There is a comforting simplicity in job titles.

They feel objective. Clean. Easy to filter. Easy to report on. Easy to explain in a slide.

Target the CEOs. Go after VPs. Prioritise Directors.

The problem is that titles tell you almost nothing about whether someone can actually buy from you.

In B2B, we keep using titles as a stand-in for relevance because they are available, not because they are accurate.

And at scale, that shortcut quietly breaks everything.

A CEO can mean many things.

It can mean running a global enterprise with layers of approval, budgets, and long-term strategy.
It can also mean running a one-person company with a landing page and an idea.

Same title. Entirely different realities.

Most go-to-market systems treat them as equivalent.
They cannot tell the difference between authority and capacity.

That is not a data problem.
It is a context problem.

Titles became popular because they were easy.

They were structured.
They fit neatly into CRMs.
They could be filtered, scored, and exported.

And for a long time, that was enough.

But markets changed.

Companies became more diverse.
Buying motions became more complex.
Growth stopped being linear.

Titles stayed the same. Reality did not.

In B2C, context is personal.
You buy for yourself or your family.

In B2B, context is organisational.

People do not buy based on who they are.
They buy based on where they work, what that company looks like, and what problems it is trying to solve right now.

The same person behaves differently depending on the company they represent.
The same title carries different meaning depending on the organisation behind it.

Ignore that, and no amount of filtering will save you.

When teams rely too heavily on titles, everything downstream suffers.

Inbound leads get over-prioritised or ignored for the wrong reasons.
Outbound messaging sounds generic because it has to be.
SDRs chase activity instead of probability.
Pipelines inflate without improving conversion.

Eventually, someone asks why the numbers do not add up.

The usual response is to add more signals.
More tracking. More scoring. More automation.

The underlying issue remains untouched.

Relevance does not come from titles.
It comes from similarity.

Which companies have already bought from you?
Which ones succeeded?
Which ones churned?

When a new lead appears, the most important question is not their title.

It is which of your existing customers they resemble.

That context tells you more about buying potential than any job label ever could.

Titles are not useless.
They are just incomplete.

Used alone, they create false confidence and wasted effort.
Used in context, they can support better decisions.

The future of B2B go-to-market is not about finding better titles.
It is about understanding companies well enough that titles stop doing all the work.

Because relevance is not a field in your CRM.
It is a relationship between who someone is and where they sit.

And without that context, every title is just a guess.