The Demand Compass replaces the single lead score with two axes and four account types, each with one owner and one play. Here is the whole framework, end to end.
Picture last quarter’s best MQL. An engineer at one of your target accounts downloaded the whitepaper, attended the webinar, and clicked through three nurture emails. The model added it up: 95 points, threshold crossed, routed to sales. An AE called twice and emailed four times. Nothing. The engineer was researching for a side project.
The same week, a VP of Engineering at another target account posted a job opening describing the exact problem you solve, and two people from that company hit your pricing page after a funding announcement. Combined score: 15. Nobody called. Six weeks later they bought from a competitor.
Both misses have the same root cause. The MQL tries to answer one question, “is this lead qualified,” when the situation is actually asking four.
A lead score collapses at least four independent things into a single number:
Four different questions, one number. Once compressed, high engagement is indistinguishable from high intent.
These variables move independently, so the compression destroys the signal. Our curious engineer had high engagement and zero readiness. The hiring account had high readiness and zero engagement. Averaged into one number, the first looks hot and the second looks dead, which is exactly backwards.
The second failure is the unit of measurement. In a complex B2B sale, the person creating the signal is usually not the person signing the deal. An engineer researches, a practitioner consumes the content, a director attends the event, and an executive signs. Score individuals and you will route the researcher while the account quietly moves without you.
The Demand Compass drops the score and asks two separate questions, at the account level:
Brand Awareness: does this account know you? The evidence is engagement with your content and events, replies to your outreach, visits to your site, conversations with your team. This is the axis marketing can directly build.
Readiness to Buy: is there evidence this account is moving toward a purchase, with or without you? The evidence is hiring for the problem you solve, a new executive in the buying seat, a funding round, active research, changes in their stack. None of it requires them to have ever heard of you.
They have to stay separate because you control them differently. You can build awareness. You cannot force readiness; you can only detect it when it appears. Fold them into one number and you lose the only distinction that tells you what to do next.
One more rule: every placement carries receipts. An account sits where it sits because of specific, citable evidence, the actual job post or the actual thread, not because a model said 72.
Two axes, four account types. Every account in your TAM is somewhere on this map right now.
Cross the two axes and every account lands in exactly one quadrant. Each quadrant gets one owner and one play. Not a menu of options: one owner, one play. When a quadrant belongs to marketing and sales at the same time, it belongs to nobody, and accounts sit there while each team assumes the other is on it.
High awareness · low readiness
High awareness · high readiness
Low awareness · low readiness
Low awareness · high readiness
You don’t need software to start. Pull last quarter’s MQLs and your target-account list into a spreadsheet and ask the two questions for each account: do we have evidence they know us, and do we have evidence they are moving toward a purchase? Write the actual evidence next to each answer. If you can’t cite it, the answer is no.
Sort the accounts into four tabs, give each tab the one owner and one play above, and then look hard at the In-Market tab. Those are the accounts your scoring model has been quietly ignoring, and they are usually the fastest pipeline you will build this quarter.
This is the core of The Demand Compass. The book goes deeper into applying it across your GTM motion: the signals that feed each axis, how accounts move between quadrants, and how to wire the owners and plays into your CRM. Explore the framework reference, or get the book →