Sample frameDay 213·Sales · Coverage

Morning. An hour of your best salesperson's attention is the dearest thing your business buys.

Sales.

The Coverage Ladder

5 min read·Apply by lunch

The question

You could tell me, near enough, what an hour of the work you sell costs you to deliver — you'd never quote a job without it — so why haven't you ever put the same number on an hour of your best salesperson's attention, or asked which accounts spent it last quarter?

The idea

Andris Zoltners spent his career in two places at once: teaching marketing at Northwestern's Kellogg School, and co-founding ZS Associates, a firm that has done little else for decades but design sales forces for large companies. Sales Force Design for Strategic Advantage (2004), written with Prabhakant Sinha and Sally Lorimer, sets the discipline down, and its first move is the one most businesses skip. Before you argue about headcount, or draw territories on a map, you decide what kind of selling each account gets at all — and the options sit on a ladder with a price on every rung. A named person visiting in the field is the dearest contact you can buy. An inside seller costs a fraction of it. A partner shifts the cost onto somebody else's payroll and takes a margin for the trouble. A well-built page costs almost nothing per visit and never gets tired. Nearly every company is already running all four rungs. Almost none can tell you what a contact costs on each, which means the allocation was never really a decision — it's a residue: who got hired, who inherited which list, and which accounts happen to be pleasant to visit.

The framework

01
Four rungs, and a price on every one of them.
Work out roughly what an hour of field selling costs you fully loaded — salary, on-costs, the car, the travel, the share of management time it consumes. Then do the same for an hour of inside selling, for a partner-led deal after the margin you hand over, and for a self-serve purchase, which is mostly the amortised cost of the page. Rough is fine; you're after the ratios, not the decimals. The gap tends to startle people, because the top and bottom rungs usually sit an order of magnitude apart and nobody has ever put them on one sheet of paper.
02
Coverage follows potential, not last year's invoice.
The rung an account gets should track what it could be worth over a realistic horizon — its whole spend in your category, not its spend with you — weighed against how likely you are to win that share. Those are the two axes the book runs coverage decisions on: account opportunity on one, your competitive position on the other. What matters here is the failure it exposes: sorting accounts by last year's revenue simply hands you back the allocation you already have, and the expensive quadrant is the one where the potential is high and your share isn't.
03
An upgrade somewhere is a downgrade somewhere else.
Coverage is zero-sum, and the second half of the decision is the half nobody says out loud. Name it: these twelve accounts move from a quarterly visit to an inside call, these forty move to email and the website, and here is who tells them and when. It'll feel like abandonment, and once or twice it will be. But an account absorbing expensive attention it doesn't reward isn't being served — it's being subsidised by the accounts that would have grown if anyone had gone near them.
04
Publish the rule, then let it survive contact with your reps.
A coverage decision that lives in one person's head gets renegotiated deal by deal, always upward, because every rep can argue their account is special and most of them believe it. So write it down: the rungs, what each one gets, and the potential threshold that moves an account between them. Review it on a fixed date rather than on request, so a reallocation becomes an event with evidence behind it instead of a favour granted to whoever asked loudest. Zoltners and his co-authors treat this as design work, and design that isn't written down isn't design — it's preference.

Members only · 4 principles + template + AI mentor

364 more frameworks are waiting.

The Coverage Ladder is Day 1 of 365. One framework every morning for a year — across strategy, sales, negotiation, leadership, and more.

$1 /day

Billed $365/yr · cancel any time

365 frameworks

12 topics · templates · AI mentor

Reserve your place — $365/yr →

One payment a year · the whole library · no auto-renewal.

More Sales frameworks

All 24 sales frameworks →