The Three-Tier Test That Reveals Whether Your Team Is Aligned

Article at a Glance

What's the three-tier test?

It's a great way to find out if your team is truly aligned, not just aligned on paper. Take your full target account list and sort it into three buckets: must-win, nice-to-win, and not-a-focus-this-quarter. If sales and marketing can't agree on where an account belongs, that's the misalignment showing itself.

We already agree on our ICP. Isn't that the same thing as being aligned?

Not quite. Knowing your ideal customer profile tells you who you could sell to, but it doesn't tell you who you're prioritizing this quarter. That gap is where a lot of ABM campaigns go sideways. Two teams can describe the same ICP and still be pulling in different directions.

What does misalignment look like day-to-day?

Usually something like this: sales is spending time on accounts marketing isn't building anything for, and marketing is running campaigns for segments reps aren't even touching. Nobody did anything wrong. The direction just wasn't specific enough for both teams to land on the same interpretation.

Does this only work for accounts, or can I use it for other things too?

It works just as well for personas and segments. Run the same exercise (details below) on the people you're targeting and the segments you're considering instead of just the target account list itself.

Is this about narrowing our market for good?

No, just for right now. The point isn't to shrink who you could eventually sell to. It's about creating specific focus for the current quarter, so everyone's rowing in the same direction before the next round of outreach kicks off.

Once a team buys into alignment, the next question sounds simple: who are we focused on this quarter?

Teams tend to answer fast. "We're aligned on our ICP." Industries, company sizes, job titles, all agreed on. On paper, it looks settled.

Then the work starts. Sales spends time on accounts marketing isn't building for, and marketing builds campaigns for segments reps aren't touching. Everyone left that meeting feeling aligned, and somehow they're still not pointed at the same thing.

That's because knowing your ideal customer profile and agreeing on what to prioritize now aren't the same thing. "We're going after enterprise healthcare" sounds specific, until you ask which accounts matter most this quarter, or which segments are intentionally off the table.

So before your next ABM campaign kicks off, it's worth running this test to see if the alignment is real.

Why "We're Aligned on ICP" Isn't the Same as Being Aligned

An ideal customer profile answers one question: who could you sell to? Industries, company sizes, job titles—that's the profile of a good fit. It's useful, but it's also a much bigger net than what any single quarter's ABM campaign should chase.

Take that "we're going after enterprise healthcare” example from above. Said out loud in a meeting, it sounds like alignment. But it still leaves three questions wide open:

1. Which specific accounts matter most right now?
2. Which personas deserve the most attention?
3. Which segments are intentionally out of scope?

Two people can agree on the ICP and still answer those three questions differently, because the direction never got specific enough to force an answer.

That gap matters more than it seems. A precise ABM definition only works if the right account means the same thing to sales and marketing. Agreeing on a profile isn't the same as agreeing on a priority, and mixing the two up is one of the reasons alignment can fall apart once the work starts.

Where Misalignment Shows Up

This is where the gap stops being theoretical. Sales starts working a list of accounts they think matter, based on relationships, gut instinct, or whoever picked up the phone. Marketing builds a campaign around a slightly different list, based on firmographic fit or a segment that looked promising in the data. Both lists technically fall inside the same ideal customer profile, so neither team is wrong. They're just not working the same list.

The result is familiar to anyone who's sat through a pipeline review: sales asking why marketing isn't supporting the accounts they're actively working, and marketing pointing to a campaign built for accounts the reps never touched.

It’s the point where an otherwise solid ABM campaign starts underperforming, not because the strategy was wrong, but because sales and marketing were executing two different versions of it.

The Three-Tier Test

Here's how to find out whether the alignment is real. Take your full target account list and sort every account into one of three tiers: must-win, nice-to-win, or not-a-focus-this-quarter.

Do this exercise with both sales and marketing in the room, working independently at first, then comparing notes. Agreement on most accounts is a good sign, though disagreement is the more useful outcome, since it points directly to where assumptions have been filling in gaps that were never discussed.

That friction is the whole point of the exercise. It's one of the simplest ABM steps to run, and one of the few that surfaces misalignment before a campaign launches instead of three weeks into it. Time spent chatting about which tier an account belongs in is cheaper than finding out mid-quarter that sales and marketing weren’t working the same list.

Beyond Accounts: Testing Personas and Segments

The same exercise works outside of accounts as well. Run it on personas: sort the roles you're targeting into must-win, nice-to-win, and not-a-focus-this-quarter, and see if sales and marketing land in the same place. It's common to discover marketing has been chasing a persona sales barely engages with, or that reps have been prioritizing a title marketing hasn't created any content for.

Segments hold up to the same test too. If your ideal customer profile spans a few industries or verticals, tiering them the same way can reveal that one segment is getting most of the attention while another gets none, even though both were technically part of the plan.

Try not to worry about narrowing the market here. It’s really about creating specific focus for the current quarter that holds up once an ABM campaign launches instead of dissolving the moment execution starts.

True Alignment Holds Up Under the Test

Alignment on an ideal customer profile is a starting point, and the three-tier test is a fantastic way to find out for sure, before a quarter's worth of effort goes in two different directions. Run it before your next ABM campaign, not after.

Then, if you want help building the target account list this test runs on, grab our ABM Program Planning Template below!