Tuesday I asked you to pull up your territory and count how many accounts you are actually working.

If you did it honestly, you found the same thing most reps find: fifteen accounts getting real attention out of fifty or a hundred, and at least half of those fifteen chosen for the wrong reasons.

Today I am giving you the system to fix it.

The four-tier classification that tells you exactly which accounts deserve your best hours and which ones should be dropped before they waste another month. The five readiness signals that identify where deals actually exist right now. The expected value calculation that makes prioritisation a math problem instead of a gut call. And the two-hour territory reset you run once a quarter so you are never working the wrong list again.

Before we get into it: if you want to know right now which accounts in your current pipeline have the signals of a real deal versus the signals of a comfortable relationship, the diagnostic shows you in 90 seconds.

Most sales training teaches you how to work accounts. Almost none of it teaches you how to choose them.

You get a territory. You get a quota. You get told to build pipeline. The implicit instruction is to work everything until something responds and then work the things that respond.

This is how you end up with fifteen active accounts and twelve of them going nowhere.

Research from sales performance analytics firms consistently shows that in any given territory, the top 10 to 15% of accounts generate 60 to 70% of the revenue. The distribution is not even close to flat. A small number of accounts have the conditions for a deal. The rest have a contact and a CRM entry.

The reps who hit 120% have not found a better way to work accounts. They have found a better way to identify which 15 accounts to work in the first place.

That identification process is what this framework is about.

Before you score any account, you need to understand what you are actually measuring.

Activity is not readiness. A champion who returns your calls is an active account. An account where the business conditions for a deal exist right now is a ready account. You can have an active account that will never close this quarter. You can have a silent account that is about to go into a buying cycle the moment you pick up the phone.

Readiness is about business conditions, not relationship warmth.

Signal 1: Recent Budget Event

A new budget approval, a funding round, an acquisition, a leadership change with a new mandate, a public earnings call where a specific problem was called out. Any of these creates a window where money is available and decisions are being made.

How to surface it: company news, LinkedIn leadership announcements, earnings transcripts, press releases. Set Google Alerts on your top 20 accounts for exactly this kind of trigger. When the signal fires, that account moves to the top of your list.

Signal 2: Active Problem Match

The account has a documented, acknowledged problem that your product solves and that problem is creating visible pain right now, not eventually. Not "they will probably need this at some point." Their CFO mentioned it in a public statement. Your champion brought it up unsolicited. A job posting appeared for a role that only makes sense if they are trying to solve it internally.

The job posting signal is underused. If a company is hiring for a role that would manage the problem your product solves, they have either decided to build it themselves or they are evaluating whether to buy. Either way, the buying conversation is happening right now.

Signal 3: Buying Committee Accessibility

You have or can quickly get access to at least two people in the buying committee, including someone with budget authority or direct access to the person who has it. One contact at the manager level with no line to the economic buyer is not accessibility. It is a conversation that will stall as soon as internal pressure appears.

Accounts where you have multi-threaded access close faster and face less procurement friction. Accounts where you have a single friendly contact close when your contact can push it through, which is rarely.

Signal 4: Competitive Timing Pressure

The account is evaluating or has recently evaluated alternatives. A competitor is in the account. A renewal with another vendor is approaching. An RFP has been issued or is about to be.

Competitive timing pressure is a readiness signal because it means the buying decision is already live. You are not creating urgency. Urgency exists. Your job is to get in the conversation before it closes without you.

Signal 5: Strategic Initiative Alignment

Your product directly enables or accelerates a strategic initiative the account has publicly committed to. Not "our product could help with digital transformation in general." Specifically: their CEO announced a Q3 initiative to consolidate vendor spend, and your product eliminates two of their current vendors.

When your solution maps directly to a named initiative at a named company with a named executive owner, your deal has an internal sponsor before you have even made the first call. That is different from every other deal in your territory.

Once you have assessed readiness signals, you rank accounts using a simple expected value formula.

Expected Value = Deal Size × Win Probability × (1 / Months to Close)

This produces a monthly revenue contribution estimate for each account. You run it across every account in your territory and rank them highest to lowest.

The inputs:

Deal Size: Your best estimate of the total contract value based on account size, use case, and comparable deals. If you do not know, use your average deal size for that account profile as a starting number.

Win Probability: This is not the probability you have typed into your CRM. That number reflects optimism, not evidence. Use the five readiness signals to set this. An account with four or five signals: 40 to 60%. Two or three signals: 15 to 25%. One signal or none: under 10%.

Months to Close: Your realistic estimate of how long a deal would take to close from today, based on your sales cycle, the account's buying complexity, and the presence or absence of readiness signals. An account with a live buying trigger and EB accessibility closes faster than an account you need to build from scratch.

Run this calculation on every account. The ranking that comes out is not perfect. It is far better than instinct.

A rep with 80 accounts who runs this calculation will typically find that 12 to 18 accounts carry 70 to 80% of the total expected value. Those are your working accounts for this quarter. The rest get automation and quarterly check-ins until their readiness signals change.

Once you have the expected value ranking, you sort accounts into four tiers. The tier determines how much of your time the account gets.

Tier 1: Commit

High expected value, multiple readiness signals, active buying cycle or near-term trigger. These accounts get your best hours. Not equal hours with everything else. Your best hours.

Characteristics: You have or can quickly get EB access. There is a named business problem with a known budget or pending budget event. Buying timeline is realistic within two quarters. You have at least two people in the account who would advocate for your solution.

Time allocation: 40 to 50% of your selling time across a handful of accounts. This will feel wrong at first because it means explicitly neglecting other accounts. That is the point.

Tier 2: Develop

Medium expected value, one or two readiness signals, clear path to a real deal but requiring more setup work before it becomes commit-ready. These accounts get regular structured attention, but not the same intensity as Tier 1.

Characteristics: You have a champion but not EB access. There is a business problem but the budget conversation has not happened. Readiness signals exist but the timing is not right this quarter.

Time allocation: 25 to 30% of your selling time, focused on the specific activities that move these accounts from Develop to Commit. Usually that means building EB access, quantifying the problem, and running procurement discovery.

Tier 3: Explore

Low expected value or unclear readiness, accounts that could become Tier 2 based on future triggers. Light engagement to maintain awareness and surface triggers when they appear.

Characteristics: One contact, no EB access, no active problem match, no visible buying trigger.

Time allocation: 10 to 15%, primarily automated sequences and quarterly personal touchpoints. When a readiness signal fires on a Tier 3 account, it moves to Tier 2 immediately.

Tier 4: Drop

Accounts with no readiness signals and no realistic path to Tier 2 in the next 12 months. These accounts come out of your active list entirely. They go into a long-cycle nurture sequence or get reassigned. Your time is finite. Tier 4 accounts are borrowing it from Tier 1 accounts that could close.

Dropping accounts feels like giving up. It is not. It is recognising that an account with no readiness signals is not a sales opportunity. It is a relationship maintenance project with no near-term ROI, and you do not have the calendar for that.

For every account in your Tier 1 and Tier 2 list, you run a twelve-point health check once per quarter. This tells you whether an account is advancing, stalling, or declining, and what specific action is required.

Champion Health (3 points)

Economic Buyer Access (2 points)

Problem Clarity (3 points)

Process Visibility (2 points)

Timeline Reality (2 points)

Score each account out of 12. A Tier 1 account scoring below 7 has a specific gap you need to fill before the quarter closes. A Tier 2 account scoring 9 or above is ready to move to Tier 1.

Account prioritisation is not only about finding new deals. It is about finding the expansion revenue hiding in accounts you have already closed.

The average enterprise AE leaves significant expansion revenue on the table annually because they treat closed accounts as finished rather than as starting points.

Whitespace mapping is a simple process. For every closed account, you ask four questions:

What products or services do we offer that this account does not currently use?

What business problems have emerged since they implemented that we could address?

Who else in the organisation has a similar problem to the one we solved, in a department we have not engaged?

When does their contract renew, and what expansion conversation should be happening 90 days before that date?

The answers to these questions, applied systematically across your closed accounts, will almost always surface two or three near-term expansion opportunities you did not know existed. These are the highest-probability deals in any territory because you have already established trust, navigated procurement, and demonstrated value. The cost of sale is a fraction of a new logo.

Expansion accounts with whitespace signals belong in Tier 1 alongside your best new business opportunities. Most reps park closed accounts in Tier 3 by default. That is the wrong call.

Run this at the start of every quarter. Not once at the beginning of the year. Once per quarter.

Hour One: Rebuild the List

Pull every account in your territory. Remove accounts that have clearly no near-term opportunity. For every remaining account, score it on the five readiness signals and calculate expected value. Sort by expected value. Your Tier 1 and Tier 2 lists emerge from this exercise. This takes 45 to 60 minutes done properly.

Hour Two: Reallocate the Calendar

Look at the last four weeks of your calendar. How much time went to Tier 1 accounts? How much went to accounts that would score Tier 3 or Tier 4 today?

Most reps discover that 30 to 40% of their selling time is going to accounts that have no realistic near-term opportunity, because those accounts have been in the pipeline for a long time and dropping them feels like admitting failure.

Dropping them is not failure. Continuing to allocate your Tuesdays to accounts that score 1 out of 5 on readiness signals while your Tier 1 accounts get whatever is left is failure. It is just slow enough that the connection is not obvious until Q4 when you are trying to figure out what went wrong.

The output of hour two is a calendar reallocation. Specific time blocks moved from Tier 3 and 4 accounts to Tier 1 accounts. Automated sequences set up for the accounts dropping off your active list. A reminder set for the readiness signals that would bring them back.

This is the two hours that changes your quarter. Most reps will not do it because it requires accepting that the list they have been working is wrong. The reps who do it compound the benefit every quarter because the list keeps getting cleaner.

There is one account type that appears in nearly every territory and is systematically underworked.

The large account that never responded to your first outreach sequence.

You emailed them three times, got no reply, and moved them to Tier 3 or removed them from your active list entirely. Now they sit in the CRM collecting quarterly check-in emails that nobody reads.

Here is what you do not know: they may have five readiness signals and a live buying cycle happening right now that you are not in because you stopped looking after the third email bounce.

The expected value calculation on a $500K account with three readiness signals is dramatically higher than the expected value on a $50K account with an engaged champion. But most reps are working the $50K account because at least somebody is talking to them.

Before you finalise your Tier 1 list this quarter, run the readiness signal check on the five largest accounts in your territory that you have not actively worked in the last 60 days. Not to restart an automated sequence. To look at their news, their job postings, their executive announcements, and their public strategic commitments.

At least one of them will have a signal you missed. That signal is your first call tomorrow.

Today: Run the expected value calculation on every account you are currently working. You are not trying to be precise. You are trying to see the ranking. The ranking is almost always a surprise.

This week: Pull the five largest accounts in your territory that you have not touched in 60 days. Run the five readiness signals on each one. What do you find?

This quarter: Run the two-hour territory reset before the end of this month. Build your Tier 1 and Tier 2 lists from evidence, not habit.

The 5-Minute Deal Scorecard gives you the scoring framework as a working spreadsheet. You enter the account, answer eight questions about readiness signals and deal health, and it outputs a Deal Health Score from 0 to 100 and a single priority action.

It takes five minutes per account and produces a ranked list of where your time belongs.

Next week: Your territory plan is a fantasy written in December. The three assumptions every territory plan makes that are always wrong, and what top performers do instead of a territory plan.

Active readers only.

Dingo

P.S. The rep from Tuesday's email. Denver. 80 accounts, working 18 of them. He dropped 11 after running the readiness signal check. Picked up 6 accounts that had been sitting quietly in his CRM with zero outreach in four months. Two of them had budget events he had missed entirely. Both closed the same quarter. His active list got smaller. His number got bigger. The scoring framework he used is what I built the Deal Scorecard around. It is $27 and it is here.