Every sales organisation needs its representatives to prospect, qualify, and score leads consistently - it's what builds a quality pipeline and an accurate forecast, rather than one built on optimism alone.
Key findings
- Grading accounts by current value, potential value, key contacts engaged, and churn risk surfaces where growth and risk actually sit.
- A "single-threaded" approach - one engaged contact per account - leaves most accounts under-protected: research suggests the average B2B purchase now involves 6.8 stakeholders.
- Insight-led prospecting, not gut feel, is what builds a forecast you can actually trust.
A Worked Example
Consider an account manager responsible for 100 accounts, needing to find additional revenue within existing contracts, win new business, and protect renewals - but consistently missing target. The root cause is usually a quality pipeline problem stemming from inconsistent prospecting and nurturing, not a lack of effort.
Grading those 100 accounts (A through D) by current contract value, potential contract value, number of key contacts engaged, and churn risk reveals where attention should actually go: which accounts are genuine growth targets, which need retention focus, and which are lower priority. Many sales teams operate single-threaded - one properly engaged contact per account at a time - despite research suggesting the average B2B purchasing decision now involves 6.8 stakeholders. That gap is exactly where intelligent, scaled prospecting closes the distance between effort and results.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why grade existing accounts rather than treating them all equally?
Account managers responsible for large books of business can't give every account equal attention. Grading by current contract value, potential value, key contacts engaged, and churn risk reveals where new revenue, renewals, and growth opportunities actually sit.
How many stakeholders are typically involved in a B2B purchasing decision?
Research cited in The Challenger Customer (Dixon, Toman, Adamson, Spenner, 2015) found the average number of stakeholders involved in a purchasing decision is 6.8 - far more than a single-threaded sales approach typically engages.
Andrew Nicholson
Co-founder & CEO at Kulea. Guest lecturer in digital psychology and behavioural economics at the University of Buckingham.