The coverage scoreboard

BeginnerDuration ~12 min read + 30 min moveTools Notion coverage tracker (from Lesson 0.3)

The big idea: measure what the buyer did, not what you sent — because your own output always goes up when you work harder, which means it can lie to you all year.

The analogy

Think about how serious athletes train. You can’t control what happens on race day — the weather, the field, the result. What you can control is the training, and the one tool that keeps training honest is the log. Every session that actually happened gets written down. Every session that didn’t, doesn’t. The log never lies, and that’s the entire point of keeping one — because your mood lies constantly. A slow week feels like failure even when the work was right; a busy week feels productive even when you skipped the thing that mattered. The athlete who trusts the log over the feeling wins the season.

Your scoreboard is the training log. The signed deal is race day, and race day takes care of itself — if the log is honest. WPH has already lived the alternative once: the last measurement system defined success as deal quality and time-to-close, then never reported on either. Weekly reporting died at week three, and the only numbers actually tracked were content counts — posts written, blogs published, the exact vanity metrics the strategy forbade. That’s not a discipline failure; it’s physics. A system that measures output drifts toward producing output, because output is what you control. Coverage is the fix because it measures something you don’t control: the buyer’s behavior. You can’t inflate “they requested their scorecard” by writing more posts.

Honesty note: no video for this one — I checked, and Bev Burgess’s relationship-coverage model has no free video corpus worth your time. She owns the paid version in her books; this written lesson is the free one.

How it works

Start with the question Burgess’s model replaced. The old campaign question was “what was the response rate?” The account question is: of the accounts that matter, how many do we have live relationships inside — how deep, and how warm? That’s what she calls relationship coverage, and your scoreboard measures it on a ladder of stages.

Every one of the 80 accounts sits at exactly one stage, and a stage is only ever earned by their action, never by your send. The ladder runs: unaware, aware, met, consumed research, multi-threaded, diagnostic, won. Most of the list starts at unaware, and writing that down honestly is the point. The real skill lives at the boundaries, so hold these four. An accepted connection request alone is not “aware” — aware means someone showed they know the name: engaged with a post, replied, followed Richard, mentioned WPH unprompted. A friendly DM thread is not “met” — met means a real-time conversation, in person or on a live call, and ten minutes with the marketing head at the CEO Awards dinner counts. Julian emailing the benchmark to all 80 accounts moves zero of them to “consumed research” — a contact’s own action moves it: they requested their scorecard, replied with a question, cited the findings in a conversation. And two accepted connections is not “multi-threaded” — that stage needs two or more contacts who have each genuinely engaged; two connections is just two people who haven’t said no yet. Past there, the evidence gets simple. “Diagnostic” means money changed hands for diagnostic work — a verbal “we’d love an audit” doesn’t count. “Won” means a build is signed.

The ladder is one axis. The second is account depth: for every account past aware, record who the warmest contact is and how senior. “Met the digital manager once” and “the CEO texts Richard about EV launch timelines” are both technically met, but they’re different businesses. When two accounts sit at the same stage, work the deeper one — depth tells you where a referral ask or a dinner invitation will actually land.

Now the arithmetic that makes this a revenue system instead of a mood board. From lesson 1.1, roughly 95% of buyers are out of market at any moment — which on 80 accounts means about 4 are actually in market in a given quarter, and you can’t know which 4. So the play is to keep the whole list warm and let the in-market ones surface. How much surfacing do you need? Work it backwards. Four clients a year, closing warm conversations at somewhere between 15 and 25 percent, means you need roughly 16 to 27 qualified conversations a year. Spread that over twelve months and it comes to about two a month. Two. Let that recalibrate your nervous system: the entire year’s revenue goal is carried by two real conversations a month, and moving about ten accounts one stage to the right each quarter is what keeps those two conversations surfacing. Notice what’s missing from that whole chain: a response rate.

The ritual that runs it takes fifteen minutes, every Friday, no exceptions. Which accounts moved right this week, and because of what? Every move gets logged with its evidence — “Kia: digital lead requested scorecard after Wednesday’s post” — and every play that caused a move gets a line in the playbook. Zero moves is a legal answer. A fabricated move is not. This is the training-log rule: in a slow month the temptation is to promote accounts on hope — “they probably saw the report.” Hold the line. If you can’t state the buyer’s action, the account doesn’t 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.

And what leadership sees monthly is the 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.

One account sits on exactly one rung. It moves right only when the buyer's own behavior earns it.

The pattern

Count what THEY did, not what you sent. A stage is earned by the buyer’s action — a request, a reply, a live meeting, money. Your sends move nothing. Log the evidence or the account doesn’t move. Two honest conversations a month carries the whole year.

The receipts (evidence, if you want it)

• The 95:5 finding: ~95% of B2B buyers are out-of-market at any moment; firms switch providers roughly every five years, so ~5% are in-market in a given quarter — on 80 accounts, ~4 (Ehrenberg-Bass / LinkedIn B2B Institute — INDEPENDENT).
• The conversation math: 4 clients/year ÷ 0.25 = 16, and 4 ÷ 0.15 ≈ 27 qualified conversations a year, ≈ 2/month. The 15–25% warm close band is this course’s working assumption, graded in the tiny-TAM evidence.
• Relationship coverage and its two axes come from Bev Burgess’s ABM codification at ITSMA (2003) — INDUSTRY.
• WPH’s prior measurement failure is internal record: weekly reporting died at week 3; only content counts were tracked, against the strategy document’s own rules.

Your one move

Pick 10 accounts from your 1.6 board and classify them honestly: assign each a stage and write the evidence beside it. No evidence, no stage — it stays unaware. Expect most of the ten to be unaware; writing that down is the win, not the failure. Thirty minutes. Done means: ten rows, each with a stage and an evidence line you’d defend out loud.

The needle: coverage stages are just distance-to-conversation. Two warm conversations a month is the only output metric; everything on this board measures progress toward it.

Want to go further?

The full baseline completes the Level 1 capstone, alongside 1.3’s positioning statement and 1.6’s account list. Three parts. First, write the stage-definition card — one page at the top of the Notion tracker: each of the seven stages, its evidence rule in one sentence, and one concrete PH-automotive example (Met: ten minutes with the BYD marketing head at the CEO Awards dinner. Not met: a warm DM exchange with the same person). That card keeps next quarter’s classifications consistent with this one’s. Second, run the first honest classification of all 80 accounts, with the depth field (warmest contact, role, warmth in one word) for everything past aware. Third, produce the dated baseline histogram — accounts per stage. 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 needs roughly 16–27 qualified conversations a year — about 2 a month covers the whole revenue goalIt's 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 needs 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 — accounts 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… your ten classifications exist and you can defend each stage assignment’s evidence out loud.

Mark this lesson complete

Go deeper

• The pipeline rulebook — this lesson’s thinking turned into binding law: exact stage evidence rules, the four qualification tests, and the movement rules.

• 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.