Building a list of target accounts is the first step in any lead generation process, but one of the most overlooked steps is failing to go beyond a single contact within each company.
Most B2B buying decisions involve three or more people. Failing to email each recipient with a specific message is hurting your credibility and overall success in email outreach. But learning who influences your deals is actually easier than you might imagine.
In the first post of this series, we covered the five buying modes your leads cycle through. In the second, we mapped four sequence types to match each one. In the third, we built the eleven lists that those sequences run on.
Read on to learn how to reach 3-4 contacts in each target account, as part of our supporting guide to the Outreach Planner.
The four buyer personas
Every B2B deal involves some mix of these four people:
- Pain feeler: The end user or practitioner who lives with the problem every day. Warm interest, rarely budget.
- Budget holder: The decision maker. Cares about outcomes (revenue, pipeline, risk), not features.
- Blocker: Legal, IT, finance, a skeptical peer. You don't know they exist until a deal stalls.
- Champion: Someone inside the company who personally benefits when your solution works.
Working them in the right order is called account expansion, and can lift email reply rates by 46%.
Here's what each persona needs from you.
Pain feeler
The end user or practitioner who knows the problem better than anyone in the building.
They feel it daily and want it resolved, but they lack the authority or budget.
Email this person, and you'll get warm interest, useful intel, and sometimes a champion, but rarely a deal.
Speak to the time they're losing and the friction they're carrying.
Send a practical asset that makes their week easier:
- Workflow guide
- Calculator
- A tactic they can use
Budget holder
This is the decision maker and the person who signs off on spending.
They don't care about features or a process you’ve created.
Speak in their currency, not yours. They care about outcomes:
- Revenue
- Pipeline
- Risk
- Cost of inaction
Knowing this should dictate your messaging to this person and the assets you share:
- A business case
- Cost of not solving the problem
- Expected return
- Time to value
Skip product or solution mechanics and lead with what changes for them and the company.
Blocker
This is legal, IT, finance, or a peer who wants the same budget for something else.
You often don't know this person exists until a deal stalls because of their presence.
Find them (using Hunter or by asking your contact) and address what they care about (security, compliance, integration risk, hidden costs) in the message itself rather than later in the sales process.
Send:
- ROI calculator
- Total cost of ownership breakdown
- Security one-pager.
Acknowledge their role and its importance in finding a solution to the pain-feeler's challenge.
Champion
This is someone inside the company who personally benefits from your solution working.
They might not have authority, but they have influence and access.
Champions reduce the cost of your sale by selling for you internally.
The key is to make it easy for them to advocate.
Send:
- Short comparison of vendors, AI, DIY, and inaction
- Case study from a peer company,
- A "why now" angle they can use in their next leadership conversation.
How account expansion actually works
You won't email all four people at once, because that indicates you’re sending spam to email service providers.
You need to work these contacts sequentially, one persona per sequence, with a different message each time.
Here's the order the Hunter Outreach Planner uses:
- Start with the budget holder or pain feeler: The budget holder, if you know who they are, or the pain feeler if you don't. Run a direct outreach sequence.
- When that sequence ends, find a second contact at the same company: A different role, a different angle. Build a separate list for these expansion contacts so you can track performance on its own.
- For companies that stay engaged, find a third contact: Often, the champion or the blocker. Acknowledge the prior contact in the message ("I'm speaking with [name] about X").
- Never email two people at the same company at the same time: Move to the next contact only after the prior sequence completes or stops on reply.
Each new round uses a fresh message angle relevant to the new contact's role.
A Head of Sales cares about different things than a Head of Marketing.
When you think carefully about the recipient, the message, and the order, you get the 46% lift.
What this looks like in practice
Here’s an example of process optimization training pitched to a 30-person SaaS company.
To the Founder (budget holder and pain feeler in one):
"Every dollar in a startup must pull double duty, but founders can't see where waste hides. Here are three places I often find $20-50k of hidden cost in early-stage SaaS companies, and how to fix them without adding new heads."
To a Head of Operations (pain feeler):
"Your weeks are eaten by the same problems. Handoffs break, work falls through the cracks, and your team chases the urgent over the important. Here's how founders use Lean thinking to win back 5-10 hours a week."
To the CFO (potential blocker):
"Your continuous improvement team is often losing 30% of their budget to poor process adherence. I'm speaking with your COO about training to help. Can I share an ROI calculator I think you need to see?"
Find the people, send the right message
Hunter's Outreach Planner 2026 maps this account expansion into every month of the year.
Each month has a primary sequence and an account expansion action, bringing a second or third contact into play at companies you've prospected and removing the heavy lifting from your planning.
Download your free copy today and turn every target company into three or four chances to start a conversation.
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