How Actionable is Your Market Data? ft. Greg Johnson

Welcome everybody to Sales Globe's Rethink Sales Roundtable. And glad to be here again. We're always talking about different topics as we are thinking about the future of sales. And today we're going to be talking about, interesting one, Michelle, about understanding. Where'd your TAM go? It's like it's April. Do you know where your TAM is?

Right, yeah.

And it's changing, it's moving.

Yep. Very exciting session today about identifying your total addressable market. Huge challenge with everything that's been going on. A little bit about us Sales Globe, who you're talking to today. We are a problem solving firm for sales. We solve the biggest challenges that they have. You see, we've written a few books here, everything from quotas account planning and incentive compensation. And today we're going to be talking about something that impacts quotas, which is your total addressable market, and backing up a little bit. This is part of our whole view on the future of sales. And what everyone is looking at here is we have personified the future of sales and we aptly named this individual foss. And there are 10 different areas that we believe are impacting the future of sales, which we believe is here now. And One of those 10 is opportunity. And that is what we're going to be talking about is market opportunity, how that's changed and how you can identify it moving ahead.

Right, right. And so, you know, a lot of these areas are around sales roles, how we're looking at accounts, talent. But opportunity is one of the big ones who have to know where we're targeting. So we at the end of last year put together 25 predictions for 2021. We actually had 21 predictions for 2021 and then came up with four more.

So I thought 21 was enough.

But two of those were around TAM. So new sales potential data sources are going to be required beyond dollars per fte. So what that means is that, you know, when we look at market data and we say, well, they've got this many white collar workers, this many employees, and so we're going to have a multiplier in terms of dollars for our potential, we can get way beyond that. Now we've got to be a lot more specific about where that opportunity is and what it looks like. And then in terms of industry, industry targeting is going to become a lot more important than general deployment. So it's not just here's the size of our TAM or here's how big each of our territories is, but it's going to be about which industries are coming back. Which ones are hot and where do we need to focus. And as we'll share with you today, that's actually shifting around. So really literally month by month, quarter by quarter that opportunity is changing. So we've got to have a good heat map to understand where we're going to focus.

That's right. And what we're going to be talking about today is one of the biggest challenges around that which is having accurate data. Right. What's the right data and the good data. And so that leads us to our guest today. We are so excited to be announcing a colleague and a friend of ours and also a partner of sales globe Greg Johnson from Corterra, a Moody's analytics company. Greg, welcome today to our roundtable.

Thank you very much. Glad to be here.

So I'm gonna put you on the spot a little bit. Everybody always wants to know who's our guest and what's their deal. We're a big data geek. I love talking to you because you're able to bring it down to something that somebody like me can understand very clearly. Cause I'm not the data geek. I'd love for you to just talk to everyone about what you do at Corterra, a little bit about your journey and the part about not getting off the hook. Just give everybody a fun fact about yourself that they may not know about.

Fun fact. Okay.

Those are always fun to come up with. So I guess just maybe a little bit about. A little bit about Corterra Data World. I've been a part of the data world for a long time and Our founder and CEO Jim Swift I've known for probably almost 20 years, darn near as long as I've known Mark and Michelle and you know the world for Corterra is that of solving a problem that has existed for a very long time and that is the lack of information on privately held businesses. Just some stats. 30, 31 million businesses in North America and of those 15,000 are public. Only 5.8 million have more than one employee. So when you look at that and you consider the fact that 2 to 3,000 businesses are coming and going out of business every day in non Covid times it's a lot of information that's missing and it's basically causing any decision to be inferior because you don't have that information to be made. So Corterra has gone about solving the problem and, and doing it in a completely different and unique way which is ultimately with the Moody's acquisition recently was ultimately why they wanted us and that was to be able to bring a different view of businesses and create a proxy, a suitable proxy for the lack of financial statements in the form of how companies spend. So we have all kinds of information about how they pay and who they are and what they do in terms of the good old fashioned demographic firmographic data. But it's this spend, verified spend that is really insightful in understanding your business. So the journey has been an interesting one. It's been going on now for it's about 16 years to build the data asset from essentially zero to be now over $1.7 trillion worth of B2B spend that's contributed by thousands of companies. And it's a cool model because people are giving you data because you're bringing them things in return in terms of value to run their businesses. And as you build it just gets more interesting and more insightful. So it's been a lot of fun. You know, I always go to the easy ones for my something cool about Greg and it goes back to just family.

So.

And it gets to be a longer story every time. But it started that I'm a dad to four daughters, hashtag girldad. So Kobe Bryant unfortunately made that popular just before his death. So I always say hashtag girldad. And then I now have two grandsons. So there are some men in my life and a wonderful son in law. So finally a little bit of testosterone around me. So that's, that's positive. And two dogs. So when you thought you were done raising kids, now you pick up dogs and you figure out how to try to raise them. So that's my fun fact. When I'm not working, I'm either with my kids or with my, with my pets.

That's great. Thank you so much. Well, we are really, really excited to have you here today. And we're, we have used that data with real clients. We're going to show you some of that today. But first let's talk a little bit about that data. And Mark, I think you're going to, you and Greg will take us through some of this.

Yeah, I think there's so many great views here when you take a look at the information that Corterra has. Greg, this is one that we talked with Jim Swift about a couple of weeks ago. But I just wanted to bring this one back up again. And this is what you guys call a bounce curve. And this is probably the simplest version that we've seen of it. But it basically looks at what's happened since the beginning or really the end of 2019 in terms of overall purchasing of companies. And you can see that bounce or what, you know, that drop early in 2020 and then how we've recovered from that. So it's a very simple line, obviously, but it's showing that V shaped recovery. And one of the big points is everybody's moving at a different speed. But I wonder if you could talk about just the overall picture from what you guys see in this view right now.

Yeah, I mean, it was super exciting to see February going into March. And that's. We're just at the turning point of the 12 months of when things really started going haywire as a result of the pandemic, which can be seen to the further to the left as you go into the bottom in May. But ultimately what this is is the spending by all of the companies that we have information in North America, which is roughly the 5.8 million worth that have more than one employee. So it's $1.7 trillion worth of spend. And essentially it's showing what's happening in terms of month over month growth and looking back over a full year to March of last year. So not only did we go through the extreme downturn in May of 2020, but but now we're actually up to the tune of 14.5% over March of 2020. So I look at March as it's pre Covid at some level. It's sort of beginning of COVID I guess is the way to say it. But it was before shutdown.

Right.

So super positive in that regard because it means the economy's doing real well. And a lot of economists look at it and they say, let's look at consumer spending as the driver and predictor of the world where the economy's going. And we look at it a little differently because if you think through it, what we buy as consumers, you can't buy until a company creates it. So there's B2B spend that precedes consumer spending. So I think this is actually a predictor, an indicator of where things are going. Now we've got more refrigerators that are going to be available. So people are going to be buying refrigerators again. You can just pick up the different things that are starting to move. Yeah, super interesting and fun to see this happen. The other thing we saw on the backside was a bit more of a convergence. So the little companies caught up to the big companies in growth, where there was a wide gap, where the big companies were killing it back in sort of that what it looks like. The September, October, November Frame we saw the big companies were driving it. Now the small companies are starting to come back as we start to reopen in some areas. So pretty interesting, fun to see.

So this is an overall big positive picture here. And what we looked at, another view that we looked at with Jim was levels of the supply chain. So manufacturing, distribution, retail. And you could see some differences there, but you could see where it's catching up. I think we looked at this months and months ago. We saw that the manufacturing wasn't quite keeping up, but now that's caught up. So when you look at it from a supply chain view, that tells a really great story as well.

The only thing I'll say is, you know, I always, I was caution on this because this is just the high level and these are the companies that are succeeding. The sad, desperate, terrible stories of company failures are bigger than ever below that 14.5% growth. So it's, it's a tale of two cities. I mean, the great divide, right? I mean the divide has gotten bigger between success and failure of companies. So there's so many bad stories and just tragedies of businesses that have been around for a long time that lost their business life to this pandemic. So great in one regard and there's still a lot of really tragic things going on below that.

So if you look at this as a marketer, as a sales organization, and let's take a look at the next view here. You talk about tale of two cities, but we also see a lot of, a lot of different things going on by industry as well. And so we've got some great views here of the spending increases and the spending decreases. But I wanted to see if we could talk a little bit about who's up and who's down. And you know, you can see at the top here you've got commercial equipment, wholesale, you've got electronic wholesale, electronics, you've got non store Internet retailers. So a lot of the ones you would expect to be at the top, religious organizations. I think it's kind of interesting. We saw two before. Like we saw religious organizations, alcohol and ambulatory medical services.

Psychology, that one, I.

Guess we've had a lot of fun going through this data for sure.

But yeah, let's talk about. And of course at the bottom here coming up, which is like 25.9% increase construction of buildings, which we're seeing everywhere, a lot of construction, lumber prices going up. But let's talk about some of the ones that are up, Greg. And what do you see and what does that mean for sales organizations as they think about where their markets are shifting?

Yeah, and I was going to say I'm going to actually start with that piece, Mark, because I think when we talk through this, what you see is it changes so rapidly right now. Things that went one way six months ago are going in a completely different direction now as things change. And from a sales perspective, it means your TAM is moving all over the place. I mean, it went from milk that was being brought to homes in small cartons to milk that, I'm sorry, milk that is being bought for, you know, Disneyland and places like that and cruise ships to milk that was bought by cartons. If you think about that, it's different for the milk producer and it's different for the actual packaging company. Right. So things like that, I mean specifics you mentioned building, building continues to take off because I actually have some updated fresh data, real fresh data here. And that's actually now up again. The next, with the next sort of 30 days worth of data, it's up 26.5%. So that's continuing to increase. One that isn't even on there left to the top, which is water transportation. Now I don't know if that's because the Suez Canal finally opened up or not, but that was a transportation.

I got it.

That was good. That was a big laugh. I get it. No worries. Let's see, non store retailers, 52% starting to go back down a little bit.

Right.

And that's because people are starting to think about going back to their boutiques and that type of thing. So we're starting to see more back in the brick and mortar than it was. I don't think it'll ever get back all the way to where it was, but it's certainly leveling anyway. Wholesale electronics markets and agents. So wholesale was up 59, it's now up 51, which is still pretty strong. But you can see it's still starting to finally temper a little bit. And that's one that we just, we've been sitting there saying, man, how can this thing keep going like that? How many computers can companies buy? But it's going to be interesting because now the world of things like you know, the electronics that are going into, in the componentry, that's going into fancy refrigerators and stuff as those start to get ramped up in manufacturing. So it would be interesting to see what happens next in that regard.

And at the same time you got a shortage of semiconductors, right. So you've got refrigerators, cars, everything has Semiconductors in it and we're seeing a shortage there in terms of production.

And that's become one of the bigger drivers of success or failure of a business is their supply chain. They're completely dependent on it. Manufacturing has been either living or dying by supply chain now for the last 13 months. So super interesting there.

So as a sales organization, as you look at information like this, depending on obviously what industry you're in and what you're selling, you should be able to look out at your segments and see which ones are moving. And as you're thinking about where your TAM is moving, that's going to tell you what's up and what the trends are. And then also as you're getting down to the level of territories, goal setting, that's going to fold into it as well. To that point we made earlier that the general deployment is kind of yielding to more targeted deployment by market.

And I think if Mark, if you take that list there of whatever 10 or 12 in either one of those lists and you think of that as a rep level and okay, that's my account list. The same volatility is at a territory level.

Yes.

At an industry level or at a macroeconomic level. So understanding what's moving and changing and who's doing well or who's not is driving what, where the difference is. If you think about forecasting and is this deal going to close? Well, if all of a sudden the industry took a dive, then okay, things are going to change and they're going to start tightening up. This week I heard more conversations about companies that were pulling back, who are booming, packaging companies booming, but they're pulling back by fear of interest rates going up. So that's the volatility. We've never seen it so volatile.

Right.

But to your point, it affects your reps greatly and it certainly affects your strategy. Strategy in the sales organization, the marketing organization, the product organization, potentially depending on what different markets need for different products. So there's a ripple effect across the entire organization.

So you've got to have this for people that are listening to this, you got to have this at the high level. So you got to know overall where you're heading directionally. And that'll help with your overall targeting, your overall messaging, your positioning, what you're selling. But then, Greg, what you're saying, saying, which we totally agree with, you've got to have it down at the rep level, down to the account level. So you've got to be able to, as a rep, look at your territory and know where the Hotspots are so that you can focus. Let's take a look at the opposite here, which is the spending decreases and the top one here, which you talked about earlier, that actually is improving petroleum and coal products, manufacturing. I heard this morning that all of the major petroleum and oil companies are. Are up in terms of their stock performance. So that one is starting to shift around a bit. But it sounds like that one's improving.

Yeah, it definitely is. In fact, we've.

With the latest data, we've seen it move. So it's still down year over year, but only slightly. So it's down only 4.9% compared to the 12% 30 days ago. So definitely a rebound.

And food service and drinking places is now positive.

It just didn't make your top list on the other side because it wasn't quite at the growth of more than 25% to make the top sort of 20 list there. But so that. That's changing, which isn't necessarily a surprise as much as given reopening and what's going on.

But then I expect that amusement gambling.

And recreation, with all the announcements this.

Week, combination of Disney and things like.

That, that's gonna drop right away. Heck, all you had to do was look at the NFL draft last night. Holy cannoli. I was like, what the heck that.

Whether Covid's alive or not, that'll be.

A determining factor, but that's going to drive things going up.

Yep. Kentucky Derby's this weekend, right. I heard the hotels are 65% capacity versus like 99 or 100%, but still good bourbon sales. Not quite what they were, but, you know, leading indicator perhaps. And then down at the bottom here, Greg, you see some of them, like air transportation, rail transportation, accommodations, the ones we'd expect to be down actually. Accommodations on this list down 66%. Air transport down 31, rail transport down 32. But we can see that that's picking up. Air transport, obviously the prices are going up on air transportation as well.

Yeah, Accommodations is now down only 30% month over month.

Oh, that's big. That's a big change.

And then air transport is down only 24%. So that too is starting to come back. And you got to rem. Air transportation was the absolute bottom.

They were even below accommodations before.

And so we've seen with the increase in travel that's gone on just in the last, I'll say two months, 60 days, where we've seen more than a million people at one point going through tsa and now it's way more than that that's coming back, which is positive.

Interestingly, at the bottom this time in.

Terms of the spending decreases, is performing arts and Spectator Sports down 45%. So that's intriguing to see that that's down now. I would have expected it to be going up.

They announced Broadway is going to be.

Opening up in July or September, I think, which one? So that'll be coming back as well. But again, just driving a shift in where your focus is.

And those are the companies, at some.

Point they're going to be deciding, do.

I now invest ahead of the surge?

Right. So you're going to see that the leading indicators, the sports facilities, if they're going to open up. Roger Goodell said, hey, we're going to open up all the stadiums. They get to start thinking about putting food back in those places. Right. They're going to be buying Pepsi and Coke and beer and loading those things up at some point in advance of the opening. So you got these leading indicators are going to come and it's going to say, hey, we're getting ready for the people that are going to come to these stages.

Great point. So we can tell where things are heading, so we can prepare for that. So this is telling us where the puck is going, so to speak.

Yeah. Using different data to give you insights to the market. So one of the things that we know is that there's two things that you need, right? You need really good data, you need great insights and it needs to be accurate. And the other thing is a really good process. Right. That you can actually execute upon. So, Mark, you want to take us through a little bit about our view on territories in tam.

Right. And Greg, this is actually something that we had worked on together on a few projects as well. And so we'll talk about two sides here. There's the market opportunity side, which we're talking about, which is your tam, your total addressable market, and then there's the sales capacity side. But first, the market opportunity side. When you look at this kind of information, if you go to the very top of what you see at the chart here, with that little telescope, you can get a US level, and we're assuming us here in this conversation, but a US level view of the market, heat mapping, where we think the opportunities are. So you can take a strategic view and you can say, I can see by industry what geographies are moving and where we might need to start to shift our focus in terms of what we're doing. And then that is, that's good from a strategy standpoint, but it's got to be useful from a deployment and from a sales standpoint. So coming from the bottom up, if you take your target segments, you can see little people there, your target segments, you can get account level information, which we'll talk about in a minute or two here, but account level information to be able to then put together and append with your actual company information. So if I have information on my customers or I even have information on my prospects from another data source, you could take your data and append to that and we can start to approximate what that looks like nationally, but at the account level. So we can start to build that up. So there's kind of this magic that happens, having the overall strategic view, but it's not enough just to say we know where the big TAM is in the market, but then having that tactical view to be able to bubble that up and say, okay, we know exactly where to go, where to put our salespeople and we can put together our messaging and our offer and our deployment with that.

Yeah. And I think, Mark, you know one thing that always hits me on this, it's, it's understanding what, where are you going? And I'm actually surprised in a lot of conversations when I'll talk to sales leaders and it's, you know, what are your primary areas that you're going after? What do those companies look like? Can you tell me the name of a company or could you give me a list of 50 companies that represent that company that you need to go after with that product that's driving the most revenue, the most profit, whatever it is, that is the driver for you. So that notion of the company level Persona to be able to look first out at the market opportunity and say, where do I find those? And then to boil it down, as you said, to the, you know, to the company targets at a company level specifically.

So Michelle, you were talking about a situation earlier, actually one of our clients where, you know, they can see where the market's moving, but actually how their customers are using their products.

Right.

Is changing based on the current environment.

Yeah. So when you think about the company Persona, don't underestimate that that's changed. So first of all, don't assume it's accurate. Secondly, don't assume that it has not changed because of the past year. So Mark, you're talking about a global company that what they do is they provide office equipment. So think about printers and computers and monitors, anything that an organization needs. And they target white collar workers to enable their operations and in an office environment. And now because of the pandemic, everybody is aware of this, right? There's a certain percentage of companies and it's a fairly high percentage globally that are moving into a hybrid model. So that means that now the value proposition of this company, which really was all about efficiency, the ability to handle the load being very fast, affordable, not a lot of break fix going on. Now it's changed, and it's okay. We need our people to be able to work seamlessly, whether they're in an office or they're working from home or somewhere else. Completely changes the Persona, I would think. And what your opportunity can really look.

Like in the market you said has changed, it has changed. And the other question is if it has changed. Have you changed your Persona? Have you changed where you're going?

That's right.

Need to change. Right. And I think about my mind as.

A salesperson and I gather a lot.

Of intelligence by talking to the companies, talking to people, but usually my conversations are lagging. A strategic decision by the company or an event or a change in direction by the company. And it's lacking, you know, it's lagging by at least two phases. So that's where this data becomes important. As regularly as you can get it to see what's happening, doing the changes. Because to your point, if the Persona hasn't changed, it may need to change. How do you predict that before you get on the phone and have somebody actually tell you that it's changed?

So do not assume everybody. Big takeaway. Do not assume that the company Persona that you have today is what it should be. Based on what's happened over the last 12 months. What are some other challenges? Let's talk about some challenges that we have with the data that's available today. Greg, you and I were having a conversation about this. Why don't you enlighten everyone? Some is obvious, but some may not be as obvious.

Yeah. So I'll personalize it first by saying I learned these differences only by being absolutely buried in the data all day long, every day for three, five, seven years. And I would never have thought of it until I got as deep as I have even in the last. So some basic things, the stuff that I always used, zip code that was pretty predictable. But by pulling in a zip code, the NAICS codes are the sick codes. And then filtering by number of employees and annual sales. If you took a population, pick a number, 100, and then you filter it by NAICS code. And let's just say, you know for a fact that that total addressable market is 100 companies. As soon as you filter it by NAICS code out of the 1057 sick codes and I've used like 11 or 1200 NAICS codes, you immediately lose probably 20 or 30% of that. Why? Because SIC codes and NAICS code aren't accurate. There's no data governance. There are a lot of them. The actual words in the codes, electronic decipher, it's a lot of them are there from a long time ago.

Right?

Then you go into the number of employees. Now you slice it by number of employees. You would, if again it's going in, if you knew the outcome, you would chop off another 20 or 30% because you'd lose those that weren't properly modeled to get the right annual sales.

Right.

The only numbers you can get annual or the only companies you can get annual sales sales on that are accurate are publicly traded companies. 15,000 out of 30 million. Even if it's 15,000 out of 5.8 million, that one employee is still not going to be accurate. And we, whether it's Corterra, Dun and Bradstreet, Equifax, Experian, Tu, you could go through Infousa, ZoomInfo, Discover. Org, any of those guys. Anybody who has annual sales numbers either buys them from somebody like us that manufactures them or we model them. Right. And what happens? And I finally geeked out a little bit and said I gotta dig into Tesla for a minute because I heard that Tesla can manufacturer cars start to finish in three hours. It's like holy cow, that's stunning.

Wow, that is, that's crazy.

But then I had to say how long does it take a Ford Mustang to be built? Arguably not as technologically, you know, advanced as a Tesla, 30 hours. The models that we and everybody else like us as data providers create take nothing in the way of account into account for efficiency. So our number of employees and or annual sales, if you take then you know, the annual sales which is the good old number of employees times you know the average or some metric that you can get from the 15,000 companies in revenue per employee out the window it goes. So there's, there's just, there's huge challenges with it and I forever thought my reps aren't good at prospecting. They can't do this, they can't, you know, all the different things or marketing stinks and they can't get me good stuff or they nobody's getting this addressable market right or my territory layout, nobody can, you know, it's like no, it's not that they're bad. It's the tools they have, most of us had, like I had were inferior. The data was, was inherently inaccurate. And data is inaccurate, right? Even our spend data, it's verified spend data. But there are some things with it that I don't get an invoice with all of the things on it. Like you get at Publix, when I go grocery shopping, I get a total. So if I have vegetables and beer, those are two different markets. But I'm gonna have to put one total number into a market, right? So they're inherently flawed. Data is inherently flawed. So you have to get more of it and you have to apply more technology to it to get more out of it. And the more of both of those you do, your results are always going to get better. All the technology you want to junk data get any more, there's a cap on it can only do so much.

So my sense, Greg, is that we're talking kind of at a 301401 level here when a lot of companies are at the 101 level. So just the picture that we showed before of the market opportunity, just being able to fill out that picture and is a challenge for a lot of companies because people are still just pulling out their account list and just, you know, going at it randomly. So if you take the other side, so we talked about market opportunity, the other side is sales capacity. So you talked about reps, good enough, et cetera. This is where you take this information and you convert that into your territory, designs your deployment. And also you're considering those things like sales capacity and your staffing plan. And so we've been talking for a while about the idea that sales capacity is going to be changing as sales models change, as we're looking at maybe hybrid instead of people just being on the road all the time, that changes capacity, average sales price changes capacity. The fact that geographic boundaries don't matter as much changes capacity. So putting these two sides together is a very complete picture and I think a challenge for a lot of organizations to do that. Well, yeah, so I want to show a little bit of reality because everybody's probably wondering, okay, well we're talking at a high level here. So I want to pull up a couple of examples, Greg. And these are from actual projects where we're looking at TAM and looking at territories and of course goals. And this one here, and this is Corterra information. This one here is looking at the account level opportunity for shipping or logistics services. So this is a company that provides logistics and shipping services for and this is one of their segments, the food segment. So what it shows you and there's a couple of companies shown here, there's Schreiber Foods and there's link snacks. And what it's showing you is shipping information for truckload less than truckload parcel. It's not just as you said, the total, the shopping list but let's talk about what, what they actually can see here.

So in this, these are, this is an example, this is sort of the page one of a report that we generate. The use case tends to be used by credit managers. So there's things like credit scores and payment behavior things but the spend data is applicable to anybody and regardless of the format it comes up in valuable. But ultimately what we're doing is we're saying for Schreiber Foods as an example, we got $312 million worth of total known spend over the last 12 months. And we're going to break that down into it's really four higher level categories which are materials, operations, shipping and then we do have another for some catch alls and below that we've got 45 total different categories. So each one of those sub segments has further subsegmented into 45 total categories. And what this is looking at is saying hey, for the last 12 months this company shrunk has spent $56 million with companies that are reporting to Corterra and That is up 1.4% year over year.

Right.

So that's growth, interestingly. And I just looked at the upper right hand corner of those reports. So those were back I guess when we were probably working on this. They're back from April 2020.

Right.

So as I watch a couple of these companies that I use all the time to talk through these, it's been amazing to watch their spend in each one of these categories change. And you watch it like food going through a snake. You watch materials go down, operations go down, shipping goes down, materials go back up, operations goes up, shipping. And all that is you think about that's just the workflow. I take my raw materials in, I run my business, I ship it out the door. If I'm a manufacturer, I can tell you a lot of things about that business without doing much. They clearly have raw materials. And if I looked down into the detail, the subcategories to materials, I'd see what it is. I'd probably realize that it's not building company or it's not a construction company, they're running their business. And by looking at the categories of spend there, I can tell what they're using to run their business. And then shipping, you can learn a whole lot about that. And that shipping is actually get all your carrier related spend, but then we have fleet related spend. So Shriver very well might have carriers where they're using primary carriers to move product, or they might have their own.

For local distribution with some commercial vehicles of their own.

Yeah, yeah.

So.

So as we get into the challenge that the, the client here, our client was trying to solve for it was this. They didn't have very good data other than history to understand what their market opportunity was. And because of, you know that the client that they serve and they're a logistics company, we were able to leverage the CORA data to help them understand market opportunity at the account level. And we were able to run heat maps and show them where opportunity was. And they built their entire coverage model strategy around that. So what, what one of the take another takeaway here then I would say is you've got to understand to the point that Greg was making earlier what your company Persona is, who it is that you're serving, because that will help you understand the right data that you can use to supplement data that you may already have.

So I wanted to ask another question. This is just another view here, Greg. This one is a company that sells food packaging and so they're looking at food producers. Well, here again is Schreiber Foods and what they purchase for packaging and the trend on that as well. And you talked about the different categories that you can access. But even if it's not one of those categories, it seems like these things could be indicators for what your products might be. So if I'm selling semiconductors or I'm selling business machines, whatever it might be, I could look at a few things. I could look at the trending and the leading indicators by industry like we saw before, and I could know where things are getting better. And then I could also probably. And as a question for you, I could probably look at some of these categories even if they're not direct matches for what I sell. And I could probably use them to estimate what I sell.

Right.

And what the demand might be.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, it's. If you think about, I always use a restaurant as an example.

Right.

And some people say I'm not fun to go to restaurants with because I'm always looking around for logos and whatnot. And I do. But if you think about walking into a restaurant and assume, you assume you know what the restaurant is. But assume you're looking at something that says just the categories of spend, and you see things like alcohol, Pepsi, Coke, produce, food, toiletries, uniforms, linens, CO2 to pump the soda and the beer through. All of a sudden you look at that and you're like, oh, yeah, they're not building steel structures so you can start to see what they are. And I don't have to know that they're buying Pepsi or Coke. I don't need to know that. But if I'm selling Pepsi or coke or the alcohol, and I see that they've got uniforms and food and all these other things that would indicate a food establishment, I know it's there. I do it all the time. The transportation space is fun because you can look at, like building wood products is one on that list. If I pulled that company up right now and looked at their shipping spend, I bet you 10 bucks that they have the full truckload spend. And I can tell you that without even looking at the full truckload spend, I'd tell you it's a flatbed full truckload. Why? Because it's the only way to move lumber. I could put it in a box, you know, I can put it in a small car. You can move as much in one. One with one truck, you know, one cab as you possibly can. But you see it all the time.

So it's that.

How can you interpret. It's a great. It's fun. You start looking at it and it's. You can geek out pretty quickly on it, I guess, but easy to look for.

So what's the. What's the practical application of this level of information? When you get down to the, say, the sales manager level or the rep level, what should they have? Should they have just the account list? Should they have access to this kind of information? At this level of detail, what's really practical in terms of using it in.

A sales organization to educate a rep? I don't want my reps to have to figure out how to read this report. My reps here have to learn how to read this report. But outside of my business, I wouldn't want them to get into that. So it's, how do you get the data? Number one, where do you get it? And there's, there's, you know, that we have the spend data. There's other types of different data that are interesting as well. We think this is pretty predictive.

But.

But how do you get that data? How do you somehow put it in the control of somebody with tools that allow Them to maximize. Right. Because the first cut could be I want everybody who has packaging spend.

That's it.

Okay, that's good. It's going to get you pretty, pretty far. Intent data is another one that's out there. Intent is cute. That probably is better than NAICS codes and sick codes. But intent data doesn't mean they bought it. This means they bought it. But then you could go on and say, okay, how do I take 45 categories of spend and look at anyone that had packaging spend and say what are the top five categories of spend outside of packaging? And then sort all the others and say I'm going to find anybody with these five top categories because there's a high probability that there's packaging and you could, you could drive it down to all kinds of analytics to do it with super powerful stuff. We do it all the time. But that's not usually in the wheelhouse for most marketing or sales website. You start by just looking at, you know, find those with the categories you've got and then see what you can do to build the talent and or leverage the resources across your organization with people that are doing other business intelligence, bi type of activities and see what you can do to get even more out of the data or use tools from, you know, companies like us that have other tools that do all that.

For you if you want it.

But there's whatever data it's. How do you get more unique data and then apply technology to it to extract the real value from it?

So we started at really high level about with those, those bounce curves. We looked at industry and then we started to drill down to, you know, what the account level looks like here. You can see how you start to put some of these pieces together at the territory level. So some of the big factors, we're just showing five factors here. So your coverage model, we talked, Michelle, about the idea that those are changing coverage models are changing and we're tracking how that's evolving and obviously working with companies to develop their models. Moving ahead, you've got considerations of reach and density. So how far can somebody get geographically to cover these opportunities? Again, that's changing because we have virtual or hybrid selling models. Density, we've got, you know, higher density, metro areas that we've got to think about and what's happening to those. Right. So that may be maybe shifting as well.

Yeah, there's been a shift, hasn't there in some of these high density areas?

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, it's to that point we can't assume things are going to stay the same. So does, does the density of purchase in those areas change at all? Then you've got the big question of sales capacity, which we've talked about. So headcount, talent level, amount of time available to sell, workload, to sell, that type of thing. And then ultimately then you've got deployment, which is where are we going to put people given all these factors? So, you know, I just want to kind of paint that picture or bring it together that we've got that super high level. Then we get down to industry, then we get down to account level Persona, and then we say, okay, now we have to put people out there. What are the big factors we're going to consider? So I think, you know, when you look at it, soup to nuts, a lot of these pieces come together and this kind of information can really enhance your approach. Not just on overall market targeting, but getting down to the actual execution.

You know, it's making me think about not just the company Persona, but the buyer Persona. So I think that that may have changed too. When you think about the value proposition, what it is that they're solving for, it just may have shifted based on some of the things that you're mentioning there, Mark, that are impacting companies that are buying like reach. Where are buyers? How is their organization structured now? Right. What's happening? So I think taking a really close look at not just the company buyer, but, sorry, not just the company Persona, but the buyer Personas, how they may have changed. We know that pre pandemic, an average of seven individuals involved in the B2B sale, has that changed? So I think we need to be asking a lot of different questions around that.

You know, as we were talking to one of our think tanks as well, we were talking about the idea that people getting back into the field is varying by industry. It's also varying by demographic and age group as well. So, you know, Greg, a lot of people like us who are like, ready to get back on the road, but what we're also hearing from clients is people that are maybe a little younger than us are going, oh, I'm doing just fine, working virtually. And then you flip it around, you talk about buyer Persona. Well, the buyer, how does the buyer feel? How are they going to act? Are those buyers like us? You know, you got to come and come and see me, or are they going to be, you know, like the other generation that's saying, hey, you know, just let's, let's get on a virtual call or a video call and we could do it that way. So those, those things are all going to shift around a bit.

I don't know. I've got a very young millennial over here, production manager, rolling her eyes at us right now. So it's not a one size fits all. But Mark is right. We gotta be taking a close look at the buyers. I, you know, I've just got them on my mind because we, we often ignore the buyer Persona in the pursuit of company. And I just think that both are very important. So, you know, as we, as we wrap this up, what we're saying is the data that's out there. Well, we do know the historical data is probably not so good anymore. It's not an indicator of what the future TAM can look like, because we've mentioned things more than just the inaccuracy of that data, but that you're market may have changed, your company Persona may have changed because people's business models are changing. Right. And then just what they buy is changing and how they operate. So you got to really look at that. And what we're saying is some of the data could still be good, but append it and look at other sources of data by looking at your company Persona and get the best match for your company based on that.

Exactly.

Well, Greg, any other words of wisdom as we're, as we're winding this up in terms of how we're looking at our tam?

You know, I think we've covered a lot of stuff today, but I think it is one thing you said most resonated with me, Mark, was a lot of companies, if you go to the super sophisticated, a lot of companies can't handle that. And I talk to companies all day that are still doing things in a somewhat prehistoric approach, but it was because they're focused on delivering product, not on building infrastructure.

Right.

But there's like anything, there are all kinds of different levels of improvement that you can get and just challenge yourself to approach it differently, bring in people that are willing to geek out and talk about it and help you guys. We've had a lot of fun talking with all kinds of different projects with you guys and just sharing knowledge. And there are a lot of folks like us out there on the data side who are geeks in the data world, but sales folks at heart that are certainly willing to talk about it and just challenge yourself to do it differently. I think that's the key. The millennial production manager over there is. That's the group that we got to dig in other people that understand the data and they're going to guide us, but great stuff.

Yeah, exactly. Right. And, you know, for everyone listening, please feel free to contact us at Sales Globe because we've got materials to support our conversation today with Greg and more detailed information. So we'll actually show you a process that you can walk through on your own as you're looking at your total addressable market. So please be sure to connect with us on that. Check out our podcast. We're on stage, Spotify. We're on itunes. We're anywhere you listen to a podcast. And please be sure to talk to us about your greatest tough challenges, Corterra and salesglobe. We're here to help. But, you know, in the meantime, look through all that data and everybody have a fantastic weekend.

Great. And Greg, thank you for joining us. I appreciate your input.

Yeah, thanks so much.

Thanks for having.

Thanks, everybody.