Job Titles Are Made Up: Search by the Role, Not the Words on the Business Card

A CRM consultant told us about a cleanup job that stopped before it started. The client wanted to segment their database by role: send one message to finance, another to operations, a third to IT. The database held about four thousand contacts. When the consultant pulled the job title column and counted the distinct values, there were roughly fifteen hundred of them.

Fifteen hundred titles for four thousand people. Nearly every second contact had a title nobody else in the database shared. Segmentation by title wasn't hard. It was impossible.

That isn't a dirty-data problem. Nobody typed those titles wrong. They are what people call themselves, and people call themselves whatever they like.

Titles are written for the holder, not for you

A job title has one job: to tell the world something flattering and roughly accurate about the person holding it. It's written for a business card, a LinkedIn headline and an email signature. It was never written to be searched.

So titles drift in every direction at once:

• Inflation. A two-person sales team has a "Head of Sales," a "Sales Director" and a "Chief Revenue Officer," depending on who founded the company and who wanted a title instead of a raise.
• The same word, different jobs. At one company "sales manager" means the person running the sales team. At the next, it's what every rep is called. Same title, two completely different conversations.
• Words that cover everything. One prospect told us their "operations" contacts included a caretaker, a parking manager and a head of consulting. All three, correctly, have "operations" in the title.
• Two languages at once. In the Nordics the same job shows up as Försäljningschef, Säljchef, Head of Sales, Sales Director, Säljansvarig and VP Sales, sometimes inside the same company.
• Small companies combine roles. At a forty-person firm, the CFO is often also head of HR and IT. The title says one of them.

A sales lead put it plainly in a demo this summer: a salesperson can be called all sorts of things today. They were talking about their own team.

Three ways title search fails

When you build a list by searching titles, you hit three different failures, and only one of them is visible.

1. It misses the right people. You search "CFO" and miss ekonomichef, finance director, head of finance and the VD who still runs the books at a fifteen-person company. Every synonym you didn't think of is a decision maker you never call. You never notice, because people who aren't on the list don't complain.

2. It finds the wrong people. You search "sales manager" and get forty heads of sales and three hundred account managers. You search "operations" and get the parking manager. The list looks full, and the first day of calling is spent learning who to skip.

3. It can't see the role at all. A pricing-software vendor wanted people with "pricing" in their title. In official and public sources, there were a few dozen. That's not because pricing doesn't exist at those companies. It's because the person who sets prices is called commercial director, CFO or head of business control, and "pricing" is a line in their job description, not in their title.

The third failure is the expensive one. The role you sell to exists at thousands of companies, but under a title that has nothing to do with it.

A role is a job, not a word

The fix isn't a longer list of keywords. It's a different question. Instead of "what is this person called?", ask "what does this person do, and what can they decide?"

That gives you two separate axes:

• Function: the part of the business they work in. Finance, sales, IT, operations, HR.
• Seniority: how much they decide. Founder or owner, C-level, director, head of, manager, specialist, board.

"Sales Director" and "Försäljningschef" sit at the same point on both axes. "Sales manager" at the forty-person company and "sales manager" at the four-hundred-person company may not. Once you search on the axes instead of the words, the fifteen hundred titles collapse into a few dozen groups you can actually work with.

Five rules for building lists on roles

1. Describe the role as a job before you search. Write one sentence: what this person does, what they decide and what they're measured on. "Owns the budget for IT infrastructure and signs supplier contracts above a certain size." That sentence will survive every title variation. The keyword "IT manager" won't.

2. Split function and seniority. Most bad lists come from mixing the two. "Head of IT" is a function and a seniority glued together, and a search for it misses the IT director, the CIO and the IT-chef. Pick the function first, then the seniority range you sell to. If you sell to people who make the decision, say so explicitly, and let the managers who manage only their own work fall out.

3. Write roles as a priority list, with a fallback. At a large company the person you want exists. At a small one, they often don't, and someone else holds the job. So define the order: the IT infrastructure owner first, then the IT manager, then the CFO, then the CEO. One SDR we work with set up exactly this kind of ladder in their first week, adding a narrow infrastructure role on top of the generic IT decision maker and dragging it to the top. The rule is simple: call the highest role that exists at this company, and never leave a company off the list just because role number one isn't there.

4. Keep literal title search for the rare titles, and know its limit. Some titles are specific enough to be worth matching word for word: "pricing," "category manager," "fleet manager." Use title-contains for those. But accept what the pricing vendor found: if a title is rare in public sources, matching it gives you a short list, not a market. For the rest of the market, target the person one level up and use the call to find the owner.

5. Confirm the role in the first half-minute. Some titles can't be read without context. "Architect" means one thing at a software company and another at a construction firm. "Partner" means owner at a law firm and maybe nothing at a consultancy. "Secretary" can be an assistant or a board role. Don't guess. Ask early: "Is it you who decides on X, or is that someone else?" Either you've confirmed the role, or you've just been told the right name, which is the best referral you'll get all day. More on that kind of answer in the Nordic cold-call objections guide.

A ten-minute test

Try this before you build your next list.

1. Export the last hundred contacts your team called. Just name, company and title.
2. Count the distinct titles. If it's more than forty, title search is already failing you.
3. Group them by function and seniority by hand. It takes ten minutes for a hundred contacts. Notice how many titles you had to think about.
4. Look at who you missed. Pick five companies from the list and check who else works there. Count the people who hold the role you sell to but have a title you would never have searched for.

That last number is the size of the hole. In our experience it's rarely small.

How we do it

In Funnelfeedr, every job title on every contact is mapped onto one shared structure: a function (one of a few dozen areas like Sales, Finance or Software & IT), a more specific discipline, and a seniority level. The mapping knows tens of thousands of title variants, Nordic ones included, so Swedish titles like vd and it-chef land where they belong. When a title isn't recognized, it's compared by meaning against the known titles, and AI picks the best match from that shortlist. It's never allowed to invent a new category. Titles that only make sense in context, like "architect" or "partner," are judged per industry.

On top of that, you define your target contact roles once on the Prospect seat. A role is a function, a seniority range and a contact type. You can also describe the job in your own words and get the titles that mean the same thing. Then you drag the roles into priority order. At every company the highest role that exists comes first, and if role number one isn't there, it falls to number two. When you search for companies, the Contact Role filter finds organizations with someone in that role, whatever they call themselves. The raw "title contains" match is still there for the rare titles from rule 4.

What no system can do is find a role nobody has written down. If the person who owns pricing isn't mentioned anywhere public, the list will give you the company and the person one level up, and the call does the rest. That's what rule 5 is for.

If your list problem is freshness rather than titles, start with why contact lists go stale. If it's where to look in the first place, building a prospect list in the Nordics covers the sources.

Want to see fifteen hundred titles turn into the five roles you actually sell to, with the right person first at every company? Book a demo and bring your messiest title column →