Territory & Account Planning in Depth: Prioritize Your Patch and Plan Every Key Account
Signature Course No. 378 — A Signature AI Socratic Coaching Course.
No experience needed — your coach starts where you are.
A New Kind of Learning
Socratic coaching, delivered by an agentic AI coach.
Not a course you watch. An AI coach you work with.
The Lighthouse Coach begins by discovering how you think about the subject, teaches what is missing, and gives you realistic practice before asking you to prove that you can use it. You may test out of concepts you already understand, while capstones turn the learning into a practical plan, decision, conversation, or other real-world result.
The curriculum is deliberately authored; the AI delivers it through coaching. It is not an AI randomly generating lessons.
A coach that teaches by asking — not by lecturing
The Lighthouse Coach is an AI Socratic coach built on Cognosco Learning's Territory & Account Planning in Depth: Prioritize Your Patch and Plan Every Key Account course, in the Sales, Service & Revenue category. It does not play videos at you. It holds a conversation: it asks you a question, listens to your answer, names the misconception it hears, affirms what you got right, and asks the next question — the way a great coach works in the room.
A patch you have not counted is not a territory — it is a rumor with a quota attached. Most territories are not planned; they are inherited — a list of accounts in a spreadsheet, a quota, and whatever the previous holder left in the notes field. This course teaches the alternative: planning as a discipline with a method, done before the work, in writing, on one running patch whose every figure you can rebuild with a pencil.
It starts with the count. You will meet Quarryline Industrial Supply's territory in full — 240 accounts, counted once each under a written buying-unit rule, divided into four segments and three tiers, with current revenue of $3,600,000, potential of $9,000,000, and whitespace of $5,400,000 that tie to each other at every level. Every worked figure in the course is built from those numbers and no others.
It works in two movements. First, Module 1 — Read the Patch, Then Divide It — work through Concepts 1–9, finishing with The Territory Plan; then, Module 2 — Plan Every Key Account — work through Concepts 10–18, finishing with The Key Account Plan, Ready to Hand Off.
Both capstones produce real artifacts — a complete territory plan for the running patch: segments, tiers, and money that tie in both directions, coverage designed inside a stated capacity of 720 units, and the document finished for a cold reader; and a complete account plan for one Tier A key account: facts researched and marked, whitespace built by category and reconciled to the tier, objectives chained to evidence, the decision structure mapped, the target built from stated assumptions, and the handoff written in both directions.
The boundary is part of the course. This is a planning course, and planning only: the discipline that happens before anyone picks up a phone. You will find no prospecting tactics here — creating pipeline is a neighboring course's craft — and no relationship management either; the account plan is the artifact that hands off into both, written so someone else can act on it without you in the room.
The course is self-paced and always on — roughly 30 minutes per concept, about 9 hours in full, taken in as many sittings as you like. You can type your answers, or talk out loud: the Voice Coach speaks its questions and listens to your spoken replies. Learners who already know the material can test out concept by concept.
Territory & Account Planning in Depth: Prioritize Your Patch and Plan Every Key Account is part of The Lighthouse Signature Series — the online counterpart to the one-day, in-person learning Cognosco Learning has delivered since 2002.
Course Facts
One full concept, coached end to end — free: verify your email and we’ll send you a link to start.
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Diagnose → Learn & Practice → Prove → Capstone
Every learner moves through the same discipline a Cognosco instructor would insist on in the room.
Diagnose
The Coach starts where the course starts: with the segmentation question. How is your patch divided today, and who chose those divisions — you, a predecessor, or a reporting tool's default? Name two accounts your current divisions treat as alike that you actually plan for completely differently, and say what difference between them is doing the real work; and if you could cut your patch by only one difference, say which difference would change the most planning decisions, and why that one. Every concept opens with three questions that locate where you actually stand, and your answers shape how deeply the Coach works the concept with you. Everyone begins with Module 1 — no skipping the foundations you only think you have.
Learn & Practice
Work each concept in conversation with the Coach — spoken or written — then practice it against realistic situations until it holds up.
Prove
Every concept ends in proof: answer the check cold and demonstrate the skill. Know it already? Test out and take credit immediately.
Capstone
Finish with two capstones — The Territory Plan for Module 1 and The Key Account Plan, Ready to Hand Off for Module 2 — that pull the whole course together, and earn the certificate.
What You'll Learn
Count it once, divide it by difference, tie every figure — in that order, every time. Every discipline in this course hangs on one sequence: decide what one account is before you count, cut the patch by the differences that change planning decisions, tier and score with criteria you can defend out loud, and write the result down as documents another person can work from.
Module 1 reads the patch, then divides it. Segments That Mean Something; The Patch as a Portfolio; The Ideal Account Profile; Coverage Design; Data You Can Plan On; Tiering Accounts; The Prioritization Score; Balance the Load; and The Territory Plan Document — the counting, dividing, tiering, and coverage disciplines that turn a raw list into a finished territory plan.
Module 2 plans every key account. From Tier to Account Plan; Research Inside the Plan; Whitespace Analysis; Objectives and Planned Plays; The Stakeholder Map, for Planning; Resourcing the Plan; The Numbers in the Plan; Review, Revise, Hand Off; and The Planner's Standard — the account-level disciplines that keep a tier's promise, account by account, and judge the whole set before it directs a year of work.
And it holds its boundary throughout. Every concept in this course produces paper — a segment definition, a tier list, a whitespace table, a plan — and no concept produces activity. Activity belongs to the neighboring courses. The test of everything here is whether the document, read cold by someone else, makes the right next work obvious.
What you will learn
- Segment a territory by differences that change the plan, and state what each segment is for
- Count a patch exactly once and build its totals — accounts, current revenue, potential, and whitespace — so they tie
- Define an ideal account profile and coverage rules that match real capacity
- Tier and prioritize accounts with written criteria and a scoring model you can defend
- Analyze whitespace account by account and turn it into planned objectives
- Write a territory plan and an account plan for every key account that are consistent with each other and ready to hand off
Everything in the course
- All 18 concepts of Territory & Account Planning in Depth: Prioritize Your Patch and Plan Every Key Account, in 2 modules
- A starting-point check first — the Coach finds where you actually stand before teaching
- Learn, Practice, Prove for every concept — no passive video watching
- A test-out on every concept: prove you know it and move on
- The Voice Coach: talk with the Coach out loud — it speaks, listens, and replies
- A personal Learner Record of your work across the course
- Two capstone exercises: The Territory Plan and The Key Account Plan, Ready to Hand Off
- A printable session summary whenever you pause
- The Lighthouse Coach completion certificate (Signature Series)
- Your progress is saved as you go — stop anytime, resume where you left off
Built for the people who own a patch
Field and inside sales representatives — who own a patch of named accounts and want their year decided by a plan they wrote, not by whoever emails loudest; and account managers taking over key accounts who need to plan an account they have inherited before they start working it, and to know what they actually hold and what they do not.
Sales managers and territory designers — who draw patch boundaries, set coverage, and must be able to show that two patches of equal quota carry roughly equal opportunity and roughly equal work.
Sales operations staff — who maintain the account data everyone plans from, and who need to know what planning-grade data actually demands of a record. This course assumes you sell, or support people who sell, to a defined set of accounts; it assumes no prior planning method, and if you can read a table and add a column of figures, you have everything it requires to start.
Prefer to learn live and in person? The same material anchors Cognosco's one-day programs — browse the in-person catalog.
Start with Segments That Mean Something
$195 — introductory price. One payment. No subscription, no password to manage.
Here is exactly what happens when you enroll:
- Pay securely with Stripe — you are taken straight into the course
- Create your learner profile and begin the Module 1 starting-point check
- Save the access key you are given — it restores your enrollment on any device
- Learn at your pace; your progress is stored in your browser on your device
For the full voice experience, use Chrome and allow the microphone when asked. Typing your answers works everywhere, all the time. Questions before you enroll? Email hello@cognoscolearning.com.
Before you enroll
What is a Socratic coaching session?
A conversation, not a video. Your coach asks a question; you answer — out loud by voice, or by typing — and the coach responds to what you said: naming the misconception it hears, affirming what you got right, and asking the next question. You advance only when you have mastered each concept, so a finished course means the learning held.
How long does it take — and how long do I have?
About 30 minutes per concept. Learn in sittings of any length; your progress is saved as you go. You have a full year from purchase to finish, and you can revisit and retake within that year.
What does the certificate verify?
That you completed every concept and both capstones of this course. Anyone can confirm a Cognosco certificate online — enter its certificate ID on our verification page.
What if it isn't for me — what are the refunds?
If you have not started, cancel for a full refund within seven days of purchase. Once you have started, there is no cash refund — stop before finishing and we credit the full amount you paid toward any other course in the library (credit valid one year from your original purchase). Once you complete the course, no refund or credit applies.
More Signature Courses are coming
Territory & Account Planning in Depth: Prioritize Your Patch and Plan Every Key Account is Signature Course No. 378. Leave your email and we'll send you news of future Signature Courses and Lighthouse updates as they are announced — nothing else.