How to find the right decision maker in every company

Say you sell to marketing teams. In every company on your list, you want one person: the decision maker, the one who owns marketing. It sounds simple, and the usual way of searching keeps getting it wrong. Here is why, and how Waterfall ICP, the BlitzAPI people search built for this, fixes it, with the same examples as the video.

Definition Decision maker also called economic buyer

The person who can say yes to a purchase and owns the budget for it. In a marketing deal, that is whoever runs marketing in the company: a CMO in a large one, a Head of Marketing in a mid-size one, often the founder in a startup.

PreciselyIn a B2B buying committee, the decision maker, or economic buyer, holds final approval and the budget. Champions push for the purchase, influencers shape the choice, and gatekeepers control access; none of them can sign alone.

How do teams usually find decision makers?

For one account, you check the company’s team page or search LinkedIn by job title. For a whole list of accounts, you open a people search: company filters on one side, job titles on the other. Then you try to fit your whole targeting strategy into a single query.

That query is a bet. The next two diagrams show how it loses.

Why does one job title miss so many decision makers?

Start clean and search for CMOs only. The list looks great: senior and relevant.

Now look at what’s missing. Northwind Logistics calls the role Head of Marketing. Acme has a Marketing Director. At Initech Cloud, 15 people, the founder still runs marketing. Three companies with the same need, and your search found nobody in any of them.

Why doesn’t a broader search fix it?

So you widen the search to every title with CMO, Marketing or Growth in it. Now you find someone almost everywhere.

Then you run it on Globex Analytics, 5,000 employees. Twenty of the forty people in its marketing team match. Which one is the buyer? Someone on your team now has to sort that out by hand, company after company.

The filters aren’t the problem. One query is being asked to understand thousands of different org charts.

How do you find the right decision maker in every company?

Change the logic. Instead of one query, write a ranked list of the people you would accept, from your first choice (P1) to your last resort (P6). In each company, the search tries P1 first. Nobody? It moves to P2, then P3, and it stops at the first person it finds. That is a waterfall search, and the search that runs it is Waterfall ICP.

Definition Waterfall ICP also called a prioritized title search

A people search that tries your list of job titles in order, inside one company, and stops at the first person it finds.

PreciselyThe BlitzAPI endpoint POST /v2/search/waterfall-icp-keyword takes a company's LinkedIn page and 1 to 10 ranked levels of title phrases, and returns up to max_results people, each tagged with the level that found them (icp) and a relevance rank (ranking).

A Marketing Manager is noise in a 5,000-person company and the right buyer in a 40-person one. Same playbook, different company, different answer.

Try it: one list, six companies

Pick a company and compare the three searches. Watch where the cascade stops.

How do you tell the decision maker from a champion or an influencer?

The last levels of your list can stay broad on purpose. They catch the companies where titles don’t help, like the founder-run startup. If a broad level sometimes brings back the wrong person, that can be fixed afterwards, with a qualification step that reads each profile and gives each person a role in the purchase:

• Buyer: the decision maker, who owns the budget and signs.
• Champion: wants the change and pushes for it inside.
• Influencer: shapes the choice without owning it.
• Noise: matched a title, plays no part in the decision.

In the video, that step is Jev by TypeSafe AI, which reads each person’s full profile (role, responsibilities, career). With the level that found them, the list can route itself: buyers to your sequencer, champions to your CRM.

What does a complete targeting system look like?

Finding the person is one block of five. Before it, a company search decides which accounts are worth searching; after it, qualification, routing and email enrichment turn the people you keep into conversations.

For builders

Everything above runs on one endpoint. This part is for the people who will wire it up: the call, a real run, how titles match, and what to check before you ship.

How do you run Waterfall ICP with the API?

POST/v2/search/waterfall-icp-keywordAPI reference

One company in, its best available people out, in your order of preference, each tagged with the level that found them.

Send

company_linkedin_urlrequired

The company's LinkedIn page, the input that identifies it reliably.

cascade[]required

Your ranked levels, 1 to 10. Each has include_title, and optionally exclude_title, location and include_headline_search.

max_results

How many people to return across all levels. 10 by default, 100 at most.

Read

icp

The level of your list that found the person.

ranking

The person's overall relevance rank inside the company.

person

The full profile. Pass person.linkedin_url to enrichment for an email or a phone.

How the slots fill: a real run

We ran a four-level cascade on October 14, 2026, against a real company page with more than a thousand employees, asking for 3 people. P1 found two of them and took two slots. P2 found nobody, so the search moved on. P3 filled the last slot, and the search stopped.

max_results3

1. Slot 1Slot 1P1VP Growth & Marketingranking 1
2. Slot 2Slot 2P1Chief Brand & Marketing Officerranking 2
3. Slot 3Slot 3P3Growth Marketing Managerranking 3

1. P1Chief Marketing Officer · [CMO] · VP Marketing · Vice President Marketing2 found
2. P2Head of Marketing · Marketing Director · Head of GrowthNobody, moves on
3. P3Marketing Manager · Growth Manager · Demand Generation Manager1 found, stop
4. P4[CEO] · Founder · Co-founderNot reached

The request, as it ran:

{
  "company_linkedin_url": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/<company>",
  "cascade": [
    {
      "include_title": ["Chief Marketing Officer", "[CMO]",
                        "VP Marketing", "Vice President Marketing"],
      "exclude_title": ["assistant", "intern", "junior"]
    },
    {
      "include_title": ["Head of Marketing", "Marketing Director",
                        "Head of Growth"],
      "exclude_title": ["assistant", "intern", "junior", "product"]
    },
    {
      "include_title": ["Marketing Manager", "Growth Manager",
                        "Demand Generation Manager"],
      "exclude_title": ["assistant", "intern", "junior", "product"]
    },
    {
      "include_title": ["[CEO]", "Founder", "Co-founder"],
      "exclude_title": ["assistant", "intern"]
    }
  ],
  "max_results": 3
}

And what came back, trimmed to the fields that matter (names and company withheld): a VP Growth & Marketing and a Chief Brand & Marketing Officer, both from P1 with ranking 1 and 2, then a Growth Marketing Manager from P3 with ranking 3. Note how “VP Marketing” caught “VP Growth & Marketing”: the words matched, in another order.

To reach the people it returns, pass each person.linkedin_url to Email Enrichment or Phone Enrichment. For coverage and the other APIs it works with, see decision maker identification with BlitzAPI; plans and rate limits are on the BlitzAPI pricing page.

Two numbers on every result

VP Growth & MarketingOne result from the real run, and its two numbers

• icp1

  The level that found them

  Who reaches out

  • 1 or 2Account executive
  • 3 and belowSDR
• ranking1

  How central they are

  How hard you go

  • 1 to 3Email, LinkedIn and phone
  • 4 to 10Calls only
  • 11 and beyondNurture

These thresholds are the first routing rule the documentation suggests, a starting point to tune on your own pipeline. Store both numbers: they answer different questions, and a person found at level 3 can still have ranking 1.

How a title matches a level

• All the words, any order. “VP Marketing” matches “VP of Marketing” and “Marketing VP”.
• No synonyms, no abbreviations. “Demand Gen” does not match “Demand Generation”: list each form you want.
• Brackets mean exact. “[CEO]” matches only the title CEO. Without brackets, “CEO” also matches “CEO Office”.
• Location is the person’s country, not the company’s headquarters. WORLD means no filter.
• Current roles only. Someone who left the company will not come back.

Before you ship

• ✓Exclude aggressively: assistant, intern and junior on every level, and product in a marketing cascade.
• ✓Run a second list for companies under about 20 people, with the founder at P1, so that P1 means “ideal buyer” everywhere.
• ✓Set max_results on purpose: 1 for the single best buyer, 3 to multi-thread.
• ✕Headline search in the first level: it trades away precision exactly where you need it most.
• ✓Watch where matches come from. If most companies resolve at the last level, your first levels do not use the titles this market uses.