Tier review and KDMs

The last step of onboarding splits into two reviews back-to-back: first you confirm the tier each account belongs to, then you confirm the key decision makers (KDMs) Enki has identified at your prioritized accounts. This article walks through both. It is the canonical home for what a KDM is in Enki IQ and how the recommended-KDM mechanic works; the deeper definitions of each tier live in the Features article on territory and scoring.

How scoring works

While you were importing and enriching accounts, Enki was preparing to score them. When you arrive at this step, scoring starts: every account is graded on a multi-dimensional rubric and assigned a composite score from 0 to 100. The composite places the account in a tier bucket (thresholds 80+ / 60-79 / 40-59 / below 40 for Tiers 1 through 4). For the full breakdown of what each tier means strategically and what research and treatment each one unlocks, see the Features article on territory and scoring.

Scoring uses a different rubric depending on your industry. For SaaS AEs, the dimensions are ICP Fit, Intent, Timing, Accessibility, and Growth. For finance and legal sellers, the dimensions are Revenue Potential, Life Events, Wallet Share, Relationship, and Regulatory. Each dimension carries a one-line explanation in the UI; click an account to expand its per-dimension breakdown and read why it scored the way it did.

A progress loader runs while scoring is in flight. You can leave the page; when you return, the wizard picks up where it left off.

Reviewing and overriding tier assignments

When scoring finishes, accounts are grouped by tier with Tier 1 and Tier 2 open by default and Tier 3 and Tier 4 collapsed. Each row shows the composite score and the tier the model assigned. You can move accounts between tiers with the up and down arrows next to each row. Promote an account you know is critical even if the model under-scored it; demote one you do not actually want to chase right now.

Tier 1 is capped at 25 accounts during onboarding. This cap exists because Tier 1 accounts receive the most expensive, highest-quality research treatment (a deep research agent that browses the web and produces a comprehensive briefing across overview, financials, strategy, market, people, and sales). Twenty-five is the count we have found AEs can realistically focus on at once. If you try to promote a 26th account into Tier 1, the UI blocks the move; demote something else first. The Features article on territory and scoring is the canonical reference for the cap itself and what it unlocks.

You can rerun this scoring later from the Territory page if your situation changes (new product, new ICP, new accounts imported). Overrides you make now are honored as user intent and not overwritten by future automatic scoring runs.

What a KDM is

A Key Decision Maker (KDM) is a contact at an account who has authority over the buying decision for your product. In Enki, a KDM is a contact marked as a decision maker on their profile. KDMs get prioritized research, surface first in the people view, and feed directly into the territory plan's account-by-account recommendations.

KDMs are not the same as champions, evaluators, or end users. Those are other roles a contact can play on a buying committee, and Enki tracks them separately on each contact. A single account often has several KDMs (a CFO and a Head of Procurement, for example, on a finance-driven deal). The model surfaces the candidates; you confirm the call.

The recommended-KDM mechanic

After you confirm tiers, Enki identifies likely decision makers for each of your prioritized accounts and scores each candidate on persona fit and authority. This runs as a background phase you can watch from the same loader. When it finishes, you land on a confirmation panel.

The panel shows, for each prioritized account, a small set of recommended contacts with a fit score and a one-line reason (job title match, seniority, function alignment). Each row has a confirm action. Confirming marks that contact as a decision maker and flags them for prioritized research downstream. You can also reject a recommendation, add a contact the model missed, or skip an account entirely if you do not have enough information to call it yet.

The goal of this step is not to be exhaustive. It is to give Enki enough confirmed signal to weight the territory plan around the people who actually matter. You can return to any account after onboarding and add or change KDMs from the People tab. The influence map view shows the relationships between confirmed and candidate KDMs at each account. For what research a confirmed KDM unlocks downstream, see the Features article on contact research.

Finishing the step

Once you have confirmed KDMs across your prioritized accounts (you do not have to do every one; you can do the ones you have an opinion on and skip the rest), you proceed to plan generation. From here, Enki starts the territory plan: deep research on Tier 1 accounts, standard research on Tier 2 and Tier 3 accounts, and synthesis of the full plan. That handoff is covered in Your first territory plan.

Next steps

Your first territory plan explains what runs in the background after you finish this step and how to read the plan when it lands. For the long-form definitions of each tier and the scoring rubric, see the Features article on territory and scoring.