The headline number shows what a report values.
You have read activity reports before. Most open with the largest number available, which is usually the count of organizations contacted. The suggestion is that more contact means more progress.
In a market of sophisticated buyers, that number measures something else. Your buyers are few, they will be approached again and every approach carries your reputation. A large count of approaches records how much of that reputation was spent, and says nothing about what was gained. A coverage report is built the other way. It has four counts, each smaller than the last, and the smallest is the one your team acts on.
Four counts, and each answers a different question.
We build and track your pipeline of qualified opportunities, and report coverage at four of the seven steps of our architecture: assessment, intelligence, distribution and performance.
Each answers a different question: how wide we looked, who has a reason to act now, who was approached in your name, and who is worth your team’s time. Read together, the four answers describe one market being narrowed against your criteria.
The steps between the counts produce no count of their own. They are where the tests are applied: the target profile written with you, the market-access plan built on it and the qualification that holds every response to it.
For each count, ask what an account had to show to reach it. A sound report can answer from criteria written before the mandate began, and those criteria do not change after the fact.
On one representative mandate the four counts were as follows, with about one in four accounts moving forward at each stage. They describe work already done. Volumes differ with the market and the target profile, so they are a record and not a forecast.
- 1,247 assessed: the accounts considered against the mandate.
- 342 mapped: the accounts our market intelligence identified as in market.
- 87 engaged: the accounts our team took the proposition to, under the client’s standards.
- 23 qualified: the opportunities that passed on fit, readiness and next step.
Narrowing is the point, and a large engaged count is not.
It is tempting to read the fall from one count to the next as loss. It is the opposite. Each stage applies a further test, and an account that fails one is a conversation your team never has to sit through.
The engaged count deserves the closest reading, because it records where your proposition was taken to market in your name. We keep distribution targeted, never at volume. Every contact must meet the in-scope criteria of your target profile before any approach is made.
So a large engaged count is not a sign of ambition. In a small market it is a cost, paid in your standing with the decision-makers you need. In a sound report the breadth sits in the first count and the restraint in the third.
Each count has one thing worth checking.
The same four things can be asked of any coverage report, ours included, every quarter, and one quarter read against the last shows more than any single figure. Do not turn the counts into a target: the 23 qualified opportunities are the record of one mandate, and a target invites exactly the loosening the report exists to expose. Stage by stage, this is what to look for.
- Assessed: breadth, including markets your current channels cannot reach.
- Mapped: the commercial situation behind each account, its reason to act now.
- Engaged: restraint, with every account inside your target profile and approached under your standards.
- Qualified: a defined next step beside each opportunity, such as a meeting or an intro call.
The counts sit beside the opportunities themselves.
Counts summarize, but they do not tell your team what to do next. For that, the report carries each qualified opportunity and each warm introduction as it moves.
On a representative view from one mandate, five qualified opportunities were active at once. Each was listed with the steps of the architecture it had passed through and its next step. For a PE-backed roll-up seeking add-on targets, the next step was an introduction to the deal team. For a family office in market for healthcare deals, it was a co-GP conversation. A strategic acquirer evaluating platform deals had a meeting scheduled.
Not every opportunity moves through the same steps, or at the same pace. On the same view, a growth equity fund expanding its sector coverage was still at initial qualification. Warm introductions are reported in the same way: who each is from, who it is to, and whether it is in progress, confirmed or scheduled.
The two views also check each other. A qualified count that rose while the lines beside it showed no defined next step would be counting something else. The counts tell you the mandate is working; the line beside each opportunity tells you which conversation to prepare for.
