Stop Aiming at Titles. Start Aiming at Users

We built the modern B2B machine to optimize for what was easy to count: titles, firmographics, cookie trails, “intent.” The system is doing exactly what it was designed to do—produce volume. And that’s the problem. When your audience is engineers and developers, volume becomes noise, noise becomes distrust, and Account-Based Marketing quietly degrades into AB-spam.

You can feel it in your own dashboards. You nail the accounts and miss the humans. LinkedIn titles look right; replies sound wrong. Your PLG motion fills up with gmail sign-ups that routing can’t use. “Intent” says a logo is warm, but you still don’t know who actually ships code in Kubernetes or Airflow—or who’s deep on your competitor’s stack. We pretend a building is a buyer. It isn’t.

This is where the argument for Contact-Level Technographics begins.

The category error at the heart of developer marketing

A job title is a political fiction: it describes a hierarchy, not a habit. Engineers and developers organize their work around tools, frameworks, repos, and teams. That’s the real constituency. If you market to the org chart, you market to the wrong reality.

CLT inverts the lens. Instead of “Company X uses Snowflake,” it asks: Which humans at Company X actively use what—and can we prove it? The proof lives in developer-native public spaces—GitHub, Stack Overflow, Kaggle—where contribution is visible and specific. When you resolve that activity to a work identity (email, phone, team, seniority), two outcomes appear:

1. A usage-density map by account. Not “in market,” but how in market—how many practitioners, on which teams, in which regions.
2. A campaign-ready contact bundle. The actual practitioners—and likely champions—you should invite, educate, or (yes) win over.

This is a shift from ICP (ideal company) to IDP (ideal developer). From where to hunt to whom to help.

Why titles fail—and CLT doesn’t

Titles flatten. Developer behavior fragments. LinkedIn rarely tells you who writes dbt models, maintains Redis, or is knee-deep in Databricks notebooks. But the public web does. It leaves an activity trail that’s more honest than any résumé: commits, issues, forks, accepted answers.

With CLT, you stop diluting spend across 20,000 engineers because a logo looks perfect and start concentrating on the few hundred who actually do the work your product touches. This isn’t a list problem. It’s a theory-of-the-buyer problem.

The metric that changes your priorities: Usage Density

Marketers obsess over whether an account is “in market.” Wrong question. The better question is how deep the opportunity is inside the walls.

Usage Density = # of relevant practitioners / engineering headcount (or by team/region)

It’s a resource-allocation tool:

• Tiering: Put Tier 1 dollars where density—and therefore relevance—is high.
• Localization: Aim content at the actual tools, in the actual team, in the actual region.
• Scoring: Feed ML with signals that correlate to demo→opportunity, not just pageviews and titles.

This is the difference between TAM (total addressable market) and what you really need: TDM, the total depth of market within each account.

Three plays that make money (and friends) with developers

1. Integration Enablement (friendly-tech motion).
   If you integrate with Airflow, Kubernetes, dbt, find those users by name across your TAL. Invite them to content that assumes their skills. You’re not “nurturing”; you’re helping. Meeting quality goes up because relevance goes up.
2. Competitive Takeout (replace the other guy).
   Snowflake wants Databricks users. Fine: pull the people using the competitor inside named accounts. Run bottom-up (practitioner value) and top-down (executive ROI) in parallel. Multi-threading stops being a hope and becomes a plan.
3. PLG De-anonymization (trial → buying center).
   “john.doe@gmail” becomes a team at Acme Corp with adjacent influencers (architects, leads). Route with usage-density signals. Trials stop dying alone.

“But we already have ZoomInfo and intent.” Keep them—for what they are.

Firmographic databases and intent platforms are maps at 30,000 feet. Keep the map. But the work is won at street level. CLT is the ground game. It gives you the precinct list—the humans. Without it, ABM is a beautifully resourced air campaign that never lands.

The ethics (and optics) of contacting developers

Developers dislike spam because it treats them like titles, not people. CLT improves the ethics of your outreach precisely because it raises the bar on relevance.

• Source with discipline: public-web evidence, URL audit trails, no behind-the-firewall shortcuts.
• Respect regions: suppression lists, permission-pass, explicit opt-in where required.
• Lead with usefulness: code-adjacent content, migration guides, doc deep dives. If your first touch is valuable, your second touch is welcome.

Good marketing is a social contract. CLT helps you keep your side.

What this looks like in the first 30 days

• Week 0: Give the vendor 200–500 named accounts, plus your “friendly tech” and “competitor” lists. Optional: last 60–90 days of PLG sign-ups.
• Weeks 1–2: Get the usage-density map and contact bundle.
• Week 3: Activate two lanes:
  • Bottom-up: practitioner sequences, user workshops, doc pathways.
  • Top-down: exec emails that frame ROI and risk in the language of how the team actually works today.
• Week 4: Judge it like a grown-up: meetings, demo→opp, CPL, PLG match rate. Expand or kill. Either is progress.

The real critique—and the opportunity

Marketing to developers is not failing because marketers are lazy. It’s failing because the industry is using the wrong unit of analysis. Titles are an artifact of bureaucracy. Usage is an artifact of reality. If you accept that, the path forward is obvious:

• Replace title-based audience building with IDP and usage density.
• Trade generic “intent” for evidence of practice.
• Treat CLT not as another tool in the stack but as a change in go-to-market policy: market to people, not buildings.

The future of data is bespoke and real-time. The winners won’t be the teams who rent bigger databases. They’ll be the teams who learn, faster than their competitors, who actually does the work—and then build for them.

If you want the blunt version: stop shouting at job titles. Start helping users. The rest of the funnel will take care of itself.