How Leaders Use Potential Modeling to Prioritize Accounts

Enterprise revenue leaders face a familiar challenge: understanding where to focus resources for the greatest possible return. With thousands of accounts, complex product portfolios, and increasing pressure for predictable growth, it’s easy to misallocate effort—over-investing in saturated accounts while overlooking segments with far greater upside.

Forecasts alone rarely solve this. Dashboards don’t solve it. Even strong performance in certain areas doesn’t guarantee strategic alignment.

Leaders need something broader and more reliable: clarity about where the real potential exists—and how much of it there is.
That’s where potential modeling becomes essential.

Why Forecasting Alone Isn’t Enough

Forecasting provides valuable context but not direction. And many organizations struggle to trust the accuracy of their projections. According to Gartner, less than half of sales leaders report high confidence in their forecast accuracy.

McKinsey reinforces this point, noting that companies relying solely on historical internal data often miss critical market signals that influence future demand.

As a result, organizations often lack visibility into:

• Which accounts are already close to saturation

• Where expansion is realistically possible

• Which offerings hold the greatest commercial relevance

• How behavior differs across customer segments

These blind spots lead to cascading inefficiencies across sales, marketing, and product teams. To understand why your revenue predictions might be letting you down, check out our article on the topic here. 

What Potential Modeling Actually Is

Potential modeling shifts the focus from “What have we sold?” to “What could we sell, and to whom?”

It does this by combining insights from:

• Comparable customer groups

• Real buying behavior

• External market signals

• Historical billing patterns

• Offering structure and logic

• Jobs-to-be-done taxonomy

This enables leaders to answer strategic questions more confidently:

• Where is the money?

• How much is realistically available?

• Which accounts are most likely to convert?

• Which offerings have meaningful upside?

• What should teams prioritize immediately?

As Toni Keskinen, CPO & Co-Founder of 180ops, puts it:

“We bring sales, marketing, customer success and offering management together, creating a shared understanding in the market and its priorities.”

That shared understanding is what transforms potential modeling into a foundational management tool.

Toni explains this dynamic clearly in the short clip below, where he breaks down who potential modeling actually serves and why that matters for enterprise growth:

The Core Components of Effective Potential Modeling

A strong potential model mirrors real-world complexity—both in how customers buy and how products behave.

1. Customer Behavior Patterns

Not every customer follows the same logic.
Greenfield projects behave differently from serial buyers, and ongoing billing relationships require different analytical approaches. Recognizing these differences is essential for accurate potential estimates.

2. Offering Logic and Structure

Offerings can be package-based, consumption-based, newly launched, or tied to upgrade/downgrade paths. A sound model must account for these structural differences.

3. A Jobs-to-Be-Done Taxonomy

Grouping offerings by the customer needs they serve ensures teams aren’t treating thousands of products as unrelated silos. This improves prediction quality and makes the final recommendations actionable.

If you'd like to explore why internal models often struggle to capture this level of nuance, see: Why In-House Potential Models Often Fail—and How Executives Can Avoid It.

How Potential Modeling Drives Enterprise Prioritization

Once revenue potential is quantified, leaders can make decisions that are both more confident and more efficient.

For example, ranking accounts by real revenue upside helps teams avoid spending valuable time on segments that may look large based on historical spend but offer limited future growth. 

This clarity also empowers teams beyond sales. Marketing can build more relevant audiences based on buying patterns. Offering teams can see which products drive strategic expansion. Leadership can forecast from a stronger foundation of what’s possible, not just what’s projected.

Bain & Company notes that organizations prioritizing high-potential accounts achieve higher returns without increasing sales effort proportionally.

Whitespace: Useful, But Not a Strategy

Whitespace identifies where customers aren’t buying, but it doesn’t reveal:

• Whether a gap is commercially meaningful

• Whether a customer resembles those who do buy that offering

• The value of the opportunity

It’s a visibility layer, but not a revenue strategy. Potential modeling brings the missing context by pairing whitespace with monetary value, buying behavior, and offering logic.

READ MORE: The Whitespace Advantage Your Revenue Team Might Be Missing

A Better Foundation for Decision-Making

With a clear view of account and offering potential, leaders can:

• Make faster, evidence-based decisions

• Allocate resources where they matter most

• Reduce wasted effort across teams

• Improve forecast reliability

• And drive sustainable, long-term revenue growth

Potential modeling transforms raw data into strategic direction, and that strategic direction into measurable impact.

What to Read Next

To explore the core definitions and terminology behind potential modeling, see What Is Potential Modeling? A Practical Guide for B2B Revenue Teams.