The account system

BeginnerDuration ~25 min read + half-day build (v1)Tools Notion, Sales Navigator, CAMPI member list

No video in this lesson

The free video corpus on ABM mechanics is vendor-webinar-thin, so this lesson is written from ITSMA/Burgess-grounded research instead of around an embed.

Why this lesson

The account system is spine asset #1 — the physical form of the entire strategy. Everything the course has argued so far (named market, expert power dynamics, beachhead rings, proof) collapses into one artifact: roughly 80 accounts you can hold in a single view. WPH already has pieces of it: a Connect Tracker with 146 rows, 111 leads saved into Sales Navigator, and an ABM program designed back on April 10. But pieces are not a system — there are no tiers, no contact maps, no signal watch. A flat list tells you who exists; a system tells you who gets what treatment, through which people, triggered by what. This lesson builds it.

The explainer

Provenance, and why the numbers force tiers. Account-based marketing was codified in 2003 by Bev Burgess at ITSMA, formalizing what firms like Accenture and Unisys were already doing: treating individual key accounts as markets of one. The part of her model most people skip is the honest capacity math. The benchmark norm for true one-to-one ABM — a full plan per account — is 5–25 accounts per dedicated team. WPH is one founder, one assistant, and Claude. That team cannot give 80 accounts the full treatment, and pretending otherwise is how account lists rot. The answer is not a shorter list; it is descending effort across a tiered one.

The three tiers, sized for WPH. Tier 1 is 15–20 accounts and gets one-to-one treatment: each account handled as its own tiny market — a mini-plan, 3–5 named contacts mapped, personalized signal-timed touches, an interview ask for the series, a seat at the quarterly dinner. Tier 2 is around 30 accounts and gets one-to-few treatment: worked in clusters rather than individually — shared content aimed at their segment or ownership group, event invitations, inclusion in the annual benchmark. Tier 3 is everyone else and gets one-to-many treatment: ambient presence only — LinkedIn content aimed at the named audience and benchmark distribution, nothing personalized. Tier by fit and winnability, not size: the ownership-group map from Lesson 1.4 does most of the work here, because a live relationship anywhere inside a group raises the tier of its sibling brands. Tiers are also a promotion path — a Tier 2 account that starts throwing signals moves up, and the treatment moves with it.

Contact maps, and why one thread is none. Enterprise purchases are committee decisions, so an account where you know one person is barely covered at all. The benchmark data is blunt: single-threaded outreach at 10,000+ employee companies yields around 0.22% replies — effectively zero. And in one large dataset of $50k+ deals, multi-threaded engagement was associated with roughly a 130% higher win rate — a vendor-reported figure, so treat the direction as solid and the decimal as marketing. There is also a plainer reason: if your only contact changes jobs, the account goes dark overnight. So every Tier 1 account gets a contact map of 3–5 named people — typically the marketing head, the digital lead, and the CEO/GM, with procurement added once a deal is live. For each person: name, role, LinkedIn URL, and an honest relationship status (never contacted / connected / conversed / met).

The signal watch-list. A signal is an observable account event; a trigger event is the specific kind that opens a window for a relevant, personal, non-pitch touch. In PH automotive the watchable set is concrete: a new model launch, a new digital- or marketing-head hire, a website relaunch, a major campaign starting, an executive move, a dealer-network announcement, an awards entry. Each account’s watch entry names which of these to watch and where (LinkedIn, press, the account’s own site). Here the small market is an advantage: at ~80 accounts, a weekly manual sweep — an hour or two of assistant-and-Claude time — covers the entire market. Intent-data platforms are built and priced for markets of thousands; pointed at 80 Philippine automotive accounts they would return sparse, noisy data for real money. Manual watching is not the budget option here. It is the correct one.

How it feeds the week. The account system is the input layer for the Lesson 0.3 cadence. Monday’s signal digest is compiled straight from the watch entries across all 80 accounts; from it, the week’s 3 personal touches are picked — each one aimed at a mapped contact, timed to a trigger event, never a pitch. The coverage scoreboard (next lesson) then sits on top of the same rows and records what moved. Without this system the cadence has no input and touches default to random. With it, the question “who do we contact this week, about what?” answers itself every Monday morning.

(This lesson’s tier structure, capacity norms, and reply/win-rate benchmarks are documented with source grades in plan/01b-tiny-tam-playbook.md §3 and plan/01-industry-map.md §5.)

Do it

Build v1 of the account system. This is the core of the Level 1 capstone — a working session gets v1 done; DIRECTION.md budgets ~2 weeks for the polished version.

1. Assemble the roster. Merge the Connect Tracker (146 rows — dedupe people into companies), the 111 Sales Navigator saves, and the CAMPI member list into one Notion table: one row per account, ~80 rows.
2. Tier every account. Using the Lesson 1.4 ownership-group map: Tier 1 (15–20, best fit + winnability, group relationships count), Tier 2 (~30), Tier 3 (rest). Record tier and ownership group on each row.
3. Contact-map the top 10 Tier 1 accounts. 3–5 named people each — marketing head, digital lead, CEO/GM — with LinkedIn URL and honest relationship status.
4. Define signal watch entries for every account. Which trigger events to watch for this account, and where to look. Tier 3 entries can be one line; Tier 1 entries should be specific.
5. Dry-run the digest. Have Claude compile one Monday signal digest from the watch entries. If it surfaces nothing usable, the entries are too vague — tighten them now, not in week three.

Terms introduced

Terms introduced in this lesson

• Tiered account list
• Multi-threading
• Trigger event

Each term links to the glossary, where it is defined by the way you just used it.

Check

Check yourself

1. Single-threaded outreach at 10,000+ employee companies benchmarks around a 0.22% reply rate. What is the account system's structural answer to that number?

   Map 3–5 contacts per Tier 1 account and build those relationships in parallel, so no account depends on one threadSkip large accounts and focus on smaller companiesBuy an intent-data platform to find warmer leadsSend more messages per contact until one lands

2. Which of these is a trigger event worth a personal touch in the PH automotive market?

   A Tier 1 account hires a new digital or marketing headA competitor agency lowers its pricesA global report on worldwide EV sales trends is publishedA recruiter sends Richard a connection request

3. Why does this lesson recommend manual signal watching instead of intent-data tooling?

   Manual watching produces more signals per accountAt ~80 accounts, one person (or Claude) can sweep the entire market weekly by hand; intent platforms are built and priced for markets of thousands and would return sparse, noisy data hereIntent data is only available for US companiesTooling is against LinkedIn's terms of service

4. How does the account system feed the weekly cadence from Lesson 0.3?

   It replaces the coverage scoreboardIt schedules the quarterly executive dinnerThe Monday signal digest across all ~80 accounts is compiled from each account's watch entries, and the week's 3 personal touches are picked from itIt generates automated outreach messages for every account

Check answers

You can move on when you can… show a live account system: 80 accounts tiered, the top 10 contact-mapped, and signals defined for every account.

Mark this lesson complete

Go deeper

• Bev Burgess (with Dave Munn), A Practitioner’s Guide to Account-Based Marketing — the handbook from the person who codified ABM at ITSMA in 2003. Honest note: it is written for large enterprise marketing teams, so read it for the tiering and coverage logic, not the org charts.
• Let’s Talk ABM — Burgess on ABM’s origins — a short interview, not course material, but the origin story from the source.
• Next up: 1.7 · The coverage scoreboard — the metric layer that sits on top of these 80 rows and replaces response-rate thinking for good.