Buying roles in a segment
A persona in Demander is a role inside a firmographic segment, such as the budget-owning finance leader at mid-market software companies in Germany and Austria. It carries pains, jobs to be done, triggers, objections with answers, channels, messaging angles, search keywords and a lifetime value band, all derived from your product profile.
For a B2B product the proposal is an economic buyer, a champion and, unless the purchase is simple, a technical evaluator: two personas for low-complexity products, three otherwise, up to four if you ask. Products for small companies get the founder as the economic buyer. Roles and departments come from 14 category lexicons, so an HR tool gets HR titles and a developer tool gets engineering ones.
For a consumer product Demander proposes segments instead: people looking for what the product does, people unhappy with what they use now, gift buyers for physical goods and regulars for subscriptions. Consumer segments get consumer channels only (search, Meta, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, opt-in e-mail) and never cold outreach or LinkedIn. No ages, names or hobbies are made up.
Five checks behind every confidence score
| Check | What it looks at | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Product fit | How closely the persona’s pains and jobs match the value propositions and features on your site, and whether the site names the role | 30% |
| Reachability | How well each ad platform reaches this seniority in these countries, from B2B benchmarks and country reach data | 20% |
| Economics | Cost per lead on the two best platforms, carried to acquisition cost through funnel priors and set against the lifetime value band; payback beyond 24 months is flagged | 20% |
| Evidence | How much proof the site carries, whether its industries and roles match the persona, and whether you have approved claims | 20% |
| Compliance | The share of target countries where cold e-mail needs prior consent | 10% |
Personas scoring 0.45 or more start active; the rest stay proposed until you activate them. Market size is estimated from company counts by size band (Eurostat and US Census, to an order of magnitude), times industry share and the density of the role. Consumer segments are sized from the ad platforms’ audience estimates once an ad account is connected.
What the validation tells you
Each persona comes with risks and recommendations written from the same numbers. These are the ones you will see most.
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01
Small segment
Under about 300 companies, the advice is account-based targeting and outbound rather than broad paid reach.
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02
Very broad segment
Over 200,000 companies, narrow it by industry or trigger so the messaging can stay specific.
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03
Paid unlikely to pay back
An estimated lifetime value below the acquisition cost points to content, partnerships and inbound first.
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04
Consent-only countries
If most target countries require consent for cold e-mail and the persona lists outbound, outbound will be limited to consented or opt-out contacts.
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05
No local pages
A country whose language the site does not use gets a note that ads and landing pages will need translation.
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06
Where to lead
The three platforms with the best fit for the persona, with estimated cost per click per country.
Weights that move with pipeline
Each persona has a weight you can set from 0 to 10, and the media plan splits budget by weight times confidence. Archive a persona and it drops out of the plan; its share goes to the others.
Once spend and pipeline are recorded, the optimiser re-weights personas with Thompson sampling on pipeline per euro spent. A weak pooled prior keeps €50 of spend from crowning or killing a persona on one deal. Weights move halfway toward the new target per run, personas younger than 30 days keep a 10 percent floor so they get a fair test, and every persona keeps a small minimum until a person archives it. Until any pipeline exists, weights stay where they are. Re-weighting runs on its own from autonomy level 2 and is a proposed action below that.
From personas to a committee at each account
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Roles from your personas
The committee is derived from the personas. Missing roles get defaults: an economic buyer above the champion, a champion below a buyer, a technical evaluator for software and an optional procurement role for complex purchases.
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Titles in seven languages
Each role carries titles and synonyms in English, Czech, Slovak, German, Polish, French and Spanish, a seniority band, departments and LinkedIn job functions. Title matching handles feminine and adjectival forms and German compound titles.
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Coverage per account
Contacts are matched to roles by title, then department and seniority. The coverage score weighs the required roles (economic buyer and champion 1, technical evaluator 0.8) and scales each by match confidence, so a CFO matched by exact title counts more than someone senior in finance. Covered and missing roles show on the account and feed its score.
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Filling the gaps
People discovery fills each role at each account with up to five people (one by default), searching only roles still missing and staying inside the run’s credit cap. Fill gaps re-runs just that step. See prospecting.
Targeting the committee in ads
| Platform | How the roles are targeted |
|---|---|
| Your account list as a matched company list, combined with the role’s job titles, functions and seniorities; one campaign per role or several roles grouped. Under LinkedIn’s 300-member minimum the targeting widens step by step: titles, then functions, then seniorities, then the company list alone. Audience counts come from LinkedIn when connected, or from an offline estimate. | |
| Microsoft Advertising | An Audience campaign with LinkedIn profile targeting (company, job function, industry) as target-and-bid criteria, resolved when the campaign is published. |
| Other planners | The role’s titles, functions, seniority and keywords become the people layer of other campaigns, such as office geofences, where a location is always combined with people targeting. |
ABM campaigns are created as drafts and launch through the guardrails like any other campaign.
Questions people ask
How many personas does Demander create?
Two for simple purchases and three otherwise, or one to four if you choose. Consumer products get segments of buyers instead of roles. Regenerating the plan archives the earlier personas and their journeys.
Where does the market data come from?
Company counts by size band for each country, platform benchmarks for cost per click, click-through and lead conversion, funnel priors for lead to won, and country data on languages, platform availability, reach, click costs and cold e-mail rules. They are estimates to rank personas before you have results; your own pipeline replaces them over time.
Does it find the actual people at each account?
Through prospecting, with Hunter or People Data Labs on your own key. Each contact gets a buying role, and the account shows which committee roles are covered and which are missing.
Can I target a buying committee on LinkedIn without uploading contacts?
Yes. Demander syncs your target companies as a company list and layers each role’s titles, functions and seniorities on top, widening only as far as needed to stay above LinkedIn’s 300-member minimum.