Which accounts get real effort? Tier as a team, plan each seat

Real effort at $90k means 4 engaged seats per account

Real effort on a $90k deal means the seats it can’t close without are engaged. A seat is a buying role. Our starting point for deals of €50–150k, where $90k sits, is 4 seats: the champion who owns the problem, the budget owner, finance and IT or security.^↗ Your own won and lost deals can change that later.

Engaged means a two-way exchange with the person in the seat in the last 90 days.^↗ That’s a call, a meeting or a written reply to a question you asked. Opened emails, accepted connection requests and the champion’s account of a meeting don’t count.

A single contact can’t carry a decision that size. The average B2B buying decision involves 13 people.^↗ Multi-threading lifts win rates by 130% on average in deals over $50k.^↗

Now run the arithmetic on your own list, as an Illustrative count. Your 300 accounts need 1,200 seats, 300 for each of your 4 AEs.^↗ Each seat needs at least 1 two-way exchange every 90 days to stay engaged.^↗ Holding 300 seats takes about 23 of those exchanges a week per rep, before a single new seat is opened.^↗

So each rep does what the numbers allow. They pick the accounts they like and work 1 contact at each, which covers at most 1 of the 4 seats there, 25%.^↗ The rest of the list gets nothing. The team has to choose which accounts get the seats. The real question is who chooses, and by what rule.

Fewer accounts worked on 4 seats beat 300 single threads

We think a Tier 1 sized to your sellers, and worked across every required seat, will produce more pipeline than 300 single threads. Our reasons:

• Attention is the real budget. Rep hours and signal spend are both fixed. Spread across more accounts than the team can research and multi-thread, both get thinner.
• Multi-threading has to be planned. Reps default to the contact they’re comfortable with. Unless the plan says who talks to finance and security, and by when, nobody does.
• A single thread isn’t a qualified account. While the rest of the group is unknown or unreached, the deal hangs on a single person.
• A shorter list scores better. There’s less noise to average over, and with a short Tier 1 the team can see each week where the score was wrong.

We don’t think a single list size suits every team: it comes from your sellers and your deal size. Nor does multi-threading win the deal on its own. It makes sure the seats that decide have heard from you before they decide.

Tier the list as a team, sized to your sellers

Set the tiers in a single session with every AE, the sales leader and the list’s owner. Work from a score anyone in the room can check. Fit comes from your won and lost deals of the last 24 months.^↗ Signals count only as dated, company-level events with a source link.^↗ The tier is calculated from fields on the account, never typed in by its rep, and its definition has a single owner and a version.^↗

Then size the tiers to the sellers you have. Panelhop’s capacity check works with 5–15 Tier 1 accounts per AE, 20–60 in Tier 2 and 100–500 in Tier 3.^↗ For 4 AEs at $90k, we’d start at 10 each: 40 Tier 1 accounts and 160 seats.^↗ Tier 2 takes 25 per AE, 100 accounts, and Tier 3 the other 160.^↗ A Tier 2 account gets 2 seats named before the first touch, the champion and the budget owner; a Tier 3 account gets none until a signal moves it up.^↗

Favourites come to the session with their evidence. Each AE lists theirs with a dated signal or a seat engaged in the last 90 days.^↗ That evidence goes into the score like any other account’s, and a favourite without it is ranked on fit alone. Each Tier 1 account then gets a single owning AE. Whoever has a live relationship keeps the account, and the rest are shared out until every AE holds 10.^↗

After the session, no rep moves an account into Tier 1 alone. New evidence goes on the account’s record instead. A dated signal moves the account up the day it lands, and an engaged seat raises its score at the next re-tier.^↗ An AI pass may propose moves with reasons, but only the list owner approves them.^↗

Every Tier 1 seat gets an owner and a date

A multi-threading plan names who on your team engages each required seat, and by when, before the first touch.^↗ It’s the step today’s advice leaves out. Of the 2 AI answers and 3 cited pages we read for this question, all 5 tier accounts on fit and intent.^↗ None says who on the selling team engages each role.^↗

The AE shouldn’t hold every seat alone, because each seat needs someone who can answer its first question. The AE takes the champion and the budget owner. A solutions engineer takes IT or security, and the sales leader or the CEO takes finance.^↗ Each date follows the deal: the champion at the first meeting, IT or security at discovery, the budget owner and finance before the business case.^↗

Bringing decision makers in early pays. Across 655,000 opportunities, win rates rose by 55% when decision makers were actively involved in the first 2 stages of the sales process.^↗

Report the result as coverage: engaged seats ÷ required seats per account. Report it weekly for Tier 1 and monthly for Tier 2, in place of contacts reached or sequences sent.^↗ Several people from a single function still fill 1 seat.^↗ An account counts as qualified when at least 3 of its 4 seats are engaged, the budget owner or their direct report among them, and IT’s review has a date.^↗

Accounts move tiers on a set rhythm, by written rule

An account moves up the day a dated signal lands. Every other move waits for a set review and a reason the written rule names. A rep losing interest is never one of those reasons.

Every week, review Tier 1 in 30 minutes.^↗ For each account, look at its coverage, the next empty seat, that seat’s owner and its date. A missed date opens the next review with a new date and a reason.^↗ An account that has gone quiet keeps its tier and gets a new plan, such as a different door-opener or a different seat first.

Between reviews, a signal at a fit account moves it up a tier the day it lands, with the seat it opens first in the plan.^↗ Each AE can hold up to 2 accounts above their 10 for these.^↗ Beyond that, the list owner gives the account to an AE with room. Every quarter, re-score the whole list and refill Tier 1 to 10 per AE, highest score first.^↗ An account whose signals have faded returns to its fit tier.^↗ The written rule, in full:

The plan worked through for 300 accounts and 4 AEs

Take a fictional enterprise SaaS vendor selling $90k annual subscriptions against 300 named accounts.^↗ It has 4 AEs, 1 solutions engineer and a VP Sales, and every number here is Illustrative.^↗ In the 90 days before the session, its AEs touched 104 accounts, their favourites.^↗ They had a two-way exchange at 61 of them, each with 1 person: 61 of 1,200 required seats, about 5%, and no account with a second seat.^↗

At the session, 61 favourites brought an engaged seat as evidence and 23 a dated signal.^↗ Of the 104, 26 made Tier 1, 48 went to Tier 2 and 30 to Tier 3.^↗ The other 14 Tier 1 slots went to accounts nobody had touched, all strong fits with a dated signal.^↗ By AE, favourites filled 9, 4, 6 and 7 of the 10 slots.^↗

Tier 1 started with 22 of its 160 seats engaged, about 14%.^↗ The plan gave the AEs 80 seats, the champion and the budget owner at each account.^↗ The solutions engineer took 40 and the VP Sales 40, each seat with an engage-by date.^↗ Holding all 160 takes about 12 two-way exchanges a week across those 6 people.^↗

In week 5, a Tier 2 account announces a new VP for the department the product serves.^↗ It moves to Tier 1 that day as its AE’s 11th account, with that seat first in the plan.^↗

That’s the difference between multi-threaded outreach and booking single meetings. A meeting with another person from the champion’s team adds no seat. A first reply from finance at a Tier 1 account adds one.