The coverage scoreboard

BeginnerDuration ~35 min read + 90 min classification exerciseTools Notion coverage tracker (from Lesson 0.3)

Why this lesson

WPH has already lived through a measurement failure once. The last system defined success as “quality of inbound conversations, average deal size, time-to-close” — and then never reported on any of them. Weekly reporting died at Week 3. The only numbers actually tracked were content counts: posts written, blogs published — the exact vanity metrics the strategy document forbade. A system that measures output will always drift toward producing output, because output is what you control and it always goes up when you work harder.

Coverage is the fix because it measures something you don’t control: the buyer’s behavior. You cannot inflate “they requested their scorecard” by writing more posts. Lesson 0.3 installed the coverage scoreboard as a recipe; Lesson 0.2 gave you the word. This lesson makes it rigorous — exact stage definitions, the evidence each stage requires, the second axis the single-stage view hides, and the arithmetic that connects a Friday review to 4 clients a year.

No video for this one — Bev Burgess’s relationship-coverage model has no free video corpus worth your time (confirmed by search), so this written lesson is the source.

The explainer

The metric shift, stated precisely. Burgess’s codification of ABM replaced the campaign question — “what was the response rate?” — with the account question: of the accounts that matter, how many do we have live relationships inside, how deep, and how warm? That is relationship coverage, and it has two axes. The scoreboard’s stages measure the first: how far each account has moved toward you. The second axis is account depth: within an account, how strong is the warmest relationship? Both matter, because an account can look “covered” while the only live relationship is a junior analyst who forwards nothing.

The stages, with evidence rules. Each of the 80 accounts sits at exactly one stage. A stage is earned by their action, never by your send. The rules:

• Unaware — the default. No evidence anyone at the account knows WPH or Richard exists. Most of the list starts here, and writing that down is the point.
• Aware — someone at the account has shown they know the name: accepted a connection and engaged with something (a reaction, a comment, a reply), followed Richard, or mentioned WPH unprompted. A sent-but-unanswered connection request is not awareness.
• Met — a real-time conversation happened: in person or on a live call. Ten minutes with the marketing head at the CEO Awards dinner counts. A DM thread, however friendly, does not — asynchronous text is awareness, not a meeting.
• Consumed research — a contact acted on WPH’s research: requested their company’s scorecard from the benchmark, replied with a question about the findings, or cited it in a conversation. Julian emailing the report to all 80 accounts moves zero accounts to this stage. Their request moves one.
• Multi-threaded — two or more contacts at the account have engaged: each has independently replied, met, or consumed research. Two accepted connections is not multi-threading; it is two people who haven’t said no yet.
• Diagnostic — the account has paid for diagnostic work. Money is the evidence; a verbal “we’d love an audit” is still multi-threaded.
• Won — a build is signed.

Account depth, the second axis. For each account past “aware,” the tracker records one more field: who is the warmest contact, and how senior? “Met the digital manager once” and “the CEO texts Richard about EV launch timelines” are both technically “met,” but they are different businesses. Depth is what tells you where a referral ask or a dinner invitation will actually land. When two accounts sit at the same stage, work the deeper one.

The quarterly arithmetic. Here is why moving ~10 accounts one stage right per quarter is the whole job. The 95:5 finding (Ehrenberg-Bass, from Lesson 1.1): roughly 95% of buyers are out-of-market at any moment; firms switch providers about every five years, so ~5% are in-market in a given quarter. On 80 accounts, that is ~4 in-market accounts per quarter — and you cannot know which 4. So you build memory and relationships across the whole list, and when an account’s moment arrives, WPH is the name already in the room. Downstream, the revenue math closes the loop: 4 clients a year at warm close rates of 15–25% requires 4 ÷ 0.25 = 16 to 4 ÷ 0.15 ≈ 27 qualified conversations a year — about 2 a month. Ten accounts moving right each quarter keeps enough of the list warm that the ~4 in-market accounts keep surfacing as those 2 conversations. No stage of this math needs a response rate.

The Friday ritual. Fifteen minutes, every Friday, no exceptions: which accounts moved right this week, and because of what? Each move gets logged with its evidence — “Kia: digital lead requested scorecard after Wednesday’s post” — and each play that caused a move gets a line in the playbook. Zero moves is a legal answer; a fabricated move is not.

The honesty rule. The scoreboard only predicts anything if stages are earned. The temptation under a slow month is to promote accounts on hope — “they probably saw the report.” Hold the line: if you cannot state the buyer’s action, the account does not move. A truthful scoreboard showing 60 accounts still unaware is operationally useful; a flattering one is the old output-counting failure wearing a new costume.

What leadership sees. Monthly, the report is a coverage histogram: a count of accounts at each stage, this month next to last month, with the moves and their evidence, plus depth notes on the five warmest accounts. Not posts published. Not impressions. When the histogram’s mass shifts right month over month, the system is working — even in a month with zero replies, zero inquiries, and zero deals.

Do it

This completes the Level 1 capstone, alongside 1.3’s positioning statement and 1.6’s account list.

1. Write the stage-definition card — one page, kept at the top of the Notion tracker. For each of the seven stages: its name, its evidence rule in one sentence, and one concrete PH-automotive example (e.g. Met: talked with the BYD marketing head for ten minutes at the CEO Awards dinner. Not met: a warm DM exchange with the same person). This card is what makes next quarter’s classifications consistent with this one’s.
2. Run the first honest classification of all 80 accounts from 1.6. For every account, assign a stage and write the evidence in the evidence field. No evidence, no stage — it stays unaware. Add the depth field (warmest contact, their role, warmth in one word) for every account past aware.
3. Produce the baseline histogram: a simple count of accounts per stage, dated. Expect it to be brutally left-heavy. That chart is the “before” photo every future monthly report gets compared against.

Terms introduced

Terms introduced in this lesson

• Relationship coverage
• Account depth

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

Check

Check yourself

1. Julian sends the benchmark report to contacts at all 80 accounts. How many accounts can move to "consumed research" that day?

   Only the accounts where a contact took an action: requested their scorecard, replied about it, or referenced it — your send moves nothingAll 80 — the research was distributed to every accountEvery account where the email did not bounceHalf of them, as a reasonable estimate of open rates

2. Why is the pipeline target 2 qualified conversations per month, and not more?

   Because a founder only has time for 2 calls a monthBecause only 2 accounts are in-market at any time4 clients/year at a 15–25% warm close rate requires roughly 16–27 qualified conversations a year — about 2 a month covers the whole revenue goalIt is an arbitrary starting quota that doubles every quarter

3. Three contacts at AC Mobility have accepted Richard's connection requests, and one of them has also met him at an event and requested the benchmark scorecard. Is the account "multi-threaded"?

   No — multi-threaded requires 2+ contacts who have engaged (replied, met, or consumed research); connections alone count zeroNo — multi-threaded requires all mapped contacts to have met Richard in personYes — any account with a "met" contact is automatically multi-threadedYes — three contacts are connected, which is more than the required two

4. What does the monthly report to leadership look like under this system?

   A list of every piece of content produced that monthA forecast of which accounts will close this quarterA coverage histogram — how many accounts sit at each stage versus last month, with the moves and their evidence — plus depth on the warmest accountsTotal LinkedIn impressions and follower growth

Check answers

You can move on when you can… classify all 80 accounts honestly and defend each stage assignment’s evidence.

Mark this lesson complete

Go deeper

• Bev Burgess & Philip Kotler — Account-Based Marketing: The Definitive Handbook: the source of the relationship-coverage model, from the person who codified ABM at ITSMA in 2003. Book page; a good free companion is Burgess on the Growth Manifesto podcast.
• Ehrenberg-Bass — The 95:5 rule: the paper behind the “~4 in-market accounts you can’t identify” arithmetic.
• LinkedIn B2B Institute — How B2B Brands Grow: the companion research on why memory built now converts at the buyer’s moment later.
• Next up: Level 1 capstone in Practice & capstones, then 2.1 · Founder visibility.