Welcome back to ‘Tactical Tips’ by Jerel and Shuo at DECODE, the largest founder community co-hosted across Berkeley and Stanford. We've updated our rhythm to bring you higher-signal content.
Moving forward, we’ll be landing in your inbox twice a month, alternating between one of our founders’ top questions on how to build, sell and operate 10x better, and trends on what’s new and next in startups and tech to keep you ahead of the curve.
Today, we’ll be answering the question, “How to build your target account list?” and covering insights around shadowing best reps, running post mortems, and identifying traits and signals.
So, here is advice inspired by Brian Aoyama, VP Growth & Applied AI, and Mallory Blocker, Growth Marketing Lead, at MedScout
And ... we’ve curated a YouTube playlist featuring our best founders, operators and investors.
🔥 Inside this issue:
✅ 3 tactics to build your target account list
✅ 2 traps to avoid
✅ 1 tool to leverage
👇Let’s dive in.
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3 tactics to build target account list
👀 Shadow your best sales rep(s) and document what you see
Build a target ICP account list that goes beyond ZoomInfo exports and firmographic filters; the criteria that actually determine fit usually live in the heads of your best reps
Capture your best reps’ judgment so you can train, scale, and qualify accounts with AI
Bring the team together, pull a random selection of accounts from your CRM, and have your top rep share their screen. Hit record and ask them to evaluate the accounts in real-time
Don’t just listen to what they say. Watch what tabs they open, notice where they click and linger, and pay attention to what makes them say “this is interesting” versus “this one’s not for us.” Write up what you observe, then ask your reps “what did we miss?”
Create a documented draft of how your best person evaluates accounts, captured from real behavior
📝 Run a “post-mortem” on your best and worst customers
Pull at least three of your best-fit customers and worst-fit or churned customers each.
For each one, ask:
What made this a good or bad fit?
What did we know, or could have known, before the deal closed?
Was it budget constraints?
Decision-making process?
Risk tolerance?
Run this in rounds: pair one good fit with one bad fit, extract the differences, and repeat
Each round sharpens the lens, revealing real patterns from actual customer history, not assumptions about who should be a fit
✍️ Turn patterns into traits, and traits into signals
Look for underlying traits beneath the surface patterns that tells you why an account succeeds or fails with your product
E.g. Don’t stop at “they were a small company”
“Small company” is a data point; “low risk appetite in a category they see as non-core” is a trait
For each trait, define concrete signals that indicate the trait is present.
Then, map each signal to when and how you can find it. Answer:
Outside-In: Can we find this via research (LinkedIn, news, job boards) before a conversation?
Inside-Out: Does this only surface during the sales process or conversation?
Outside-in signals dictate your list-building logic, while inside-out signals dictate your qualification questions
Map these signals to your workflow and build your evaluation rubric (a structured document a new rep could follow, or that AI could use to research and pre-qualify accounts at scale)
2 traps to avoid
🚨 Turning evaluation rubric into a checkbox scorecard
Avoid yes/no checklist design that flattens nuance
Focus on documented reasoning behind each signal and what it indicates
Weak rubrics score answers; strong rubrics explain why signals matter and how judgments are made
🚨 Treating the first-pass rubric as the final output
First shadowing of reps + best/worst customer analysis will feel incomplete, and is expected; the goal is for iteration, not perfection on round one
Avoid locking a “definitive” rubric in a single session
Early version should set direction, not serve as final evaluation framework
1 tool to leverage
📖 Best practice on product onboarding
A finished rubric has 4-6 traits, each with 2-3 signals
For each signal, identify what it is, why it matters to your business, what good looks like versus what’s concerning, and where to find it
Ensure it is specific enough that two different people reviewing the same account would reach the same conclusion
The simple rule is: Could a new rep use this rubric to evaluate an account the way your best rep would? If yes, you’re done. If not, keep iterating
Leverage this skill to produce a rubric for account qualification tailored to your business
Bonus: 1 trend to spark startup ideas
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