Here's an uncomfortable truth most CROs won't say out loud: roughly two-thirds of the accounts in your reps' territories will never become customers. Not because your reps aren't skilled. Not because your product isn't valuable. Simply because those accounts were never viable targets in the first place.
This isn't pessimism. It's pattern recognition based on analyzing thousands of accounts across dozens of B2B organizations. And once you accept it, everything about how you run your revenue organization starts to change.
When Armis (recently acquired by ServiceNow) analyzed their 15,000-account universe with us, we found something striking: only about 5,000 accounts showed genuine potential to buy their solution. Another 5,000 might be relevant under specific circumstances. And roughly 5,000 would never convert regardless of sales effort.
The validation? Their RevOps team confirmed that 90% of their historical revenue came from the accounts we identified as high-potential. The pattern held.
This isn't unique to Armis. Across our customer base, we consistently see that between 60-70% of assigned accounts aren’t actually facing the problems your solution solves — or aren’t at a stage where they’d invest in solving them, or are structurally unable to adopt your solution.
If you're a CRO, your first reaction might be concern. Two-thirds of accounts are dead ends? But flip the frame: you've been deploying your most expensive resource—quota-carrying reps—against targets that couldn't convert regardless of effort.
This explains a lot of what frustrates revenue leaders: Why some reps consistently outperform despite running identical playbooks as their peers. Why certain territories wildly exceed plan while others chronically miss. Why your top performers seem to have an intuition that's hard to replicate.
That intuition? It's pattern recognition. Your best reps have learned—consciously or unconsciously—to identify which accounts are actively experiencing the problems you solve and are positioned to act. They spend their limited selling hours on accounts that can buy.
Traditional territory assignment relies on firmographics: company size, industry, geography. But these surface-level attributes tell you almost nothing about whether a specific account is predisposed to buy your solution.
Two companies in the same industry, of similar size, in the same region can have completely different propensities to purchase. One might be actively dealing with the exact problem you solve, led by someone who's made similar buying decisions before, and structurally positioned to move quickly. The other might have none of those attributes.
Yet in most territories, both accounts get equal treatment. And reps are left to figure out—through trial and error—which ones are worth their time.
Once you acknowledge that two-thirds of accounts won't convert, several things become possible:
First, you can stop measuring activity volume as a proxy for effort. If a third of accounts are genuinely viable, then a rep working 80 accounts deeply may be more productive than one touching 300 superficially.
Second, you can reallocate territory more intelligently. Instead of giving each rep a similar quantity of accounts, you can ensure each rep has access to a similar quality of opportunity. Your top performers no longer have to luck into good territories.
Third, you can have honest conversations with your board. If your addressable market is actually one-third the size you've been modeling, your growth assumptions change. But so does your confidence in hitting the targets you do set.
The companies winning in today's market aren't the ones with the most reps or the highest email volumes. They're the ones who've figured out how to identify their viable accounts and focus their resources there.
This requires moving beyond firmographic ICP definitions to understanding why your company specifically wins certain accounts. What problems were those customers facing? What triggered their decision to buy? What attributes made them ready to act? When you understand the why behind your wins, you can find more accoutns that match that pattern.
Two-thirds of your accounts won't buy. That's not a failure—it's simply the nature of B2B sales. The question is whether you'll continue deploying resources against all of them equally, or whether you'll focus on the third that actually can.
Revic AI helps revenue teams identify their highest-potential accounts and understand exactly why each one is worth pursuing. To learn how we can help your team focus on the accounts that matter, visit revic.ai.
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