How Paddle Builds Dynamic Ad Audiences Without Relying on Ops

GTM teams often struggle to keep ad audiences aligned with the accounts Sales is prioritizing.

It's not just that Sales and Marketing aren’t always on the same page. It’s that keeping Sales and Marketing audiences aligned at an operational level is resource-demanding.

Manually adding and removing contacts from Salesforce campaigns can be a major blocker, slowing down progress and making it difficult to keep ads in sync with Sales priorities.

For Paddle, the solution required introducing a system to update ad audiences dynamically, without Ops intervention.

This playbook outlines how Paddle solves that practical alignment issue by using Influ2's Cohort Builder to gain autonomy and agility, reduce dependence on RevOps, and keep ad audiences fresh and Sales-aligned.

The Sales-Marketing alignment issue is often painted as a turf war between teams with competing agendas, where Marketing is measured by MQL volume, but Sales finds most of those leads unhelpful.

But there’s more to the story.

Sure, there is often a disconnect between marketing audiences and sales priorities. But it's not just a case of conflicting goals.

The problem is also operational. 

In many GTM teams, Marketing is often working from static contact lists drawn from marketing automation platforms, which aren’t always aligned with who Sales is prioritizing at the moment.

When Marketing wants an updated list, they usually turn to RevOps, but Ops is often overloaded and unable to turn that list around quickly.

As a result, marketers aren’t as agile as they should be in keeping ad audiences updated. And if Marketing can’t get its ads in front of the same people Sales is targeting, a huge chunk of the investment in that channel goes down the drain.

At best, ads are hitting the right people but with out-of-sync messaging, since campaigns aren’t synced to sales intel like deal data and intent signals.

At worst, they’re targeting non-buying group members or stakeholders at accounts Sales is no longer actively pursuing.

The definition of wasted ad spend.

For Paddle, the status quo of manually enrolling and unrolling people in Salesforce campaigns prevented them from being able to keep pace with changing sales priorities.

And it meant that ad audiences quickly became bloated.

With the goal of reducing the burden on Ops and ensuring that ad audiences are always aligned with sales priorities, Sacha switched to a Cohort-based approach.

A Cohort is a set of people (contacts in your CRM) grouped by certain criteria, such as:

• Account data (e.g., company size)
• Contact data (e.g., role)
•  Deal data (e.g., pipeline stage)

With Influ2’s Cohort Builder, instead of manually filtering and importing an audience from your CRM, you set up custom criteria and exclusions once, and Influ2 dynamically pulls in contacts that check the right boxes.

Here’s a simple example.

Say one of your Cohort criteria is that sales outreach is in process.

Each time a new contact moves into the SDR outreach flow, they’ll automatically get added to the Cohort. Then, you can start showing them ads relevant to their stage in the buying journey.

Since Cohorts are dynamic, marketers don’t need to manually add and remove contacts from campaigns, meaning Marketing can keep ad programs aligned with Sales on who to target and with what messaging.

In our webinar, Influ2 in Action: Building Smarter Audiences, Paddle’s Growth Demand Gen Manager, Sacha Gauthier, revealed how he uses Cohort Builder to gain more control, speed, and flexibility.

This is the exact playbook Paddle uses to build dynamic ad audiences that stay aligned with who Sales is targeting.

Their first step in building a dynamic ad Cohort is to define the criteria at the account level. That’s to say, which accounts in our CRM do we want to bring in?

The exact criteria you can use here depend on the fields you have set up in your CRM.

For Paddle, that looks like:

Account Priority

These are accounts that the Revenue team has decided to go after this or next quarter. 

Lower-priority accounts can then go into long-term nurture campaigns or ad programs designed to reactivate lost opportunities.

Division

Paddle segments ad audiences to match their primary geographic regions.

Headcount

Paddle has smaller accounts that they’re not directly targeting with Influ2. By adding a headcount limit, they can use other channels to engage smaller accounts, and focus their contact-level ads on high-priority accounts and enterprise companies.

Open opportunity

Paddle uses the open opportunity criteria to easily segment contacts between ad programs that have different purposes.

For pipeline generation programs, Paddle sets the “Is opportunity open?” criterion to False, switching that to True for pipeline progression campaigns.

Growth Track

Sacha uses the Growth Track filter to create pain point-based segmentation. This is all about aligning ad messaging with buyer intent.

If, for instance, the SDR identified a pain point related to the unsubcription process during discovery, they’d select that pain point in the CRM.

Next, Sacha sets up the criteria that define which specific contacts are brought in from the CRM, so that ads are only shown to relevant buying group members.

Contact scoring

Paddle uses an internal contact grading system that defines how important that contact is to the buying group, then sets up a filter in Cohort Builder so that only contacts with a score greater than or equal to 4 are added to the Cohort. 

This is how Sacha was able to narrow down 200 contacts to 10 buying group members, without asking Ops to send over a new list.

Last outreach date

By adding in a “Last outreach data” criterion, Paddle easily excludes accounts that have been removed or disqualified from Sales communications.

If Sales isn’t actively pursuing that account (for example, they haven’t logged a call or email task in a while), continuing to push ads to them could waste ad spend and hurt your conversion rates.

Other contact-level criteria

In addition to the examples above, some other common criteria to use for Cohorts are:

• Job title: In most cases, defining the buyer roles or personas you want to target is the move here. For instance, if you’re selling social media management software, you might target the VP of Marketing alongside the Social Media Manager.
• Buying group role: If your Sales team uses a buying group role field in their CRM (e.g., to specify if the contact is a champion or a decision maker), you can use this criterion to further segment ad audiences, such as separating blockers from champions.

Some accounts may well meet the criteria you’ve set up, but you still don’t want to advertise to them.

For instance, you may not want to show ads to competitors, or to current customers (you’ll have a separate account expansion Cohort set up for that!)

To solve that, Paddle set up an exclusion Cohort to specify and include competitors, as well as old, disqualified accounts from its active ad campaigns.

Once all of the relevant criteria and exclusions are set up, Influ2 will pull the relevant contacts from your CRM into that ad Cohort, then dynamically update them as CRM data shifts (for example, as new accounts enter the pipeline).

While this happens automatically, Sacha doesn’t settle for “set and forget”, opting instead for “set, then review in three months”. 

It doesn’t quite roll off the tongue the same, but it's a much more effective way to stay aligned with sales priorities.

For Paddle, this looks like coming back once a quarter—after Sales completes their QBRs—to review how its ad Cohorts are set up.

For instance, a change in how Sales approaches account segmentation may inform how Cohorts need to be structured, or an update on how reps are using fields in Salesforce may require an adjustment to the inclusion criteria in an existing Cohort.

Aligning ad campaigns with sales outreach requires more than getting Sales and Marketing working together toward the same success metrics (though it's a good start).

It requires a system for keeping ad audiences up-to-date without Ops having to manage it manually.

By building dynamic ad audiences, Paddle’s marketing team puts less of a burden on the Ops team, so they can execute faster, maintain alignment with sales priorities, and accelerate outbound.

Want to do the same? Learn more about Cohort Builder here.