Sales executives get caught in the prospecting trap because they share a common delusion. They believe there’s a million-dollar sale out there for them if they can just find it. So they look under every rock, calling as many people as they can, emailing everyone and their brother, chasing that hidden gold. In reality, big deals aren’t found. They’re built. They’re built in partnership with a champion and a buying committee, engineered to comprehensively address a serious problem a district is facing. It’s only by going deeper and more specific that an account executive can build a deal like that.
Scott Noon at Midday Advisors calls this the Buried Treasure Myth, and it’s the sales-side twin of the Address Book Problem on the marketing side. Marketing builds too big a list because reach feels like coverage. Sales works too wide a territory because prospecting feels like the job, and narrowing the list feels like giving up a shot at the one deal that changes the quarter.
What is the Buried Treasure Myth?
The Buried Treasure Myth is the belief, common among account executives, that a large enough deal exists somewhere in an unworked territory and can be found through sheer volume of outreach. It treats prospecting as a search problem, when the accounts most likely to produce a large deal usually aren’t hidden. They’re identifiable in advance, and the deal itself still has to be built through the buying committee, not discovered through a cold call that happens to land.
Why does the myth persist even when it doesn’t work?
Because it feels like effort, and effort feels like the job. An AE working a wide territory can point to activity: calls made, emails sent, meetings booked. An AE working a narrow list of fifty accounts with real depth has less activity to point to in any given week, even when that depth is what actually produces a signed contract. Volume is visible. Depth compounds quietly, and it’s harder to defend in a Monday pipeline review.
There’s a real psychological pull underneath it too. Somewhere in a rep’s territory is a district that will sign a bigger contract than anyone expected, and no one wants to be the rep who missed it because they’d already crossed that district off. That fear is rational on its own terms. It’s also exactly what keeps a rep’s attention spread across a thousand low-probability accounts instead of concentrated on fifty accounts with real signal behind them.
The economics tell a different story than the fear does. Only a small share of any market is actually in-market to buy at a given moment, research from G2 has found the figure sits around five percent across B2B categories generally. A rep spread across a thousand accounts is spending the overwhelming majority of their attention on accounts that aren’t buying anything from anyone right now, K-12 or otherwise. Multiple industry studies, including research cited by Forrester and ITSMA, have found that account-based approaches produce meaningfully higher win rates than broad outbound. The exact lift varies study to study, but the direction is consistent: depth on the right accounts beats reach across all of them.
The territory math doesn’t work the way it feels like it should
Picture two AEs. One works a full state territory, every district, regardless of fit or readiness, sending the same outreach to all of them. The other works a list of fifty accounts scored on fit and readiness, with real research behind each one and outreach built around that district’s specific situation.
The first AE has more total contacts. The second AE has more real conversations. A district that gets outreach built around its own stated priorities, current vendor relationships, and level of awareness of the problem responds differently than one that gets the same template as five hundred other districts. The math isn’t close once win rate and deal size are accounted for together, not just activity volume.
This is also where the myth does quiet damage beyond the missed quota. A K-12 buyer network is small and connected. Curriculum directors compare notes at regional conferences and on shared listservs. An AE blasting five hundred districts with generic outreach isn’t just wasting effort on four hundred fifty of them. They’re spending down the company’s reputation in a market where reputation travels faster than in most B2B categories.
What to do instead
Keep the territory, change what it’s for. A state or regional territory still makes sense for owning and routing inbound warm leads, someone has to be the rep of record when a district in that state reaches out on its own. What shouldn’t be territory-driven is outbound prospecting. A scored account list, not the territory map, should tell an AE where to spend proactive effort. The two run side by side: territory determines ownership of what comes in, the working list determines what the rep goes out and builds.
Score the list on fit and readiness together. Fit alone produces a list that’s directionally right and immediately too large. Nearly every district in the country runs the same fiscal-year calendar, so budget-cycle stage doesn’t separate one account from another the way it might in a market where buyers move on independent clocks. What separates them is awareness of the problem, how much it hurts right now, and whether there’s real appetite inside the district to solve it. Fit combined with those readiness signals produces a list an AE can work now, this quarter, with a real reason to believe the district can act.
Change what gets measured in the pipeline review. If activity volume, calls made, emails sent, is still the primary metric for outbound effort, the incentive still points AEs back toward the myth. Measuring engagement depth and committee coverage on the working list points the same rep toward the behavior that actually produces bigger deals.
Let the AE in on why the outbound list is smaller. A rep who’s had their proactive target list quietly narrowed without explanation experiences it as a demotion, especially if it isn’t distinguished from their territory. A rep who understands the split- territory still covers what comes in; the working list is just where deliberate effort goes out- experiences it as a better way to hit a number they already wanted to hit.
Big deals aren’t found. They’re built.
The rep who closes the deal that changes the quarter isn’t the one who called the most people. They’re the one who went deep enough on the right account to understand a real problem well enough to build something around it. That’s not luck. It’s a choice about where attention goes, made in advance, on purpose.
If your organization is dealing with a version of this, let’s talk.
This post is part of the guide Account-Based Sales and Marketing for K-12 Education Providers. Related reading: The Address Book Problem.
Scott Noon is the founder of Midday Advisors, a K-12 go-to-market advisory firm.
Frequently Asked Questions
The Buried Treasure Myth is the belief that a large, unfound deal exists somewhere in an unworked territory and can be uncovered through sheer volume of prospecting. In reality, high-value K-12 deals are built deliberately with a champion and a buying committee, not discovered through cold outreach alone.
Wide prospecting feels like more effort and produces more visible activity, calls made, emails sent, in a given week. Deep, focused work on a smaller account list produces less visible activity in the short term even though it produces better win rates over a quarter.
Research on account-based approaches consistently shows higher win rates and larger deal sizes compared to broad outbound, even though the specific percentage lift varies by study. A rep working fifty well-researched accounts with real fit and readiness signal generally outproduces a rep spread across an entire state territory.
No. A state or regional territory still makes sense for owning and routing inbound warm leads that come in on their own. What changes is outbound prospecting: instead of proactively working every account in the territory, the AE’s outbound effort follows a scored working list. Territory governs what comes in, the list governs what the rep goes out and builds.
Shift the primary pipeline metric away from activity volume, calls and emails sent, and toward engagement depth and buying-committee coverage on a named account list. The metric shapes the behavior, and measuring volume keeps reps chasing volume.
