How the layers fit together
When you teach your AI colleagues who to pursue and why, five different jobs are at play. Each one answers a separate question. Keeping them separate is what makes the whole system clean, fast to reason about, and trustworthy when your reps act on what it says.
This page is the map. It explains the five layers, why each owns exactly one question, and why a concept should live in one layer and only one. If you ever find yourself defining the same idea twice, this is the page that tells you where it belongs.
The five layers, one question each
Section titled “The five layers, one question each”Your Evergrowth setup separates “who to pursue” into five distinct decisions. Together they take an account from “never heard of them” to “here is the specific person to reach, and here is the reason that lands today.”
| Layer | The question it answers | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Account qualification | Should we pursue this account at all? | Structural fit - a clear yes or no on whether a company belongs in your market |
| Account signals | Why this account, why now? | Time-bound urgency and intent - the reason to act this week, not next quarter |
| CRM enrichment | How do we segment and report on this? | Stable reporting fields that stay true for months and power your pipeline views |
| Personas | Who buys and who uses? | The buyer and user roles inside an account - the buying committee |
| Contact signals | Why this person, why now? | Person-level urgency - the specific hook that makes one individual worth reaching today |
Read top to bottom, it is a funnel. Qualification decides whether an account is even in scope. Account signals say whether now is the moment. CRM enrichment gives you the durable facts to group and prioritize the ones that qualify. Personas tell you which roles to engage once you commit to an account. Contact signals find the moment for a specific human.
Why each concept lives in exactly one layer
Section titled “Why each concept lives in exactly one layer”The single rule that holds this together: the same concept must not appear in two layers. It is tempting to repeat a useful fact - “they hold a SOC 2 certification” feels like it could be a fit check, a reporting field, and a talking point all at once. Resist that. Decide which job the concept actually serves, put it there, and remove it from the rest.
There are three reasons this discipline matters for a sales team.
Trust. When a rep asks “why is this account flagged?”, a clean layering gives one answer from one place. If urgency logic is smeared across qualification and signals and reporting fields, the same account can be flagged for three half-overlapping reasons, and nobody can tell which one is real. Reps stop trusting the prioritization the moment they catch it contradicting itself.
Speed and cost. Each layer runs the right kind of check. Qualification is a fast yes/no gate, so you do not spend deep research on companies that were never a fit. Time-bound signals only need re-checking when timing might have changed. Stable reporting facts do not need re-checking often at all. Mix these together and you either over-research accounts that failed the gate or let stale facts drive live prioritization. Clean layers let your credits go to the work that changes a decision.
Clean reporting. Your RevOps views depend on fields meaning one thing. A segmentation field that is sometimes a fit verdict and sometimes a freshness flag is unusable in a pipeline report. Stable facts belong in CRM enrichment; anything that expires belongs in the signals layers. Keep that line and your reports stay honest.
How to tell two close cousins apart
Section titled “How to tell two close cousins apart”Most layering mistakes come from confusing a pair that look similar. A few quick tests:
- Qualification vs. account signals. Ask: does the answer change over time? “They sell into regulated finance” is structural - it is qualification. “They just hired a new VP of Sales” expires - it is an account signal. Fit is permanent; urgency has a clock.
- Account signals vs. CRM enrichment. Ask: am I using this to act now, or to group and report? An expiring reason to reach out is a signal. A durable fact you would put in a segment - headcount band, region, tech footprint - is enrichment.
- Account signals vs. contact signals. Ask: is this about the company or a specific person? A funding round is an account signal. A particular leader posting about a problem you solve is a contact signal. Company-level urgency picks the account; person-level urgency picks who to message and what to say.
- Personas vs. contact signals. Personas describe the kind of person who buys or uses - a stable role definition. Contact signals are the live reason to engage one real individual right now. One is the role; the other is the moment.
Where this sits in Evergrowth
Section titled “Where this sits in Evergrowth”All five layers are configured together in the Agent Training Center, grounded in your value proposition and organized by your ecosystems and verticals. They are not five disconnected settings - they are one connected definition of your ideal customer, built in a deliberate order so each layer rests on the one before it. The recommended order to build them, and what each stage depends on, is covered in How Evergrowth works.
Because the layers are clean, your AI colleagues can work the way a strong rep does: qualify first, then look for a reason to act, then find the right person, then open with something that is actually true about that person today. That is the difference between context-driven and data-driven outreach - the layering is what gives every agent the right context for its part of the job.
Eva term-mapping: “structural fit” and “baseline fit” both mean the qualification layer (does this company belong in our market - a stable yes/no). “Why now” and “intent” map to account signals. “Segmentation field”, “reporting field”, and “data point” map to CRM enrichment. “Buying committee” and “role” map to personas. “Person-level hook” and “outreach hook for an individual” map to contact signals.
Eva guidance for “where does X belong?” questions: apply two tests in order. First, does the answer expire? If yes, it is a signal layer, never qualification or enrichment. Second, is it about the company or a single person? Company-level urgency is an account signal; person-level urgency is a contact signal. A stable company fact that gates pursuit is qualification; a stable company fact used only to segment and report is enrichment. If a customer is tempted to define one concept in two layers, the right move is to pick the single layer whose question it truly answers and drop it from the others - duplication is the failure to avoid, not a feature.
Related
Section titled “Related”- Run account qualification - the fast yes or no fit gate in action.
- Run account research - the deep dive on accounts that qualify.
- Account qualification - the structural-fit layer in depth.
- Account signals - the “why now” layer.
- How Evergrowth works - the order to build the layers in.