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.
The Compass Question is the sentence the book asks you to carry into every pipeline review: where is this account on the Compass, and what is the one move that fits? It is one of the four named laws in the appendix, and it does more work than its length suggests. The old question, "is this lead ready for a call?", has a yes or no answer and one move behind it, a call. The Compass Question has four answers, and each quadrant comes with its own move and owner: build awareness (marketing), sharp signal-informed outreach (the SDR), stay useful and do not push (marketing), or rapid, precise, human follow-up (the AE). The day a team asks it instead of the old question, the whole motion changes.
The value of the question is that it names position failures as position failures. The three people who open the book, the CMO whose team spammed people who weren't ready, the VP whose reps rejected "qualified" leads, and the marketing director who did not know who she was allowed to target, were not failing at messaging or effort. The motion was fine, aimed wrong, and none of them had a shared way to say where an account stood or whose move it was.
The question is also the Monday exercise the chapter ends on. Take your top twenty accounts, put each in a quadrant using whatever you know today, even gut, and write the single move next to each. If placing twenty accounts by hand already changes what you would do with half of them, that is the question working. Asked continuously across the whole market, with decay keeping it honest, it becomes the Market Map.
From The Demand Compass, by David Moreira and Marcos Stubrin. All terms · The book
