IKIWISI and Account Scoring
How to turn tacit knowledge into scalable targeting.
In 1964, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in a case called Jacobellis v. Ohio. The issue before the court was whether or not the state of Ohio could ban a film1 for being obscene. Ultimately, the court ruled against Ohio.
Justice Potter Stewart issued a concurring opinion in which he noted only the most hard-core pornography could be considered out of bounds according to the First Amendment. He wrote:
I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [“hard-core pornography”], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.
That bolded line became so famous and controversial that “I know it when I see it” has its own Wikipedia page. It’s controversial because, well, how could it not be? Everyone’s line at which speech/film/anything goes from “I don’t like it” to “it’s obscene” is different and is most definitely not an objective standard.2
“Sir,” you might be saying, “this is a B2B newsletter.” (Assuming the first couple paragraphs even got past your work’s email filters.) “Please stop talking about obscenity and get to the point.”
Fine. “I know it when I see it” (which I’ll abbreviate to IKIWISI) is a good way of thinking about the subjective test your sales reps use to decide if a prospect is worth pursuing. IKIWISI stands in opposition to the effort teams put into coming up with objective account scores.
One reason Justice Potter felt confident enough to put IKIWISI in his concurrence, is that he could expect people from the same society would have mostly similar standards. Societies tend to enforce rules and influence preferences that way. For sales, those rules are your ICP, so rep IKIWISI judgments ought to mostly conform to your company’s ICP. In short, there ought not be much daylight between rep preferences and your a scoring model based on that ICP. Right? Right…
Yeah, it doesn’t usually happen that way. Every sales rep interprets your ICP in their own way based on many factors: how well they’ve been enabled, their past experience, their skillset, hopes, dreams, current quota attainment, etc.
Here’s how it usually plays out:
RevOps builds a scoring model based on account firmographics and their statistical relationships to historical performance. Leadership buys in.
RevOps uses that model to rank accounts and assign territories to the reps.
Reps look at the top few accounts in the territory, do a cursory glance at LinkedIn, scroll a bit on the company website and then start disqualifying accounts that “don’t look good”.
RevOps and front-line managers get Slack messages ranging from “hey could you look at a couple of these accounts” to “my territory is a barren wasteland and my family will surely starve”.
And, for another year, all the work on objective account ranking butts up against the cold, hard reality of rep IKIWISI.
Welcome to the Wild Wild West
That reality is enough to make some teams try to avoid the pain of building and enforcing a ranking model altogether in the name of letting reps have more “ownership”. They implement a process where reps choose the accounts they work. I’ll affectionately refer to this model as “wild wild west” because it generally bombs.
But it doesn’t bomb for everyone. The reason the wild wild west is so appealing is that IKIWISI works—but only for the reps that have the ability to see the right things that are actually correlated with outcomes.3 The best reps have both a knack and a process for consistently identifying prospects that are similar to past successful deals and repeating those patterns to close new customers.
It’s great for star performers, but terrible for those at the top of the bell curve. And completely unhelpful for helping new reps get better. As you scale, you need a system that enables all your reps to be as productive as possible, not just those who are especially good at IKIWISI.
So, the answer is to just enforce a top-down scoring model and force the reps to comply. It’s not quite so simple. IKIWISI is valuable; ignore it at your peril.
There’s another way of describing IKIWISI: tacit knowledge.4 This is information that’s not documented but instead lives in the heads of particular—often successful—individuals, subject to their willingness to share and their own subjective interpretations. In that respect, it’s incredibly valuable. The only problem is, it’s seemingly impossible to codify and scale.
A truly good account scoring model should fit with the intuition of successful reps. Blindly correlating firmographics with outcomes often misses important subjective signals that IKIWISI captures.
So we’re at an impasse! A good scoring model should be scalable, objective, explainable, correlated with outcomes, and match up with subjective IKIWISI evaluations. Seems impossible. Maybe. Let’s explore some ways to systematize IKIWISI and unlock it for all reps.
Make IKIWISI work for you
The challenge of IKIWISI knowledge is that it’s—by definition—hard to describe. People look at the totality of an account (or film) and make a judgement call. In order to co-opt it into your scoring system, you need to work with your reps to turn their tacit knowledge into something you can use.
The best way I’ve found to do this is to sit down with your best reps while they do account research. Give them a list of new accounts and then watch how they go about deciding whether they should work them. It’s probably easiest to do this on Zoom so you can record their screen.
If they’re anything like reps I’ve worked with in the past, you’ll probably see them visit the company website and click around a bit. Then they’ll head to LinkedIn to look at the company page along with some contacts. They might also visit ZoomInfo, Apollo, etc.
As they go through this process, ask them questions. The conversation might go something like this:
Q: I saw you visited the careers page, what were you looking for?
A: I wanted to see if they have any sales rep openings.
Q: What does that tell you?
A: Well I’ve noticed that if the sales job descriptions mention travel/driving, they’re likely to need a corporate card for each of their reps.
Q: Cool, and what are you looking for in Sales Navigator?
A: I like to look at how many sales reps they seem to have overall with similar job titles to the descriptions I found.
Q: How do you use that information?
A: When I call them up I reference the number of sales reps and ask how they’re managing expenses for the ones on the road. That worked really well on my last couple deals. They’ll have other people that travel—like maintenance workers—but the sales reps tend to have the biggest expenses so they’re usually higher priority.
There’s nuance in here you might miss if you didn’t follow along with the rep. If you just asked the rep what factors they look for, they might not give you the whole story. Maybe they say “sales headcount” but the reality is they’re looking for sellers who are also road warriors. This may or may not align with your ICP definition.
The above Q&A is paraphrasing a real conversation I’ve had. This one was easy because those are pretty concrete things. Admittedly, it’s sometimes a little more nebulous. I’ve heard things like “if they have a really professional website, I know they’re investing in marketing”. With some questioning, you can usually get a better idea of what the rep actually looks at to determine “professional”.
Now, repeat this process for a selection of top, middle and low performers. Find the common things the top performers look for that they others don’t. Those things become the foundation for turning IKIWISI from something indescribable to something a bit more tangible.
From here, you can use AI research tools to crawl the web and enrich accounts with some of these data points.
Sometimes it’s hard to boil some IKIWISI knowledge down to a clean list of “enrichable” data points. You may want to augment those factors with a “bottoms-up” analysis that uses AI to review a prospect’s online presence and compare it to your successful customers. You can do this for a small set of accounts with the LLM of your choice. If you want to do it at scale, I would humbly suggest Market Map for this kind of scoring.
However you do it, once you’ve codified IKIWISI knowledge in a systemic way, you can then incorporate that into account scores alongside more traditional firmographics.
Wrapping up
Like it or not, your sales reps will rely on “I know it when I see it” knowledge to evaluate the accounts you’re asking them to pursue. No matter how much effort goes into an account’s score, if it violates the IKIWISI test, you’ll end up with nothing but annoying Slacks.
The answer isn’t to give into IKIWISI and go wild wild west, but neither is it to ignore IKIWISI entirely. Instead, take the time to work with the reps, get all that valuable tacit knowledge out of their heads and into your ranking systems.
It may not settle a Supreme Court case, but it’ll definitely help you grow.
It was called The Lovers. I won’t link to it here because, well, this is actually a newsletter about B2B sales. I don’t know if Justice Potter was right about it because I haven’t seen it.
If you prefer sports metaphors to Supreme Court history, you might prefer thinking of this as the “eye test”.
And sometimes what seems like strong IKIWISI ability is actually just a tenured rep who has become good at working the system to hold on to accounts everyone agrees are objectively good.
Yes there are other terms for this but I think it wouldn’t hurt to err on the side of being culturally sensitive in 2026.