Defining roles

Roles are the job descriptions for your buying group — Champion, Economic Buyer, Technical Evaluator, Procurement, and whatever else your motion needs. You define what each role means, who can fill it, and how complete the group has to be before an account counts as ready.

Roles live on the ICP. Each ICP that has buying group intelligence turned on carries its own role set. Two ICPs — say, a PLG trial motion and a sales-led enterprise motion — can define entirely different role sets because the people who need to be involved in each deal are different.

Where you define roles

In the builder: When you create a new ICP, the Buying group roles step is where you build the initial role set. It shows a card for each role, lets you add from the template library or create custom ones, and exposes the matching settings that control assignment.

When editing an existing ICP: Open the ICP, go to the Roles tab. The same builder surfaces there — you can add, edit, reorder, or remove roles at any time. See Editing an ICP for how the save bar and re-evaluation dialog work.

Starting from a motion preset

When you create an ICP from a motion preset (PLG Acquisition, PLG Expansion, Sales-led Enterprise, Renewal, Cross-sell), the Buying group roles step is pre-populated with a starter role set tuned to that motion. You can keep those roles as-is, edit any of them, add more, or remove ones that don't fit your team's definition.

If you start blank, the role set starts empty and you build it from scratch.

Role fields

Each role has the following fields:

Targeting: title keywords and targeting note

The Targeting section inside each role card has two inputs:

Title keywords are entered as chips. Type a keyword and press Enter (or tab away) to add it. Each chip is a word or phrase that can appear in a person's job title — "VP Finance", "Procurement", "Head of Engineering". A person whose title matches any of the keywords becomes a candidate for this role.

Targeting note is a free-text field (labeled Targeting note · guides the AI). Write it in plain language — it describes the kind of person who belongs in this role beyond what the title alone captures. For example: "Director and above in finance, including CFOs and VPs who control budget". The targeting note is used during evaluation and affects scoring, so editing it will prompt you to save with a re-evaluation option.

Required vs Optional

A Required role must be filled for the account's group to reach Complete. An Optional role contributes to coverage when it's filled but does not block the group from reaching Complete without it.

Set a role as Optional when it is valuable to track — for example, a Legal contact who often appears late in a deal — but not universally present. Set it as Required when the absence of that role is itself a signal that the deal is not ready to move.

Minimum contributors

Min contributors sets the headcount threshold for a role to be considered satisfied. The default is 1 — one person filling the role is enough.

Raise this when the role genuinely requires multiple people. For example, if your enterprise deals always involve two technical evaluators covering different domains, set Technical Evaluator to a minimum of 2. The role reads as Missing until that headcount is met, even if one person has already been matched.

Reordering roles

Drag any role card using the grip icon on its left edge to reorder it. The order is not cosmetic — it is the tiebreak order for role assignment.

When a person's profile and activity match more than one role, the role that sits earlier in the list wins the assignment. That person then appears in the winning role on the account's coverage view and in any downstream CRM field pushes.

Put your most distinctive and highest-priority roles first. If Champion and Economic Buyer are both plausible for a VP of Engineering who hits the pricing page, the one you place first is the one they'll be assigned to.

Deleting a role

Open a role card by clicking its name row, then click the trash icon in the upper right of the expanded card. Deleting a role removes it from the role set immediately and does not trigger a re-evaluation — existing assignments to that role will be absent on the next evaluation.

ICP-level matching settings

Three settings at the ICP level control how role assignment works across all roles:

In the ICP builder's Buying group roles step, these controls appear under Advanced matching (collapsed by default — click to expand). On the Roles tab of an existing ICP, they appear inline.

Changing the confidence threshold, roles-per-person setting, or tiebreak order marks the ICP as having unsaved changes. When you save, you can choose whether to re-evaluate past accounts with the new settings or apply them only going forward.

Demographic-only roles

Some roles are best matched on profile criteria alone — no trackable signal activity required. Procurement, Legal, and Finance contacts often engage through email, phone, or document requests rather than web activity, so signal points from those channels may never reach TrailSpark.

For these roles, fill in the title keywords and targeting note carefully and accept that no signal points will reinforce the match. They will be flagged as gaps in the Signals feeding roles panel on the Roles tab — that is expected, not a problem.

See Signal and role attribution for how signal points complement profile criteria when you do want to configure them, and for a deeper look at why demographic-only roles are a valid and common pattern.

Next steps

• Role attribution — how a person is matched to a role, by profile, activity, or both, and how tiebreaks resolve
• Account coverage — read the coverage picture for an account: role states, stages, and the roster
• Role corrections — override a role assignment in-app or from your CRM when the match is wrong
• Signal and role attribution — configure signal points per role in Signal Mapping