How does prospecting work with multiple personas?

Last updated: June 17, 2026

How prospecting works with multiple personas

Personas are configured in Settings → Personas. Persona matching is case‑insensitive, ignores punctuation, and requires every word in the persona title to appear (in any order) in the candidate's title. So a persona of "VP Sales" matches "Vice President of Sales" only if you include the word "VP" as a variation — the algorithm doesn't infer abbreviations on its own.

To avoid broader matches: use title exclusions. Note that exclusions take precedence over inclusions — excluding "director" will also exclude "Executive Director" or "Director of Marketing" even if those are explicitly in your include list. Use specific exclusion terms (e.g., "Director of Operations") rather than broad ones.

Targeting multiple personas in one Play

You have two options, depending on what you want.

Option 1: Single prospecting node, multiple personas

If you add multiple personas to one prospecting node with a total prospect limit (e.g., 5 prospects total), the system fills the limit in persona order:

  1. First, find as many prospects as possible from persona 1.

  2. If under the limit, continue to persona 2.

  3. Continue down the list until either the limit is reached or there are no more personas.

This is appropriate when you want a fixed total volume across personas and persona priority matters.

Option 2: Parallel prospecting nodes — for per-persona limits

If you need a specific number of prospects per persona (e.g., 2 from IT, 2 from Ops, 2 from HR), create separate prospecting nodes in parallel, one per persona, each with its own limit:

  • Each parallel node runs independently and finds prospects against its single persona.

  • Each can have its own "Max prospects per company" setting.

  • Each parallel branch requires its own loop node before connecting to a sequence enrollment node. There is no way to combine results from separate prospecting nodes into a single loop.

Pro tip: parallel prospecting nodes can reduce the number of duplicate Plays needed by 3–5x compared to creating separate Plays for each persona.

If you're hitting your prospect cap

If you're configuring a per-persona limit (e.g., 5–7 per persona) but consistently getting only 2–3 prospects per account, the most common cause is that your persona criteria are too narrow. Try:

  • Broadening the included title list.

  • Adjusting seniority and department filters.

  • Switching to Waterfall Prospecting to use external data providers instead of just your CRM.

If you're using max-per-company alongside per-persona limits, both apply — the company cap can also throttle the volume.