Most product leaders start market validation the same way: build a survey, launch a landing page, wait to see who responds. Sales and marketing teams do the same in demand generation, building an outreach list around one ideal customer profile before confirming who actually fits it. Different activity, same blind spot: targeting the wrong buyer, or not enough of them.

The Three Questions That Come First

Before any outreach, survey, or trial goes out, three questions have to be answered.

1. What problem does your solution solve?
2. What industry are you selling into?
3. What size company are you targeting?

These answers reveal the real buyer, in order. Define the pain point your solution resolves, then map it to the job function where it shows up, since the same pain point can sit in different departments depending on industry and company structure. Most targeting stops there: one department, one title, one persona.

One Title, Different Authority

That single persona has a flaw: the title itself does not exist the same way at every company size. A thousand person company likely has a Chief Revenue Officer sitting above sales, marketing, and customer success. A fifty person company has no such role. The person doing that job, owning the whole revenue engine, is simply called VP of Sales. Search only for “Chief Revenue Officer” and you might miss every founder stage and growth stage company where that authority exists under a different name. Survey the wrong version of that title and the response you get back is noise wearing the shape of evidence.

One Buyer Is Rarely the Whole Story

Even when the title is right, it is still one person, and the purchase itself often depends on several. Harvard Business Review researchers Karl Schmidt, Brent Adamson, and Anna Bird studied more than 5,000 B2B stakeholders and found the single decision maker sales reps are trained to seek out rarely exists anymore, at companies of 50 employees or 50,000. On average, 5.4 people now sign off on a single purchase, and since that 2015 research, security, compliance, procurement, and legal have only added more people to the group.

A Consolidated Message Beats a Fragmented One

Once several people have to agree, it is tempting to write a separate, narrowly personalized message for each: a budget argument for finance, a risk argument for security, a regulatory argument for legal. That feels right, and the same HBR research found it backfires: a message built around each stakeholder’s narrow priority highlights how differently they see the problem, making group agreement harder, not easier. The fix is not less personalization. It is one consolidated message that speaks to the shared problem across every function it touches, personalized within that shared frame instead of pulled apart.

The Cost of Getting This Wrong

Targeting the wrong buyer, or only one, is expensive in a way that is easy to miss. Budget gets spent reaching people who were never going to buy, and because the response still looks legitimate, leadership reads it as real signal instead of noise, misreading a weak response as no demand. There is a quieter cost too: outreach that keeps landing on the wrong person erodes the brand, and makes the next real attempt harder to land.

Where AI Changes the Equation

Some of the most relevant buyers never get contacted at all, because their title did not exist when the list was built. Catching that today means reading real profiles individually on LinkedIn, or paying for an enrichment platform, and either way it is slow: about five minutes per person, which becomes 25 minutes to map one buying group of 5.4 people. That review work, not the strategic thinking behind it, is what AI is now good at. The three questions still need a person who understands the business. AI just removes the manual work of confirming who fits that definition, so you can validate demand, or generate it, against the right buyer instead of whoever was reachable.

We used this approach with one B2B technology company validating a new solution before launch. Defining the buyer group correctly before outreach began is what let the results count as real evidence: engagement rates above 20% from real buyers, not survey responses.

Are you still targeting one decision maker, and the same one across every industry you sell into?