Not all opportunities are created equal

"Focus on your best accounts" is the most useless sentence in sales, and it survives because it's unfalsifiable. Best by what? Biggest? Warmest? Closest to renewal? Most likely to answer today?

Every one of those gives you a different list, and the gap between them is where your week goes.

So here is the scoring I actually use, after fifteen years of doing this by hand across nine or ten companies. It isn't sophisticated. That's rather the point — it has to be simple enough that you can disagree with it out loud.

Three inputs, and the third is the one people miss

What they're worth. Not what they paid — what they'd be worth if this went well. A customer at €500 a month who runs four other companies is not a €500 opportunity. Nor is a one-off €20,000 project from someone leaving the industry.

How warm it still is. Warmth decays, and it decays from the last two-way exchange, not the last thing you sent. A newsletter is not warmth. If your last real conversation with someone was March, you are in March with them regardless of what your automation has been doing since.

Whether something changed. This is the one that gets skipped, and it's the one that decides whether a message gets a reply. Nothing you do makes a good moment. You find them. A champion changed jobs. A renewal is ninety days out. A company raised, or hired a first salesperson, or shipped the thing they told you about eighteen months ago.

Worth and warmth tell you who. Only the third tells you now — and "why now" is the difference between a note that gets answered and a note that gets forgiven.

Why decay is not what you think

The instinct is that colder is worse. It isn't, up to a point.

Someone you spoke to last week needs nothing from you. Someone you spoke to two years ago has probably forgotten the specifics of why they liked you. In between — somewhere around six to fourteen months — sits the person who remembers you clearly, whose situation has genuinely moved on, and who has no current reason to be annoyed that you're writing.

I've watched this hold across enough companies that I now look for the middle of the list rather than the top. The freshest names are almost never the answer, and the ones everyone's list surfaces first are the ones everyone is already contacting.

Six piles, not one list

The other half of the problem is that a single ranked list quietly assumes every opportunity is the same kind of thing. They aren't, and mixing them is how the cheapest revenue in the business loses to the most exciting.

• Renewal — money you already have, that leaves if nobody notices
• Expansion — an account that could be twice the size and has never been asked
• Win-back — bought once, went quiet, still likes you
• Nurture — real interest, wrong timing, no reason to write yet
• New business — no history, earned by research
• Advocacy — people who've sent you business and were never thanked

Sort them separately or the loudest pile wins. New business is the most interesting to work and almost always the worst use of a Tuesday; a renewal at risk should never sit below a cold prospect just because the prospect's company is more fun to look up.

The one that costs people the most is advocacy. It's the shortest conversation in the business, it has the highest hit rate of anything on the list, and virtually nobody runs it, because asking feels like a favour rather than work.

The thing scoring actually buys you

Not accuracy. The score is a guess with arithmetic on it.

What it buys is a starting point you can argue with. The reason a sales hour fails is almost never that you picked the wrong account — it's that picking at all costs more than you have, so you pick nothing and answer email instead.

A ranked list with reasons attached collapses that. You read the top item, you disagree with two of the five, you work three of them. Twenty minutes of deciding becomes two minutes of correcting, and correcting is cheap in a way that deciding is not.

And the disagreement is the valuable part. Every time you overrule the order, you've made your own judgment explicit — which is the only way anyone has ever got better at this.

Try it on ten

Take ten people you've done business with. Score each one out of five for worth, warmth and whether something has changed. Add them up. Sort.

Then look at your actual plan for the week.

If the two lists match, you don't need any of this. Mine has never matched — not once in fifteen years, and not last month either.

Next week: why you already know all of this, and still won't do it on Thursday afternoon.

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The Sales Harness — one better move, every Tuesday.