Imagine a strategic RevOps leader who is anti MQL, anti spray and pray.
He doesn’t just pull reports. He avoids the vanity metrics trap. He understands that focus beats volume.
Doug Botchman is just that.
He’s the Director of Revenue Operations at Ceros, where over the last year they’ve been able to drive 2.5x higher conversion on top tier accounts with ICP Marketing, Keyplay, and specialized AI Agents.
Doug walked me through his strategy. In today’s newsletter, we’ll break it down.
ICP Focus Unlocked The Next Phase of Growth
Ceros knew their next phase of growth would be about focus.
Their previous volume-focused machine was reaching it’s limits. Lots of ‘qualified’ leads that weren’t ending up converting. Too many poor-fit accounts were slipping into their targeting and onto sales calendars.
They needed a better way to ensure that they were focusing their limited GTM resources on their best-fit accounts (and no one else).
Doug setup a comprehensive ICP Model in Keyplay to:
Focus on the right accounts. No broad account lists or native LinkedIn ad targeting. A comprehensive list of scored accounts that everyone agreed were qualified.
Measure the right metrics. No more fuzzy SQL definitions that incentivized volume. Specific account-level scoring that only rewards breaking into the right accounts.
Align and improve over time. No more arguments about what their ICP really is. It’s documented in a model that they can validate, backtest, and improve.
AI Agents to Triple Down on ICP Quality
Once he had a model that was working – scoring their high ARR customers high, and DQd leads low – he wanted to go a step further.
Doug asked: “How can we use AI highlight at characteristics that we could never get at before?” With Keyplay, he could go beyond basic firmographics and avoid the pitfalls of blackbox “predictive” models.
He worked with the team at Keyplay to build a family of AI Agents that would research and enrich his accounts in his sleep. These agents didn’t just spit out long-winded answers, they delivered insights that fed Doug’s scoring and segmentation.
Some of the unique Agents that he’s running across his TAM:
Marketing Use Case Intelligence
What it finds: What content are they building? Landing pages? Microsites? Interactive experiences?
Why it matters: "Our reps were spending time researching to try and find this. Now we have it at our fingertips and can craft a quicker, more personalized story."
Content Strategy Analysis
What it finds: Are they focused on thought leadership? Lead generation? Event marketing?
Why it matters: Helps sales understand the buyer's content priorities and business focus.
Interactive Content Detection
What it finds: Are they already creating interactive content? How sophisticated is it?
Why it matters: Competitive intelligence and expansion opportunity identification.
These are just a couple of the agents that Doug was able to build with Keyplay. All of these insights that would normally take a team of humans to find, he can now find instantly.
After applying these agents to their market, they were able to surface hundreds of great-fit accounts that their traditional data providers were missing.
From Data to Action: Coordinated GTM Plays
Using their Keyplay ICP Model, which looks at 40+ data points, including the AI Agents, they’re able to prioritize and segment accounts much more intelligently.
Each account gets scored and tiered:
Tier A: 70%+ score. High-fit, high-readiness. Their best NRR performers, proven over 24 months.
Tier B: 50–69%. Strong potential, often missing one or two key signals.
Tier C/D: Below 50%. Lower intent or maturity, but still on their radar.
Like Tyler Calder at PartnerStack, Doug and the team at Ceros use these tiers as a strategic anchor in account selection, territory planning, and demand generation:
Different segments get different bidding & creative in LinkedIn Ads.
Automatic fair territory assignment to reps.
Google Ads conversion events are weighted differently by account score.
Custom nurture sequences and content tailored to their specific use cases.
Pre-call research packets with agent-sourced marketing use case intelligence, content strategy analysis, and competitive positioning
They treat ICP as a program, not a one-time project. They revisit this quarterly, not annually. Markets shift fast, so they use these scores to catch Tier C accounts on their way to becoming Tier Bs. That lets us get in early, and grow with them.
Measuring What Really Matters
And finally, they use this to refine and improve all of their programs against the metrics that actually matter.
Instead of marketing celebrating “MQLs” while sales is missing, the whole GTM team at Ceros is laser-focused on if they’re getting into the right accounts.
Looking for a measurement framework? Kyle Poyar has a great one here.
Wrap-Up
Doug's approach proves a simple truth: precision beats volume every time.
While most companies chase more leads with legacy ABM platforms, Ceros focused on better leads with ICP Marketing. They built systems that identify their best-fit accounts and ignore everything else.
The result? 2.5x higher conversion on their top tier accounts.
The playbook is clear:
Build a comprehensive ICP model that goes beyond basic firmographics. Use AI agents to surface insights you'd never find manually. Tier your accounts and align your entire GTM motion around those tiers.
Most importantly, measure what matters. Account penetration in your ICP, not MQL volume.
Your growth is waiting in the accounts you're not targeting yet. But first, you need to know exactly who they are.