Persuasion is a powerful device for shaping people’s attitudes and actions. Recent work has begun to examine who persuaders target with their persuasive efforts. The current work explores how persuaders think about intermediaries—individuals who can advocate to a target on the persuader’s behalf. Specifically, this work studies people’s preferences to seek breadth of support—prioritizing the number of intermediaries with favorable attitudes—versus depth of support—prioritizing extreme attitudes among intermediaries. Although advantages exist to both approaches, six initial experiments with varied paradigms document a preference for depth: persuaders favor obtaining support from fewer intermediaries with more extreme attitudes compared to more intermediaries with less extreme attitudes. To explain these results, two additional experiments demonstrate that people believe intermediaries with more extreme attitudes are more likely to invest the necessary effort and intensity to advocate for the persuader’s position and therefore are perceived as more likely to persuade the target. Building on this mechanism, two final experiments demonstrate that persuaders’ preference for depth versus breadth is moderated by whether people believe effort and intensity are required by intermediaries. Implications for understanding how people think about using intermediaries, as well as targeting in persuasion more generally, are discussed.