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Blog · AI and self-service analytics

What is coverage intelligence? A plain definition and the five measures in it

Coverage intelligence is the practice of measuring, from a company's own sales data, which customers it reaches, how much of each customer's spend it holds, and where the gaps are, with every figure reconciled to the ledger. This guide defines it, sets out its five measures, coverage, share of wallet, gap at norm, dormancy and concentration, shows how they roll up, and distinguishes it from BI, CRM reporting and sales analytics.

The short answerCoverage intelligence is the measurement, from a company's own ledger and CRM exports, of which accounts it reaches, how much of each account's category spend it holds against a norm drawn from its own best customers, where the largest gaps are and who owns them. Its five measures are coverage, share of wallet, gap at norm, dormancy and concentration. They roll up from account to rep to region to company and reconcile to invoiced revenue, so every number in a coverage report can be traced to rows in an export.

Companies know their revenue by every dimension and their customers by name, and still cannot say which of the accounts they should be serving they are not, or how much of each customer's spend goes elsewhere. Coverage intelligence is the practice that answers those two questions from data the company already holds. This guide defines it, sets out its five measures, and says what it is not.

Definition

Coverage intelligence is the measurement, from a company's own ledger and CRM exports, of:

  • which accounts it reaches, at what cadence;
  • how much of each account's category spend it holds, against a norm from its own best customers;
  • where the largest gaps are, valued, and who owns them;

with every figure rolled up from account to rep to region to company and reconciled to invoiced revenue.

The five measures

Measure Question Formula, in short
Coverage Which accounts do we reach? accounts touched at cadence ÷ accounts assigned
Share of wallet How much of each customer's spend do we hold? our sales ÷ customer's category spend
Gap at norm What would this customer spend if it bought like our best similar customers? norm − actual, floored at zero
Dormancy Who has gone quiet, against their own cadence? days silent > multiple × own cadence
Concentration How much of the book depends on how few? top-n share; count to half

Each has a page on this site with the formula, the rows it needs, a worked example and where it goes wrong.

The roll-up

Every measure is computed at the account and rolled up:

account → rep → team → region → company

With the identity that makes the report defensible:

Σ accounts' revenue = Σ reps' = Σ regions' = invoiced revenue

If the identity fails, the report says where, before anything else is read.

The norm

The reference for share of wallet and gap at norm is not an industry benchmark. It is the company's own customers of the same size and sector where the company holds most of the business: what they demonstrably spend, per unit of size. The norm is computed from the base, stated on every line, and versioned when the method changes.

What it produces

Not dashboards. Lists:

  • the untouched accounts per rep, ranked by revenue, every week;
  • the gap list per rep, ranked by value at norm, with the products missing;
  • the dormant list, with cadence and run rate;
  • the movements, every measure past its threshold, cited to the table.

What it is not

Coverage intelligence
Business intelligence Describes what happened Describes what did not, against a norm
CRM reporting Reports activity as logged Reconciles activity to the ledger and the book
Sales analytics Revenue by dimension Revenue against expected, per account, valued
Market share The company against the market The company against each customer
Account planning A document per account, by hand The same measures for every account, every week

The data it needs

Export Used for
Ledger: account, date, product, revenue Every measure's numerator
CRM: account, owner, activities Coverage, hierarchy
Customer master: account, size, sector Norm, segments
Stated wallets, where held Share of wallet, higher quality

Four files. Identifiers, not names. No live connection.

Why AI changes the delivery and not the measures

An assistant can find the movements, answer a plain-language question against the tables and write the first reading. It cannot make a number right. The measures are computed in deterministic code from stated definitions, and the assistant reads and cites. That division is what makes coverage intelligence with AI trustworthy, and it is the reason the model never does the arithmetic.

Where to start

One export, the ledger, produces concentration and dormancy on the first day. Add the CRM export for coverage. Add the customer master for the norm, and share of wallet and gap follow. Covirage builds the five measures from those exports as they are. The sales intelligence solution describes the setup, and the coverage guide covers the first measure in depth.

Questions people ask

How is coverage intelligence different from sales analytics?

Sales analytics describes what was sold: revenue by product, region and period. Coverage intelligence describes what was not: the accounts untouched, the spend held elsewhere, the customers gone quiet. It uses the same data, adds a norm from the company's own customers, and produces lists of what to do rather than charts of what happened.

Does it need new data?

No. The ledger, the CRM export and a customer master with a size measure are enough for the five measures. A wallet estimate improves with data the customer states, but the norm method works from the company's own base.

Is it a category of software?

It is a practice first and a category of tool second. A spreadsheet can do it for a hundred accounts; past that, the roll-up, the reconciliation and the weekly refresh need to be built once and run on every export, which is what a coverage intelligence tool does.