They don't know you and they aren't buying. The starting state. Build awareness; do not force a meeting.
Cold is one of the four quadrants of the Demand Compass: low awareness and low readiness. The account does not know you and is not buying. It is the starting state for most of your market.
It stops teams from blasting cold accounts with forced-close outreach that burns names. A cold account is not a failed lead; it is an account whose awareness you have not built yet.
Marketing owns it. Run it like advertising: build awareness at the account with ads, outbound-as-impressions, and content. When the radar is empty, you manufacture demand on purpose rather than wait for intent that was never created.
Use Cold for the large majority of your qualified market that shows neither recognition nor buying behavior. The job is to move them toward Nurture, not to book a meeting.
A perfect-fit account that has never engaged with you and shows no buying signals is Cold. You run awareness against it and watch the radar, you do not send it to an SDR to close.
Cold sits below Nurture (same low readiness, higher awareness) and left of In-Market (same low awareness, higher readiness). Build the awareness axis to move accounts out of Cold.
From The Demand Compass: The Signal-Based GTM Framework for B2B Marketing Leaders in Complex Sales, by David Moreira and Marcos Stubrin (automate rev.ops.).
ISBN 979-8-9969092-1-6 (paperback). Get the book →