The Love Test: Your Reps Are Reactive to Love, Not Showing It

Forwarded to you? I am Heath. I build go-to-market systems and put AI to work in sales, the right way, then I write down exactly what I built, what broke, and what it moved. One story per week, receipts only. This one is about the accounts your reps are ignoring because those accounts have not written back yet.

The reflex: pour effort into whoever answers

Every rep reaches for the same move without noticing. Interest is right there. The inbound lead that replied, the champion who picks up, the account that booked the demo. So you spend your day on the people who already like you, and you tell yourself that is prioritization.

I ran an analysis on my own team that I called the love test. The question was simple. Were reps earning attention through multi-step prospecting, or just reacting to whoever already showed it? The answer was uncomfortable. Reps averaged about two touchpoints per account and over-indexed on inbound, neglecting every other channel. Effort was following responsiveness, not opportunity. They were reactive to love, not showing it.

The block was never effort. These were hard-working reps. It was that effort had no motion behind it. A reply came in, they worked it. No reply, the account sat. And the deals they did work leaned on one contact, the one who answered first, so the whole thing rested on a single relationship that could evaporate on any Monday.

The AE feels this as "my champion loves us, the deal is fine." The CSM feels it as "my main contact is happy, the renewal is safe." The marketer feels it as "this segment engages, so pour the budget there." Same reflex every time: reward the interest you already have, ignore the interest you would have to build.

The reframe: thread the deal, not the champion

A responsive contact is not a de-risked deal. It is a coin flip you have not counted yet. The move is not to work your repliers harder. It is to run a motion that earns attention before the account gives it, and to spread that attention across every altitude of the buying committee so no single contact carries the deal alone.

A deal carried by one person who likes you is not de-risked by how much that person likes you. It is one resignation away from dead.

Same move, other seats. A CSM reads "my main contact is happy" and threads it: who else uses this, who signs the renewal, is the economic buyer even in the room. A marketer reads "this segment engages" and threads it: which other personas in the account never hear from us, which channel we have never tried. The contact who answers first is never the whole deal. The committee underneath is.

How the best teams frame it

I am not the first person to argue that one thread is a liability. The operators who have studied this at scale mostly agree on where the risk lives, and it is not in how much your champion likes you. It is in how many people the deal actually touches.

SOURCE

Gong, "Data shows top reps don't just sell, they orchestrate with AI"

What it argues. Across 1.8 million opportunities, Gong found that multi-threading lifts win rates by 130% on large deals, and that deals which close carry about twice as many buyer contacts as deals that do not. The pattern is not a style preference. It is the single clearest separator between won and lost.

My take. Agree, and this is exactly what the love test surfaced. My reps were not losing on product or price. They were losing on coverage, one contact deep in deals that needed the whole committee.

SOURCE

UserGems, "Sales multi-threading: a practical guide to win more deals"

What it argues. A single-threaded opportunity wins about 5% of the time. Add engaged stakeholders and the odds climb fast, to roughly 30% at five, a 6x swing. The guide treats multi-threading as a repeatable motion you build into the deal, not a heroic scramble once the deal is already stalling.

Extend. The motion is the whole point. If you wait until the deal wobbles to go find the committee, you are enriching under pressure. Thread from the first touch, before you need to.

SOURCE

Highspot, "Multi-threading in sales: the B2B selling framework"

What it argues. Multi-threading is not "email more people." It is mapping the buying committee by role and altitude, personal, team, and org, then engaging each with the message that matches what they own. Coverage without a per-stakeholder reason is just spam with more recipients.

My take. Agree hard. The reason a naive multi-thread fails is the same reason my first push failed. More touches to the wrong people is not a motion. You have to ladder each altitude to the person who owns it.

Even a curator has to concede when the field agrees: nobody who has actually studied this thinks a happy champion is a safe deal. Coverage across the committee is the moat.

The method: Solve, Stack, Split

SOLVE THE CRUX

What is the real problem, framed as work and not a headcount?

The problem is not "reps need to try harder." It is "effort follows responsiveness instead of opportunity." So the first work is measurement, then motion: count the touches and channels per account, count the stakeholders per deal, and name the gap. For the AE that gap is threads per open deal, for the CSM it is stakeholders per renewal, for the marketer it is personas reached per account. You cannot coach a number you never counted.

STACK THE CONTEXT

What tech and signals turn a hunch into a threaded motion?

Not a shopping trip. The accounts and contacts live in Salesforce, which is what the love test read. Gong shows how many stakeholders each deal actually touched, one champion or the committee. FullEnrich finds the rest of the buying committee to thread. And Mixmax runs the multi-step, multi-channel motion that reaches an account before it has written back.

SPLIT · CUT THE DRAG

What low-judgment work goes to the system?

Measure the effort gap, count the stakeholders, find the missing committee, and run the touches on cadence across every channel. This is the part that never held up when a person did it by hand, because persistence turned back into a mood the first busy week. A system does not have busy weeks.

SPLIT · KEEP THE JUDGMENT

What stays human?

The threading and the conversation. The system says here is the committee, here is the gap, here is the cadence. The rep decides which altitude to ladder to whom, personal, team, and org, mapped to the person who owns it, and carries the relationships that make a deal survive one contact going dark.

The workflow: the board that runs it

Solve, Stack, Split is the shape. Here is the actual board, lane by lane: what the agents run, what stays human, and the tool at each step. Once it is wired, the effort gap gets measured and the motion runs whether or not the account has replied yet.

What it moved

At a company I was at, a B2B SaaS sales team carrying mid-market and enterprise deals, I ran the love test on the pipeline. Reps averaged about two touchpoints per account and over-indexed on inbound. The deals leaned on one responsive contact. The fix was not a pep talk. It was making persistence a motion and threading the whole committee, and the data on what that is worth is blunt.

The reps did not work harder. They worked wider. The same effort, spread across a motion that ran before the reply and threaded across the committee instead of resting on one contact, is the difference between a 5% deal and a 30% deal. The gain came from coverage, not from grinding.

My receipt is revenue-side. Drop your own workflow in. A CSM turns the love test into a retention read: count stakeholders per renewal, find the ones you never talk to, thread them before the contract date. A marketer turns it into a coverage read: which personas in a target account have never heard from us, and which channel we have never run at them.

WHAT I LEARNED

1. Effort follows responsiveness by default. You reward the accounts that already like you and starve the ones you would have to earn.

2. Two touches is not a motion. Most deals need five or more. Persistence has to be a system, not a mood.

3. One champion is not a de-risked deal. Almost seven people touch a B2B purchase. Thread every altitude, not just the one who answers.

4. Measure it before you fix it. The love test named the gap. You cannot coach a number you never counted.

Run this one this week

Do not rebuild the whole motion. Pull your ten open deals and count contacts per deal. Find the single-threaded ones, the deals resting on one responsive contact. For each, name one stakeholder at a different altitude you have never engaged, personal, team, or org, and add one real touch to that person this week, not an email that says "looping you in." Watch which deals feel less fragile by Friday. That is the love test in miniature, and it tells you whether the full build is worth wiring before you spend a quarter on it.

Two builds that sit next to this one:

• The Deal Hub · "Speed in a deal is not pressure. It is removing the places a deal goes to wait. Find where your deals stall, then remove the wait, not the patience." Threading covers the deal; the hub keeps it from stalling between handoffs.
• Proactive Retention · "If your CSMs find out about churn from the customer, you do not have a retention motion, you have a notification system." Same threading instinct, pointed at the renewal instead of the new deal.

This is one build from the Build Log. Every week I take one sales or revenue problem, run it through the loop, and show the receipts. If someone forwarded this, the subscribe button is right below. Keep building. Heath.