skims high-level thought leadership.
Signal-driven personas combine who buyers are with what they are showing you right now. They transform personas from static placeholders into dynamic, behavior-driven profiles that can guide strategy in real time. This shift is essential if marketers want to keep pace with how buyers actually behave.
Modeling Your Real Buyer’s Journey
If there is one thing marketers need to accept, it is that the funnel does not reflect reality. Buyers do not glide gracefully from awareness to interest to decision.
They zig. They zag. They stop. They start. They pull new stakeholders into the process halfway through.
The workbook’s recommendation is to stop modeling the funnel you wish existed and start mapping the one that actually does. That means digging into your engagement data to understand what patterns truly emerge.
- How many touchpoints does it typically take before sales engagement begins?
- What order of content assets accelerates deals, and which ones slow them down?
- At what stages do buyers most often ghost?
Armed with this insight, marketers can design nurturing strategies that reflect reality rather than fantasy. Sales teams can prioritize outreach based on actual buyer behavior rather than arbitrary lead scores. And organizations can begin to align around the truth of how their customers actually buy.
Auditing Your Audience Strategy for Gaps
Even the best targeting strategy has blind spots. Over time, assumptions calcify, biases creep in, and once-accurate insights become outdated. That is why the workbook recommends regular audits of your audience strategy.
These audits should ask difficult questions:
- Are we too heavily invested in one persona or industry at the expense of others?
- Are we over-indexing on top-of-funnel awareness campaigns while neglecting the middle and bottom of the funnel where deals are really won?
- Do we have the data coverage we need to make smart decisions, or are we flying blind?
Gap analysis may not be glamorous, but it often uncovers some of the most valuable opportunities. Correcting one overlooked segment or one underperforming channel can dramatically improve pipeline performance.
Operationalizing Your Targeting Strategy
Of course, none of this matters if targeting remains a strategy on paper. It has to be embedded into the workflows of marketing and sales teams.
Operationalization means syncing ICPs and intent signals into your CRM and marketing automation platforms so that they inform daily execution.
It means training sales reps to recognize and act on signal-driven personas rather than treating every lead the same. And it means building reporting frameworks that prioritize engagement quality over vanity metrics like clicks or impressions.
The transition from theory to practice is often where organizations stumble. The difference between success and failure lies in whether precision targeting becomes a shared discipline or remains an isolated marketing project.
Until targeting is operationalized, it isn’t strategy—it’s just a slide deck.
Why Precision Targeting Wins
The modern buyer has changed. Volume-driven models designed for another era no longer deliver results.
Precision targeting is the antidote.
By defining your best-fit universe, identifying high-intent buyers, rebuilding signal-driven personas, modeling real buyer journeys, auditing for gaps, and operationalizing strategy, you can align your efforts with the way buyers actually behave.
Marketers who cling to outdated frameworks will continue to struggle, generating reports full of activity that does not translate into revenue. But those who embrace precision targeting will waste less time, align more closely with sales, and prove impact with confidence.
The real question is not whether you should rethink your targeting strategy. It is whether you can afford not to.
This article is based on insights from Chapter 1 (“Precision Targeting Starts Here”) of the Marketing Mastery Workbook, 2nd Edition. You can request your copy today.