How Rising Team Targets Buyers: Functional Leaders with Budget and Pain

How Rising Team Targets Buyers: Functional Leaders with Budget and Pain

Most B2B companies target departments. Rising Team targets people in specific situations. The difference between those two approaches is the difference between forced expansion and organic growth.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Jennifer Dulski, CEO and Founder of Rising Team, explained how the company lands Fortune 500 logos not through traditional enterprise sales motions, but through surgical targeting of functional leaders who have three critical characteristics. Get these characteristics right, and your customers become your sales force.

The Anti-ICP

Start with what Rising Team doesn’t do. They don’t target “HR.” They don’t sell to “enterprises.” They don’t pursue “companies with 500+ employees.” These are the kinds of ICP definitions that fill strategy decks and make investors happy but break down the moment your sales team tries to use them.

Who exactly do you call at an enterprise? Which enterprises? What’s the entry point? These generic ICPs create analysis paralysis because they’re not actually actionable. They describe characteristics of companies, not characteristics of buyers.

Rising Team inverted this completely. Instead of defining their market by company attributes, they defined it by buyer situations.

The Three Characteristics

Here’s Rising Team’s actual ICP, as Jennifer describes it:

“We tend to sell to functional and divisional leaders at large companies who have these pain points. Sometimes it’ll be a CMO or a CIO or a VP of engineering who says, I really want something like this for my team.”

Notice the specificity. Not “senior leaders.” Not “decision makers.” Functional and divisional leaders—people who run specific parts of large organizations. CMOs, CIOs, VPs of engineering. People with titles that indicate scope of responsibility.

But titles alone don’t make an ICP. What makes Rising Team’s targeting surgical is understanding the three characteristics these buyers must have:

Budget control. Not unlimited budget. Not budget they need to request. Budget they personally control and can deploy without navigating six layers of approval. Enough budget to run a meaningful pilot—several hundred people for twelve months—but not necessarily enough to deploy company-wide on day one.

Personal pain. They’re not evaluating solutions academically. Their pulse scores came back bad and they’re accountable for fixing it. Their distributed team feels disconnected and engagement is dropping. They just had their offsite budget cut but still need to keep their team connected. The pain is immediate, acute, and tied to their personal goals.

Expansion authority. They can scale within their division when the pilot succeeds. They have the organizational clout to become internal champions who open doors to other parts of the company. They’re not just users—they’re potential evangelists.

Why This Targeting Works

The brilliance of this ICP is what happens after the initial sale. Rising Team isn’t just landing customers. They’re creating a specific type of customer: one who is predisposed to expand and evangelize.

Budget control means deals can close without getting stuck in procurement hell. Personal pain means high urgency—these buyers are motivated to implement quickly and make it work. Expansion authority means the initial win becomes a beachhead for broader deployment.

The result is a land-and-expand motion that happens organically rather than through forced upselling.

“As an example, we have a big tech company, we have their cloud. And then just yesterday, someone from their cloud moved to a different part of the organization, says, now I want to use this over here.”

This isn’t Rising Team’s sales team pushing expansion. It’s a buyer who experienced value, moved to a different role, and immediately wanted to bring Rising Team with them. That’s the power of targeting buyers with expansion authority—they don’t just renew, they multiply.

The Pain Point Entry

The specificity of Rising Team’s targeting extends to how they find these buyers. They don’t advertise broadly. They show up where people are actively searching for solutions to specific pain points.

“We often come in through one of the, if you will, jobs to be done of things like my pulse scores came back and they’re really bad. I need help moving them or I no longer have an off site budget. How do I still keep my team connected?”

This is surgical content strategy. Rising Team offers resources like their psychological safety blueprint. When someone searches for how to improve psychological safety in their organization, they find Rising Team. That search intent signals both the pain point and the buyer characteristics Rising Team is targeting.

The person searching isn’t a low-level HR coordinator doing research. It’s a functional leader who just got bad data back and needs solutions now. They have budget (or they wouldn’t be searching for solutions). They have pain (that’s why they’re searching). And they likely have expansion authority (because they’re researching solutions for their organization, not just their team).

The Qualification Built Into Targeting

Here’s what’s subtle about this approach: the targeting itself qualifies buyers. By focusing on functional and divisional leaders with these three characteristics, Rising Team naturally filters for the buyers who will be successful with the product.

Someone without budget control will get stuck in procurement and potentially never close. Someone without personal pain will deprioritize implementation. Someone without expansion authority might be a happy customer but won’t drive growth beyond their immediate team.

The ICP isn’t just about who can buy. It’s about who will successfully implement, see value, and become champions. This is why Rising Team can run a go-to-market motion with just five or six people total. They’re not trying to force success with every prospect—they’re selecting prospects where success is likely.

The Marketing Implication

This buyer targeting fundamentally shapes Rising Team’s marketing strategy. With a team of one person dedicated to marketing, they can’t create content for everyone. They need surgical precision.

The strategy focuses on solving the specific pain points their ICP experiences. Bad pulse scores. Eliminated offsite budgets. Disconnected distributed teams. Psychological safety concerns. Each piece of content addresses a specific job to be done that their target buyers are actively trying to solve.

This is the opposite of broad awareness marketing. Rising Team isn’t trying to make every HR professional aware they exist. They’re trying to be the answer when their specific ICP is actively searching for solutions to their specific problems.

The efficiency is remarkable. With one person on marketing, they’re landing customers like Google, Cisco, and Airbnb. That’s not about creating volume—it’s about precision.

The Sales Cycle Advantage

Targeting functional leaders with budget control creates another advantage: faster sales cycles. These buyers don’t need to navigate complex procurement processes for initial pilots. They have enough authority and budget to say yes without endless approval chains.

“Sometimes it’ll be a CMO or a CIO or a VP of engineering who says, I really want something like this for my team.”

Notice the personal ownership in that statement. “I really want something like this for my team.” Not “my organization needs to evaluate solutions.” Not “I need to discuss this with stakeholders.” Personal desire backed by personal authority.

This doesn’t mean Rising Team avoids enterprise complexity entirely. They still need to navigate security reviews, legal processes, and procurement for broader rollouts. But the initial deal can close quickly because they’re targeting buyers who can make those decisions.

The Expansion Motion

The real payoff of this targeting strategy reveals itself in expansion. Rising Team doesn’t have a separate team pushing upsells. Expansion happens through the natural motion of satisfied functional leaders.

First, they expand within their own organization. A VP of engineering runs a successful pilot with their team, sees the engagement scores improve, and scales to their entire division. The data justifies the expansion—no aggressive sales motion required.

Second, they become internal evangelists. Other functional leaders hear about the results and want to try Rising Team with their teams. The CIO’s success with their cloud division becomes the best sales pitch for other divisions.

Third, they take Rising Team with them when they move. That example of someone moving from cloud to another part of the organization isn’t unique. Functional leaders who see value with their teams want to replicate that success in their next role.

This organic expansion is only possible because Rising Team targeted buyers with expansion authority from the start. Different ICP, different dynamics.

The Principle

The lesson here transcends team performance platforms. It’s about understanding that ICP definition should optimize for post-sale success, not just initial conversion.

Most companies define ICP by firmographics: company size, industry, revenue. These characteristics might predict who can afford your product, but they don’t predict who will successfully implement it, see value, and drive expansion.

Rising Team flipped this by defining ICP around buyer characteristics that predict success: budget control enables fast decisions, personal pain drives implementation urgency, expansion authority creates growth opportunities.

The result is a land-and-expand motion that works because the targeting itself selects for buyers who will naturally expand. They’re not trying to force enterprise deployment. They’re enabling functional leaders to prove value, then leveraging that success to grow organically.

For B2B founders struggling with slow enterprise sales cycles or low expansion rates, the question isn’t whether your product is enterprise-ready. It’s whether your ICP is optimized for the full customer journey, not just the initial sale.