Read the terrain without preparing for the fight
And you size a market that the status quo will keep.
Scope 01 · Understand· Strategy · Disciplines 01 to 03
Read the board before you move a piece.
Where the margin pools, who you really lose to, who actually signs. Three questions most teams answer by accident.
Where this scope sits01 / 04
Prepare for the fight without knowing who's paying
And your ROI argument lands with the wrong seat.
Map the buying table without reading the terrain
And you know everyone in a segment that cannot pay you.
Every later decision rests on these three. Positioning, pricing, the roadmap, the launch plan: each assumes you know the market, the fight and the buying table. Most teams believe they do. Look closer and they have borrowed a market number, inherited a list of rivals from the CRM, and drawn a portrait of one buyer.
Understand is about reading, not deciding. It produces no feature and no campaign, so it is the first thing to be skipped when the quarter gets busy. That is exactly where the revenue starts to leak.
Why these three belong together?
Each discipline covers the blind spot of the other two.
Together, they give you one readable board: where the money stays, what you are really up against, and who has to agree.
Interactive
Check your Understand scope
Three questions, one per discipline. Yes, or not yet.
01
Can you name a decision your market brief changed last quarter?
HoldingFragile02
Does win-loss change your roadmap or your pricing, or does it just fill a field in the CRM?
HoldingFragile03
For your key segments, can you name what each seat at the buying table fears?
HoldingFragile / 3 holding
Where to start
01 · Map the Terrain
Read the market as it is, not as the pitch deck needs it.
Where to start
02 · Get Ready for a Fight
Your biggest competitor is the customer who does nothing.
Where to start
03 · Know Who's Paying
Someone signs, someone recommends, someone blocks.
Holding
Next: Shape
Understand is reading. Shape is deciding: the ground you own, the way you reach buyers, the way you make money.
Scope 02 · ShapeNothing you enter is stored or sent.
01Market insights
Map the Terrain
Read the market as it is, not as the pitch deck needs it.
Understand your ecosystem, your market and what moves in it. Find where the margin pools, which segment you can reach with the channels, brand and cost structure you have, and what will change it next. Revenue tells you where money moves. Margin tells you where it stays. They are rarely the same place.
If you cannot build the number from the bottom up, you do not understand the market yet: you have only borrowed a number.
What it takes
- Size the market bottom-up, from real buyer counts and real deal sizes, not from an analyst's top-down figure.
- Separate the market that is real from the market that is real for you, given your channels, brand and cost structure, and be willing to kill an opportunity on that basis.
- Map where the margin pools, not just where the revenue is.
- Keep a living market view, with dated catalysts, that the executive team actually plans from.
What good looks like
A living market view that the executive team uses for planning.
The pattern
Same board, two readings. One company read where the margin was, the other where the money moved, and only one of them was building a durable business.
- The question to start with
- Do you keep a live market brief, with dated catalysts and segment data, and can you name a decision it changed last quarter?
02Competitive intelligence and the status quo
Get Ready for a Fight
Your biggest competitor is the customer who does nothing.
Know your real competitors: who you beat, who beats you, and how often the deal dies with no decision at all. Doing nothing requires no consensus. Buying requires everyone to agree at the same time. Between 40 and 60 percent of qualified pipeline is lost to a customer who never said yes or no.
Your CRM is lying about who you lost to: logged loss reasons matched reality only 15 percent of the time.
What it takes
- Name what prospects use instead of you today, including the spreadsheet and the manual process.
- Put the cost of inaction in the buyer's own numbers: hours lost, revenue leaked, risk carried.
- Run win-loss as a system: read the loss reasons instead of assuming them, and let them change the roadmap or the pricing.
What good looks like
An ROI argument your champion can defend internally without you in the room.
The pattern
One company sold time and fought the status quo. Its rival fought its named competitors, and it did not end well.
- The question to start with
- Do you run structured win-loss interviews on your meaningful deals, and does what you learn actually change the roadmap or the pricing?
03Buyer and customer knowledge
Know Who's Paying
Someone signs, someone recommends, someone blocks.
Name your buyer, your champion and your blockers, including the prescribers outside the building. Then translate your value into the signer's language: margin, risk, headcount, time to revenue. The sentence that kills a deal is almost always one you could have answered in writing three weeks earlier.
You drew a portrait of one person. What you needed was a map of a negotiation.
What it takes
- Map the buying table for each key segment: who signs, who recommends, who blocks, and what each one fears.
- Translate value into the signer's language, not into features.
- Collect customers' exact words and let them shape messaging and product.
- Multi-thread every meaningful deal. One champion is a single point of failure: multi-threading lifts win rates by roughly 130 percent on deals over 50,000 dollars.
What good looks like
A buyer knowledge base that sales, marketing and product all draw from.
The pattern
The same tool, sold as one all-in-one platform, was hard to sell, price and grow. Split into the jobs around the table and priced per job, its revenue roughly tripled.
- The question to start with
- For your key segments, can you map the full buying table, including the prescribers outside the building, and name what each seat fears?
Where is your board blurry?
Score your company on all twelve disciplines in a few minutes.