What Is a Seniority Level?
TL;DR
Seniority level is the field on a contact record stating how much authority a role carries, independent of what the title happens to be called. A typical scale runs from individual contributor and manager through director and vice president to C-level, founder and owner, with board roles held separately.
What are the standard seniority levels?
Most providers use a scale close to this one: individual contributor, then manager, then director, then vice president, then C-level, with founder and owner as separate values because they cut across the ladder. Board member and advisor are usually kept apart again, since neither is an operating role.
The values themselves are less important than the fact that they are controlled. Because seniority is derived during job title normalisation rather than read off the string, it is the one field that compares consistently across a list whose titles do not.
Why filter by seniority instead of job title?
Because seniority is what predicts whether a reply can lead anywhere. A person who agrees with your message and cannot authorise anything produces a pleasant conversation and no deal, and the title alone does not tell you which of those you are writing to.
Seniority is also stable where titles are not. Companies invent new titles constantly and title inflation moves faster in some sectors than others, but the authority ladder underneath stays recognisable, so a seniority filter keeps working as a list ages.
Which seniority level should you target?
It moves with company size band rather than being fixed. In a company of a few dozen people the owner or a C-level executive both evaluates and buys, so anyone below that is a detour. In a large enterprise the same purchase is evaluated by a manager or director, championed upward, and approved by a vice president.
The practical consequence is that one seniority filter across a mixed-size list is wrong at both ends. Splitting the campaign by size band and setting seniority separately for each is what stops you writing to an approver about evaluation criteria, or to an evaluator about budget they do not hold.
Frequently asked questions
In the standard scale yes, but the two overlap in practice and the exception is regional. In parts of Europe and Asia, director is a legal officer of the company rather than a middle management rung, so a director at a small company there can be the owner.