Say once what you are always looking for.
A desk carries more standing intent than one topic line can hold: the kind of business it buys, the shape of target it keeps coming back to, the thing it has said in every mandate for two years. An objective is that intent, written once and held in settings. Apply one to a sounding and the search starts warmer. It never narrows what comes back.
Written once, applied when it helps.
Write it once
A short name for the selector and a paragraph of substance: sector, geography, size band, and the one or two conditions that always matter. Typed, and capped at a thousand characters, because a standing objective is a mandate statement rather than a strategy.
Pick one at the start
Two controls when you begin a sounding, one for the organisation and one for your desk. Both default to none, and most soundings carry no objective at all. Nothing is ever applied unless you choose it.
Round one starts warmer
The objective's prose becomes search vocabulary, folded into the seed and the queries the first round runs. The sounding begins near the language you care about instead of spending a round finding its way there.
Change course while paused
Which objective applies is a property of the run. Pause a sounding, swap it, and the next round follows the new one. Terms an objective already contributed stay in the seed, and the page tells you so before you commit to the change.
The house and the desk.
What the firm buys, standing across every desk. Held by an org admin and visible to everyone in the organisation.
Your desk's own mandate. Held by the team, and weighted above the organisation's, so a broad house principle cannot dilute the brief of the desk that knows what it is looking for this quarter.
At most one of each applies to a sounding, never two of the same scope. Each scope keeps up to ten active objectives, which is enough for a firm's principles and too few for a list of deals. An objective is retired rather than deleted, and the text a sounding used is frozen onto it at the moment it is applied, so a run stays explicable long after the mandate has moved on.
The team control names the desk it resolved from. An organisation-wide sounding is a shared asset, so where one desk's mandate has shaped it, that is on the face of the run rather than inferred from who happened to start it.
An objective warms the search. It never narrows it.
It can add and up-weight, and nothing else
An objective never becomes an exclusion, never removes a term, never lowers a weight, and never reaches the judgement of whether a company qualifies. There is exactly one route from an objective into a sounding and it only ever adds, so no standing preference can quietly delete the long tail Overture exists to reach.
No fit score, no re-sorting, no badge
A company is presented exactly as it would have been with no objective applied. Nothing is ranked, grouped or relabelled by how closely it answers your mandate. The objective changed which queries ran; it changes nothing about what you see once something is found.
Warming can still take you somewhere else
Objective terms compete for query slots like any other term, so a warmed sounding reaches a different set to a cold one and can miss something a cold run would have found. That is warming working as designed rather than a filter at work, and it is worth knowing before you meet it.
Objectives do not reach the programme planner. Every stage a String of Pearls proposes cites your brief, and a stage citing a standing preference would be citing something your strategy never said. A niche that an approved stage opens is warmed in the ordinary way: objectives shape execution, not the plan.
A mandate is judgement, and judgement stays private.
An objective's text sits on the same footing as a programme brief. It never crosses an organisation boundary, is never aggregated across customers, and never influences another organisation's sounding. It is never stored against a company and never enters the Overture Index: a company a warmed sounding surfaces joins the index carrying nothing about why the search went looking for it. Identity is global, judgement is yours.
Inside your organisation, one rule governs every surface that reports an applied objective. Anyone who can see a sounding can always see that an objective was applied, at which scope, and which desk it came from, because that is what explains where the sounding went. Its name and text are shown only to people who can already see that objective. To everyone else it reads a team objective on the Manchester desk, so a run stays accountable without publishing one desk's mandate to the rest of the firm.