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.
The Demand Compass is the instrument at the center of the book: a single, shared way to read every account in your market. A compass does not tell you where to go; it tells you where you are, so the right move becomes obvious. It reads each account on two axes. Brand awareness asks whether they know you and engage with your content and your point of view. Readiness to buy asks whether there is momentum inside the account right now: a budget freed up, a leader hired, a competitor failing them. The distinction that makes it a term is that awareness is developed and readiness is detected. You build the first slowly; you cannot build the second, only see it sooner.
The two axes make four quadrants, Cold, In-Market, Nurture and Sales-Ready, and an account's quadrant tells you its one move, not a menu. Northwind, a composite of the cyber deployments we have run, had 3,200 "engaged" contacts that sales would not touch. Scored against signals of movement inside the account, the Compass flagged 41 accounts as in-market that quarter. Sales worked the 41 by hand, nine became real opportunities, and three of those would not have been touched under the old list at all.
The Compass is not account-based marketing with an intent tool bolted on. ABM picks the list; the Compass reads the room. Intent data gives you one axis, readiness, and says nothing about whether the account has heard of you. Lead scoring blends people into a single number; the Compass scores accounts, on two axes, with an audit trail. It earns its keep when deals are considered, cycles are long and a committee is involved.
From The Demand Compass, by David Moreira and Marcos Stubrin. All terms · The book
