Key finding
Of 912,770 seniority-classified contacts in a large B2B database, 54.1% are tagged C-Suite, 63.8% are tagged C-Suite or Founder, and even the database's own stricter decision-maker rule keeps only 49.1% of the C-Suite-tagged contacts.
What we measured
Every prospecting tool has a seniority filter, and "C-Suite" is its most-clicked option. This study measures what that click actually returns, using the seniority classifications inside Reachium's own B2B database, and then stress-tests the tag against the database's stricter decision-maker rule.
The short version: "C-Suite" is not a small, senior slice of the database. It is most of the database.
Methodology
Exact counts, single snapshot. All figures are exact counts from one read-only snapshot taken 27 August 2026, after the mid-August deduplication described in the full database audit.
Denominator. 912,770 of the database's 2,037,030 contacts (44.81%) carry a seniority classification, parsed from job titles during enrichment. Every share below divides by the 912,770 tagged contacts unless stated otherwise. The untagged majority is absent from this study by construction, and there is no basis for assuming it splits the same way.
The decision-maker rule, defined. The database carries a stricter internal flag intended to mark purchase authority. Reconciling the two systems exactly: the flag exists only on contacts tagged C-Suite, Founder, Partner, or VP, and the per-class flag counts (242,456 + 44,782 + 35,978 + 28,706) sum to the flag's total of 351,922 precisely. It is a derived rule on top of the seniority tag, not an independent measurement, and this study uses it as a second, stricter lens, not as ground truth.
The findings
| Seniority tag | Contacts | Share of tagged | Clears the decision-maker rule |
|---|---|---|---|
| C-Suite | 493,371 | 54.05% | 49.14% |
| Founder | 88,674 | 9.71% | 50.50% |
| Manager | 74,050 | 8.11% | 0.00% |
| Partner | 68,785 | 7.54% | 52.31% |
| VP | 59,265 | 6.49% | 48.44% |
| Advisor | 40,370 | 4.42% | 0.00% |
| Entry-level | 14,505 | 1.59% | 0.00% |
| Associate | 13,480 | 1.48% | 0.00% |
(The table shows the eight largest classes; the remainder, including Principal, Analyst, Director and Other, each hold under 1.5% of tagged contacts.)
C-Suite alone is 54.05% of tagged contacts. Add Founder and the two classes cover 63.77%. Across all tagged contacts, the stricter decision-maker rule keeps 38.56%; applied to the C-Suite class specifically it keeps 49.14%, meaning the database's own second opinion discards half of its C-Suite tags as not-authority.
What this means
The C-Suite tag is diluted by arithmetic, not by lying. The company universe behind these contacts is dominated by small companies: 49.7% of size-classified companies in the same database have 50 or fewer employees. Every one of those companies has a CEO, and often a CFO and a COO besides, so title-parsing honestly applied to a small-company world must produce a C-Suite majority. A three-person agency's CEO and a Fortune 500 CEO get the same tag, and the tag is correct both times. It just does not mean the same thing.
That is why "C-Suite" in a filter is a title filter, not an authority filter, and why the halving under the stricter rule is the useful number: when a rule with any teeth at all is applied, half the C-Suite evaporates. Teams that treat seniority filters as targeting are, in this data, selecting a majority of the database and calling it precision.
The Manager row carries its own warning in the other direction. Zero percent of Managers clear the decision-maker rule by construction, yet in many buying processes a manager is exactly the person who owns the problem. A rule strict enough to halve the C-Suite is also strict enough to exclude real buyers, and no flag in this study should be mistaken for a measurement of who signs.
In practice
An SDR building a "C-Suite only" list from any B2B tool should expect the filter to return roughly half the tagged database, and should add a company-size cut before reading seniority as authority: in this data, C-Suite plus a 200-employee minimum is a far smaller and more meaningful set than C-Suite alone (the size distribution is in the company universe study).
A RevOps lead reporting "decision-makers reached" should say which rule made them decision-makers. The same database supports 54.05%, 38.56%, or 17.28% (of all contacts) as the "decision-maker" share, depending only on the denominator and the rule. All three are honest with their definitions attached and misleading without them.
Limitations
Tags are parsed from titles. Seniority classification comes from job-title parsing during enrichment. Title inflation, non-standard titles, and parsing mistakes all land in the tags, and no manual audit of a sample was performed for this study.
The tagged subset is selected. 44.81% of contacts carry a tag, and enrichment is not random; untagged contacts skew toward thinner records, and their seniority mix is unknown.
The decision-maker rule is ours. It is a derived internal rule, defined above and disclosed as such. It is used here as a stress test of the C-Suite tag, and its own validity is bounded by its construction: it cannot see authority that a title does not carry.
One database. Sourcing determines composition. Databases built from different sources will show different mixes; the mechanism (small-company arithmetic inflating C-Suite) travels, and the exact shares do not.
Case note. The Entry-level class is stored in lowercase in the raw data ("entry"), a residue of mixed enrichment sources, and is reported here normalized. It is disclosed because tidy tables can hide messy pipelines, and this pipeline, like every vendor's, is messy.