An ideal customer profile that lives in a slide deck says things like "growth-stage B2B companies with a modern sales culture." Nobody can search for a sales culture. A target that produces a list says who the person is, where they work, and what just happened to them. The second kind is the only kind a campaign can run on.
The three parts of a searchable target
Every target agaria can act on has the same three parts:
- The person. A role, or a small set of roles, that owns the problem you solve. "Head of Sales" and "VP Sales" are one person for most purposes. "Anyone in sales" is not.
- The company. Size, industry, geography. Enough to keep the list on one continent and in one price bracket, not so much that it shrinks to twelve companies.
- The signal. What changed. A funding round, a hiring wave, a new leader, a product launch, an office opening. This is the part the deck usually leaves out, and it is the part that decides whether a message can be written at all. See what buying signals look like.
"Heads of Sales at B2B software companies in the Nordics that raised a round this year" has all three. "SaaS decision makers" has none.
How agaria turns a sentence into a campaign
You do not fill in a form. You answer one question at a time, and each question comes with suggested answers drawn from your own website and your previous campaigns.
The first question is who. The suggestions are targets that fit what you sell; pick one or type your own. The next questions cover what you are offering them and what you want to happen next: a reply, a meeting, a trial. Three answers and the campaign has a target, an offer, and an objective. From there agaria finds people, researches each one, and drafts the sequence.
You can also skip the builder entirely and start from a LinkedIn search with the extension. Both roads end at the same place.
Too wide, too narrow
A target is too wide when the first message cannot mention anything specific. If the best opener the draft can manage is "I see you work in software," the target has no signal in it, and every message will read like a template because it is one.
A target is too narrow when the list runs out in a week. Forty people who match perfectly is a good start, not a campaign. Loosen one part at a time: widen the geography before the role, and the role before the signal. The signal is the last thing to give up.
One target per campaign
The pull is to put everything in one campaign to save setup time. Resist it. A campaign with one target gets one sequence written for that target, one set of signals to sort by, and one clear answer to "is this working?" The analytics only mean something when everyone in the funnel was sent the same kind of message for the same reason.
Two targets, two campaigns. Basic runs one at a time; Pro runs as many as you like. Either way, the target is the sentence you would say to a new rep on their first day: who, where, and why now.