Freative Friday - Episode 96 - Insight in Your Hunt for The Revenue Roadmap Pt 2

Sam. Foreign. Welcome to Freedom Friday. Mark Dinolo here, art school MBA and CEO of Sales Globe. And it's that day, the week we get to take a fresh look at creative problem solving for your business and for your life. And last episode we were talking about the revenue roadmap and we were talking about the different layers of the revenue roadmap that help us to drive growth for the business. Layers of insight, sales strategy, customer coverage, and enablement. And in this episode, we're going to take a deep dive into that first layer, which is insight. And I'm going to talk about the four different disciplines within Insight, which are voice of the customer, the macro market environment, competitor performance, and business performance. And the really important thing about insight is we have to know what where we are and what's happening in order to inform those other layers of the revenue revenue roadmap. So to inform our sales strategy, to inform our coverage model, to inform our enablement. So insight is that critical front end piece. Let's look at the second insight discipline, which is macro market environment. This is an area where I see gaps with a lot of leaders because they focus too myopically on their jobs or their functions or their departments and and they don't look more broadly at what's going on in the macro market. So understanding the macro market environment is kind of like checking the weather report before you're planning a critical mission. So it involves understanding the broader trends and the forces that could help you or maybe hinder your progress and getting a view ahead of time so you could do something about it proactively. So this information could include broad economic trends or geopolitical trends or industry trends. Let's look at some questions to ask. What is your CEO looking at and concerned about every day? So knowing what your CEO and C level in general is concerned about is a good indicator of what macro factor is important to your business and what you should be looking at as well. This could include indicators like interest rates, employment data, inflation data, or other industry indicators. And how are they evolving over time? So you want to be thinking about what your C level is thinking about, even if you're focused on something much more specific. A second question, how's the economic environment impacting your customers? Understand how factors like inflation, unemployment, and consumer confidence affect your market and what indicators should you monitor closely? And a third good question. What source of information can you tap into daily or weekly to stay current and proactive rather than reacting? So here I'm talking about easily accessible information. So when you start work in the morning, you already know what's going on and what your C level is thinking about. So here are a few of my favorites. Of course. The Wall Street Journal, great publication. Get it in paper, get it online. The thing to look at is that left hand column. And so that left hand column will tell you what's happening and give you a very quick read even if you can't read the whole paper. So knowing that is probably knowing what your C level is looking at as well. Another one is Worldwide Exchange. That's a podcast put on by CNBC every morning. It comes on at 5am every morning. I'm not up at 5am, but that's when it's broadcast. And then the podcast is available. It's 45 minutes. You can listen to it while you're getting ready for work. And it's awesome because you know exactly what's going on in the financial markets and also in the economy more broadly before you get to work. So that can be super helpful. The FT podcast, Financial Times of London podcast is also a great resource and there's a great website that I like called tradingeconomics.com they have some great statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and also some international stats that allow you to run trends over a period of quarters or years and compare and combine indicators country by country. So some actions to take to lead well, first, take the temperature of the macro market daily, weekly and monthly. Find your favorite resources and and use them. And in addition to what I described earlier, you may also reference industry reports, news more broadly, analyst insights to stay informed and regularly review and update your research sources. Second, engage with industry analysts and attend relevant conferences. So get out there in front of people and see people. Networking with the experts can give you valuable insights and foresight. I get so many ideas and get so much information by being out with people versus just doing things myself or doing things with my team in the office. So build relationships with key analysts for a continuous flow of information. Develop scenario planning exercises to anticipate and prepare for market changes. So with all the information that you have, you should be planning what it means. So if we're watching the trend in interest rates long term, whether that's over the past 20 years or even more recently, over the past say five years, what does it mean for our business if interest rates go up or interest rates go down? So you should be doing scenario planning for your business in these, in these, for these potential events. And then a final idea. Develop scenario planning exercises to anticipate and prepare for market changes. So if you look at questions like inflation rates. Well, how do changes in inflation rates long term and short term, affect our business? So create scenarios and understand, based on all that information you're collecting, what. What it might mean for your business and what you should be doing based on different changes.