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The Demand Compass Glossary

34 terms, each defined in one sentence and explained on its own page. The vocabulary of the book, and the older words it replaces.

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The 95-5 rule: The 95-5 rule is the finding, from Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute in work published with the LinkedIn B2B Institute, that in a typical B2B category only about 5 percent of buyers are in the market at any one time, while the other 95 percent are not ready today.

A

Account-based marketing (ABM): Account-based marketing (ABM) is a B2B go-to-market approach in which marketing and sales agree on a named list of target accounts and coordinate personalized campaigns at those companies, rather than generating individual leads from a broad audience and qualifying them one at a time.
Activation: Activation is the Demand Compass motion that serves In-Market and Sales-Ready accounts: when the Signal Radar catches an aware account starting to react on either axis, the team moves fast, with the why-now attached, and converts it; it is the only motion that converts, and the one most teams skip.

B

Brand Awareness (the axis): Brand Awareness is the first axis of the Demand Compass, the one you develop over time, and it measures whether a specific account knows and trusts you, read as a behavioral footprint left by named companies rather than as an aggregate proxy such as impressions or branded search volume.
buying trigger: A buying trigger is a readiness signal that has become fresh and strong enough to act on, an event such as a funding round, a leadership change or a relevant role posted, caught on an account that fits, which opens a short readiness window and turns detection into a play.

C

The champion: The champion is the person inside a buying account who already wants you to win and sits every day in the rooms where the decision is actually made, so in a committee sale the highest-leverage move is often to arm that person rather than to have another conversation with the decision-maker.
Cold: Cold is the Demand Compass quadrant where an account has low brand awareness and low readiness to buy, meaning nothing is happening yet, so the one move is for marketing to build awareness, and to manufacture it when nothing is signaling, rather than to sell.
The Compass Question: The Compass Question is the one question the Demand Compass asks of every account in every pipeline review, "where is this account on the Compass, and what is the one move that fits?", and it replaces the old handoff question, "is this lead ready for a call?", which had one answer and one move.

D

the dark channel: The dark channel is the set of buyer behaviors that a form fill and a LinkedIn action were never built to see, the docs read twice, the pricing page hit five times, the repository starred, the question asked in a community, where the real evaluation happens for weeks before anyone raises a hand.
The Decay Rule: The Decay Rule is the principle in the Demand Compass that a signal is evidence with a half-life, so old evidence is not current intent: recent signals carry close to full weight, older ones fade on a curve until they are gone, and an account's position is always a reading of right now.
demand capture: Demand capture is the half of the Demand Compass system that finds demand which already exists and acts on it: the Signal Radar detects an account reacting on either axis, the engine scores it and places it on the Market Map, and Activation converts it inside the window before the shortlist closes.
The Demand Compass: The Demand Compass is a model that reads every account in a B2B market on two independent axes, brand awareness, which you build over time, and readiness to buy, which you can only detect, and places each account in one of four quadrants, each of which comes with one owner and one next move.
demand creation: Demand creation is the half of the Demand Compass system made of Outbound, Inbound and Nurture, the three motions that develop brand awareness and move accounts from never-heard-of-you toward knows-and-trusts-you, so that signal appears at all; without it, demand capture has nothing to catch.

E

enrichment waterfall: The enrichment waterfall is the fixed-order process that resolves a signal fragment to a named person and account, working from the strongest identifier to the weakest and across data providers cheapest first and expensive credits last, with a merge log and a quarantine so that every match is auditable.

I

In-Market: In-Market is the Demand Compass quadrant where an account has low brand awareness and high readiness to buy, meaning something is happening inside it but they have never heard of you, so the one move is sharp, signal-informed outreach from an SDR, fast, because the window closes.
Inbound (the motion): Inbound is the Demand Compass motion that attracts accounts and pulls them in through content and a real point of view; it builds the brand awareness axis, runs underneath every quadrant rather than owning one, fills the Market Map with accounts you can then read, and does not convert on its own.
intelligence layer: The intelligence layer is the shared, account-level store of the Demand Compass system that every sensor reports into and every motion reads from, holding the resolved signals, the scores and the merge log for each account; it is the one component of the stack a company never outsources.
Intent data: Intent data is information showing a prospect's likelihood to buy, inferred from behavior such as pricing-page visits or whitepaper downloads, and typically supplied by an intent tool that watches one slice of that activity and flags the accounts that appear to be researching your category.

L

Lead scoring: Lead scoring is the practice of assigning points to individual leads according to their likelihood to convert, so that an email open might be worth 5 and a demo attended worth 20, with the running total deciding when marketing hands the lead to sales.

M

Market Map: The Market Map is the live, account-level board of the Demand Compass: the two axes run across a company's whole market continuously, so that every account sits in a quadrant with the one move it needs, and sales and marketing orient around one picture instead of arguing across two.
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL): A Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is a contact that marketing has judged ready to hand to sales, usually because a lead score built from engagement, such as email opens, content downloads or pricing-page visits, has crossed a threshold the two teams agreed on in advance.
Mental availability: Mental availability is the standing recognition a brand holds in a buyer's mental map of a category, built over time so that when an account finally enters the market it already knows and trusts you, rather than meeting you as a stranger it has to discover.
The MQL Collapse: The MQL Collapse is the mistake hiding inside the marketing-qualified lead: four different realities, account fit, contact relevance, engagement and buying readiness, forced into one score and handed to sales as if they were the same thing, with brand awareness and buying readiness treated as a single axis.

N

Nurture: Nurture is the Demand Compass quadrant where an account has high brand awareness and low readiness to buy, meaning they like your point of view but there is no trigger yet, so the one move is for marketing to stay visible and useful and wait, never to push sales.

O

Outbound (the motion): Outbound is the Demand Compass motion that reaches Cold accounts, the ones with low awareness and low readiness, and makes them aware; it is run as a system of impressions that moves an account one step toward Nurture, and it does not convert, because a forced close burns the names it touches.

R

Readiness to Buy (the axis): Readiness to Buy is the second axis of the Demand Compass, the one you cannot build and can only detect, and it measures whether there is momentum inside an account right now, a budget freed up, a leader hired, a competitor failing them, that makes the problem you solve urgent today.

S

Sales-Ready: Sales-Ready is the Demand Compass quadrant where an account has high brand awareness and high readiness to buy, the only quadrant where sales should move fast, so the one move is rapid, precise, human follow-up by an AE with full context, not nurturing and not education.
signal: A signal is a dated piece of evidence that an account did something on one of the two Demand Compass axes: an awareness signal shows the account knows you, a readiness signal shows the account is in motion now, and every signal is evidence with a half-life, so it decays instead of counting forever.
Signal Radar: The Signal Radar is the instrument of the Demand Compass that reads every account's activity across both axes, the awareness signals and the readiness signals that never become a form fill, and feeds what it catches into the Market Map, so that "who is in the market this week" becomes a standing answer instead of a guess.
Signal void: A signal void is the third and most expensive form of the single point of failure in a demand engine: buying signals fire constantly across a market, funding rounds, new leaders, stack changes, revealing job posts, website visits, and nobody reads them systematically, so opportunities arrive late or never.
The Signal-Signature Gap: The Signal-Signature Gap is the pattern in considered B2B deals where the person who emits the buying signal, the engineer reading your docs or testing the free tier, is rarely the person who signs, so a funnel that waits for the decision-maker to raise a hand waits for something that never happens.
Single point of failure: A single point of failure is any core function of a demand engine that runs only while a specific person is actively working it, so that when that person is out, leaves, or has a bad month, pipeline slows or stops, and hiring a backup only moves the dependency to someone else.

T

TAM coverage: TAM coverage is the share of a company's total addressable market that its demand engine actually touches, mapped as named accounts with signals attached, as opposed to the fraction a team reaches when lists are pulled by hand and the rest of the market is never mapped at all.
Transitive trust: Transitive trust is the trust an account extends to you because it already trusts something in your orbit, a peer who mentioned you, a community you both belong to, or a founder whose posts it reads every week, as opposed to direct trust, where the account knows you and has decided for itself that you are credible.

The terms come from The Demand Compass, by the two founders of automate rev.ops. Read what the Demand Compass is first, or the whole book.