How Stage 1 ranks accounts on the Board

The Board answers one question every morning. Which of your accounts has the most fresh reason to talk right now? Everything about how Stage 1 ranks is built around that.

It's not a lead score. It doesn't care how big a company is or how many people visited your website. It cares about what's happening inside the account this month, and whether that's the kind of thing that makes a services buyer pick up the phone.

It starts with ten signals

Stage 1 watches your target accounts for the ten buying signals that matter in a services sale. Strongest first, they are an RFP or vendor search, a new leader in the buying seat, business pressure, hiring for the problem you solve, engagement with you, engagement with a competitor, funding and deals, tech stack, topic and influencer engagement.

The order matters. An RFP means someone has budget and a deadline. A new CIO in the first 90 days means someone with authority is deciding what to change. Those carry more weight than a director liking a post about cloud costs.

Stage 1 finds these in LinkedIn posts, jobs, new seats, champion moves and reactions, plus SEC filings, news, public tenders on SAM.gov and events. The buying signals guide explains each one.

Signals roll up to the account

A signal on its own is a hint. Several at once is a pattern.

So Stage 1 doesn't rank people or events. It ranks accounts. Every signal it finds attaches to the account it belongs to, and the account's score is the stack of what's there.

Say a mid-size insurer names a new CIO. A week later, its 10-Q mentions a legacy policy system as a cost concern. Then it posts four roles for cloud engineers. Any one of those is worth a look. All three in the same few weeks moves the account to the top of your Board, and it should.

That's the most useful thing the Board does. It shows you where signals are stacking, which is very hard to spot when you're reading one source at a time.

Signals fade with age

A new leader is a strong signal in week two. In month eight, they've made their decisions and picked their vendors.

So every signal loses weight over time. By default, Stage 1 halves a signal's weight every 14 days. That's a starting assumption, not a law, and you can tune it. Some firms sell into markets where things move slowly and want a longer half-life. Others want only the freshest activity at the top.

The effect is that the Board stays current. An account that lit up last spring and went quiet slides down. An account where something happened this week climbs. You don't have to clean anything up by hand.

Fit comes first

The Board only ranks accounts that fit your firm. When you set up Stage 1, the Brain learns how your firm sells from your website and your documents, and your first Board is built from accounts that match. Signals then rank those accounts against each other.

That keeps the Board honest. A huge signal at a company you'd never win doesn't push a good-fit account off the top.

What you do with it

Open the Board, start at the top and click into an account. You'll see the signals that put it there, with sources, and the 3x3 research behind them. From there, Stage 1 checks for a warm path through your own LinkedIn connections and drafts a Hypothesis Opening for the economic buyer, the champion and the technical lead.

You read every draft and approve what goes out. The Board tells you where to look. You decide what to say.

Why rank at all

A services seller has more accounts than hours. Without a ranking, people work the accounts they like, or the ones they touched last, or whoever answered the last email. The Board replaces that with a simple, visible reason to call.

That's the whole point. Spend your best hours on the accounts with the most going on, and let the rest wait until something changes. More on why this matters in introducing Stage 1.

Stage 1 starts with a 14-day free trial, no credit card. See the plans on the pricing page or start your trial.