Own the Space, Then Predict the Revenue

Define your market before you try to dominate it. 

Before you go to market, do your marketing to test it. Understand the space you’re going into, and how that connects to Predictive Revenue.

Most companies expanding into a new geography make the same mistake. They take the playbook that’s worked at home, drop it into a completely different environment, and expect the same results.

On paper, it’s logical. In reality, it’s a fast route to confusion, missed targets and a lot of expensive dinners that never turn into deals.

You can’t own a space you haven’t defined. And you can’t define it by instinct alone.

Why definition comes first

Own the Space is a philosophy built on the idea that you choose where to compete and shape that space in your favour before you try to dominate it. In a new market, that’s even more critical. You’re not just competing for share of voice; you’re establishing what your voice even is in that market — how it sounds, who it speaks to, and why anyone should listen.

That means understanding far more than the surface-level facts of geography and sector. You need to get under the skin of how business is done there. Who holds influence. What urgency looks like. Which buying signals actually lead somewhere, and which are just polite conversation.

And the only reliable way to learn that is to put marketing in first. Not as a support act for sales, but as the lead. Marketing becomes your reconnaissance. Your market-mapping exercise. Your stress-test for messaging, positioning and channels.

Marketing as the market-maker

When you lead with marketing, you’re not just chasing leads. You’re observing the behaviour that will define your commercial reality in that space. Which channels prompt a response. What objections come up early. How quickly or slowly prospects move towards something tangible.

Done with discipline, that early activity gives you the intelligence you need to mark the edges of your map. That’s Own the Space in a new market: you decide where the borders are, who’s inside them, and how you’ll occupy them.

Where Predictive Revenue takes over

Once the space is defined, it’s time to operationalise it. That’s where Predictive Revenue comes in. Predictive Revenue is a framework for aligning marketing, sales, and leadership around one commercial outcome: sustainable revenue growth. By tracking every deal stage and using data to identify what’s working (and what isn’t), companies can forecast more accurately and act more strategically. Internationally, it ensures you’re not relying on instinct alone, but on measurable progress from day one.

Own the Space defines the opportunity.
Predictive Revenue turns it into a process.

The temptation in a new market is to loosen the rules because “it’s different here.” And maybe it is. But you can’t let that assumption drive your approach before the data confirms it. You run the same gated sales process you know works elsewhere, from day one. Only then can you start to see what’s genuinely different and what’s just a new coat of paint on the same patterns you’ve seen before.

A story from the other side

I’ve seen what happens when you skip the definition stage. There’s a project I remember vividly: a technology that was technically brilliant, built with years of expertise. The problem was that nobody had bothered to confirm if there was a viable market for it. They’d engineered the product before they’d defined the space. 

It failed. not because the technology wasn’t good, but because they didn’t know who it was for, why they’d buy it, or how much they’d pay. That’s the cost of missing the Own the Space stage.

When Predictive Revenue is layered on top, that risk drops dramatically. You’re not guessing. You’re not chasing shiny opportunities that “feel” promising. You’re working from a defined market space with a measurable, repeatable process for turning it into revenue.

Perhaps the most famous example of this isn’t even true.

You’ve probably heard that during the Space Race, NASA allegedly spent millions developing a pen that worked upside down in space, while Soviet cosmonauts simply grabbed a pencil. The truth is more mundane but more instructive. NASA did not fund the project; instead, an American inventor named Paul C. Fisher privately developed what became the Fisher Space Pen. NASA later tested and purchased it, but only after identifying real safety and operational needs (graphite dust, flammability, tool fragments in zero gravity) that disqualified pencils. 

The point isn’t that one side was smarter than the other; It’s that the tool only mattered once the operational space was clearly defined. NASA didn’t ignore a simpler solution (pencils); they evaluated it and ruled it out on safety and performance grounds. The space pen only succeeded because there was clarity about the challenge and discipline in choosing the solution. That’s what defining the space and aligning your process can help you do before you spend six figures and burn months building whatever feels technologically “cool.”

The international advantage

The beauty of pairing Own the Space with Predictive Revenue in an international context is that it gives you clarity before you commit. You’re not locking yourself into a market you don’t fully understand. You’re probing, testing, measuring, and only scaling when you know the terrain.

Done correctly, by the end of your first year in a new market, you’ve got more than a presence. You’ve got a defined space you can claim, a process that fits, and the first wave of hard data showing what’s real and what’s noise.

That’s when the optimism becomes tangible. That’s when you can truly say you’re on the path to owning the space and predicting the revenue.