Who to Sell to First: Ranking Buyer Teams by Budget Share
Split your market by the team that buys, rate each campaign on five criteria and turn the ratings into budget shares, so your first emails go where they are most likely to land.
Key takeaways
- Split campaigns by the team that feels the problem and buys (support, sales, engineering, founders), not by industry.
- Rate each campaign from 1 to 5 on pain, proof, fit, reachability and displacement, then combine the ratings with fixed weights.
- Give budget in proportion to the square of each score: it concentrates on the best campaign without starving the rest.
Table of contents
Split by the team that buys
A list such as “fintech, healthcare, VP Sales, competitors of X” mixes four different things. Prospects do not experience your product by industry; a support lead and a CFO at the same company care about different problems and answer different emails.
So make each campaign one buyer team, named the way the buyer’s org chart names it: “Support teams”, “Sales teams”, “Founders”. Industries, company sizes and the competitor they likely use become details inside the campaign.
Rate each campaign on five criteria
| Criterion | Question |
|---|---|
| Pain | How much does this team feel the problem you solve? |
| Proof | Can you point to a customer or result this team will believe? |
| Fit | Does your product work for them today, without custom work? |
| Reachability | Can you find these people and their emails? |
| Displacement | If they use a competitor, how easy is it to switch? |
Rate each from 1 to 5 and combine them with fixed weights into a score from 0 to 100. Fixed weights matter: they keep the comparison honest when you are tempted to favor the campaign you like.
See who could buy from you
Paste your website: in about two minutes you get your buyers, their decision makers with verified emails and a first email to each.
Turn scores into budget shares
Split the budget in proportion to the square of each score, then round the shares to whole percents that add up to 100. Squaring rewards the leader: a campaign that scores a bit higher gets clearly more, while weaker ones still get enough emails to prove you wrong.
| Campaign (score) | Budget share |
|---|---|
| Sales teams (80) | 38% |
| Founders (64) | 24% |
| Operations (55) | 18% |
| Support teams (45) | 12% |
| Finance (37) | 8% |
With $50 at $0.04 per email, that is about 475 emails to sales teams and 100 to finance. Revisit the shares after the first replies: real answers beat any rating.
