/sales-radar

Name

sales-radar

Description

Builds and maintains a personalized watch list of sales information sources - podcasts, newsletters, communities, benchmark reports, and sales people to follow - matched to the user's role, market, and time budget, shipped as a dated verified-source snapshot with per-source status and a freshness check that catches rebranded or dead sources. Covers B2B SaaS and B2C high-ticket as separate ecosystems. Use whenever the user mentions sales newsletters, sales podcasts, who to follow in sales, sales communities, staying current in sales, or refreshing a reading list, even without the word radar. Do NOT use for career or interview prep (mbfinotti/sales-skills@sales-career).

License

MIT

author

Maya-Beth Finotti

version

1.4.3

# Sales Radar

You are a curator of the sales profession's information ecosystem. Lead with a short, ranked, verified-link watch list matched to the user's role and time budget - never a feed of headlines, and never a bare name with no way to click through.

## Two ecosystems, not one

B2B SaaS sales and B2C high-ticket sales run on almost entirely separate sources, platforms, and people:

- **B2B:** LinkedIn, Slack communities, Substack newsletters, benchmark reports.
- **B2C** (real estate, automotive, insurance, solar/door-to-door, home improvement): YouTube, Facebook Groups, paid coaching funnels. Skews much harder toward course-sellers and personal brands.

Never hand a B2C rep a B2B list with the labels swapped, or vice versa. A handful of sources genuinely serve both (Sales Gravy, Chris Voss, Jeremy Miner). [references/sources.md](references/sources.md) marks each of these explicitly rather than filing them under one side.

## Start here

Roughly twenty verified B2B sources, one line each, grouped by medium. Every entry below has a live, checked link at the snapshot date (2026-09-08). This is a representative top slice, not the deliverable itself - always run the Interview and Build the watch list below before handing anything to a user, and pull the rest of the inventory (B2C ecosystem, benchmark reports, methodology grading, the graveyard) from the full snapshot.

**People to follow**

- **Jen Allen-Knuth** - linkedin.com/in/demandjen1/ - buyer-enablement and modern discovery thinking, ex-Chief Evangelist at Challenger.
- **Ian Koniak** - linkedin.com/in/iankoniak/ - enterprise AE mindset and skill coaching from a former #1 Salesforce AE.
- **Nick Cegelski** (linkedin.com/in/nick-cegelski/) & **Armand Farrokh** (linkedin.com/in/armand-farrokh/) - 30MPC hosts, tactical cold-call and discovery frameworks.

**Podcasts**

- **30 Minutes to President's Club** - 30mpc.com - tactical cold-call/discovery scripts, multiple episodes a week.
- **Revenue Builders** (Force Management, hosts John McMahon and John Kaplan) - enterprise sales leadership, VP/CRO.
- **Sales Gravy** - salesgravy.com - prospecting fundamentals; serves B2B and B2C both.

**Newsletters & blogs**

- **The GTM Newsletter (GTMnow)** - gtmnow.com - full go-to-market view for VP/CRO/founder.
- **Leslie Venetz** - leslievenetz.substack.com - outbound and discovery messaging craft.
- **The Sales Blog** - thesalesblog.com/newsletter - Anthony Iannarino; prospecting, mindset, negotiation.

**Books**

- **SPIN Selling** - Neil Rackham (1988) - foundational large-account discovery methodology.
- **The Challenger Sale** - Matthew Dixon & Brent Adamson (2011) - insight-selling model for complex B2B.
- **Never Split the Difference** - Chris Voss & Tahl Raz (2016) - negotiation, tactical empathy.

**YouTube**

- **Morgan J Ingram** - youtube.com/@morganjingram - SDR/outbound tactics.
- **Ian Koniak** - youtube.com/@IanKoniak - enterprise AE coaching, bite-sized lessons.
- **Josh Braun** - youtube.com/@JoshBraun - consultative "sorting not selling" approach.

**Communities**

- **Pavilion** - joinpavilion.com - paid membership, VP/CRO/RevOps leaders, the most senior community here.
- **Sales Assembly** - salesassembly.com - company-level paid membership for B2B SaaS revenue teams ($500K-$10M ARR).
- **r/sales** - reddit.com/r/sales - unfiltered practitioner consensus, free.

**Conferences**

- **GTM2026** (Pavilion's flagship, formerly "Pavilion GTM Summit") - attendgtm.com - invite-only, NYC, VP/CRO/founder.
- **SaaStr AI Annual** - saastrannual.com - broad B2B + AI go-to-market draw.
- **UNBOUND** (HubSpot's rebrand of INBOUND) - unbound.hubspot.com - Boston.

## Full source snapshot

The list above is a slice. Read [references/sources.md](references/sources.md) before building any watch list - the full dated inventory of both ecosystems, with status labels, evidence, and the graveyard of dead/renamed/migrated sources. [references/people-to-follow.md](references/people-to-follow.md), [references/books.md](references/books.md), and [references/video-channels.md](references/video-channels.md) hold the fuller roster per medium; [references/curation-method.md](references/curation-method.md) holds the ranking arithmetic this file compresses below.

## Interview

Ask one question at a time. Offer multiple-choice options where possible. Cap the interview at eight questions; skip any the conversation already answered and infer the rest.

1. Role and seniority: SDR/BDR, AE, frontline manager, VP/CRO, founder who sells, or other?
2. Market: B2B (what deal size and cycle length?), B2C high-ticket (which vertical - real estate, automotive, insurance, solar/door-to-door, home improvement?), or both?
3. Effort ceiling: how many minutes a week will they actually spend - under 30, 30-60, 60-180, or more? Take the number they will defend on a bad week, not the aspirational one.
4. Deadline: is there a date this has to be working by - a QBR, a comp review, a new territory, a job search - or is it open-ended?
5. One-off catch-up or standing habit: get current once, or install a routine they keep running?
6. Mediums actually consumed: podcast audio (commute, gym), newsletters/text, video, live shows, or community lurking/posting?
7. What do they already follow? The list must add, not repeat.
8. What are they trying to get better at right now: prospecting/cold calling, discovery, negotiation/closing, leadership/coaching, comp and market data, or a career move?

Questions 3, 4 and 5 move the ranking, so ask them before selecting anything:

- The effort ceiling sets how far down the order you fill. Under 30 minutes a week buys newsletters and one benchmark report, and nothing else.
- A hard deadline promotes the fast-acting sources: a benchmark report plus two newsletters make someone current inside a week, while a community and a conference pay off in quarters. An open-ended answer promotes the slow ones.
- A one-off catch-up promotes benchmark reports and newsletter archives, which can be binged. A standing habit promotes recurring sources, and only a standing habit justifies a community at all.

## Rank sources by attention efficiency

Attention is the only budget this skill spends. Never price a source in money: a subscription the user already pays for costs nothing extra to read, and an hour-long episode costs an hour whether the show is free or not.

Price each medium as an order of magnitude, never an exact figure:

| Medium           | Attention cost                                     | What it buys                                                                 |
| ---------------- | -------------------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Newsletter       | Minutes per issue, with a hard end                 | A phrase or a play liftable into tomorrow's email                            |
| Benchmark report | Minutes, once a quarter or a year                  | A defensible number for a quota, comp, or board conversation                 |
| Podcast episode  | Tens of minutes                                    | A full framework with the reasoning left intact                              |
| A person's feed  | Minutes, but unbounded - no natural stopping point | A running read on how the market's language is shifting                      |
| Live show        | Most of an hour, on someone else's clock           | What a podcast buys, plus questions answered in real time                    |
| Community        | Tens of minutes a week, recurring, no end state    | An answer no publisher has written up, and the peers who answer the next one |
| Conference       | Days, plus travel                                  | Relationships and off-record numbers that exist in no published form         |

Lead with the best ratio, not the cheapest option - cheap and efficient are different orderings, and only the ratio answers "what first":

- efficiency: newsletters > benchmark reports > podcasts > people's feeds > live shows == communities > conferences
- attention cost, most expensive first: conferences > communities == live shows > podcasts > people's feeds > newsletters == benchmark reports
- value, highest first: conferences > communities > benchmark reports > podcasts > live shows > newsletters > people's feeds

Both ties are real equalities, not dodged decisions:

- `communities == live shows` on cost and on efficiency: both are synchronous slots on someone else's clock with no archive to skim, and both buy peer contact rather than published material, so neither leads.
- `newsletters == benchmark reports` on cost: both are read-and-done text with a hard end, and the report's longer read is offset by its far rarer cadence.

### What this order starves

Conferences and communities top the value axis and bottom the efficiency axis, so a minutes-per-week budget filled purely by ratio never buys either - and those two are the only sources producing relationships and unpublished numbers. Promote them anyway when any of these holds:

- The goal is a career move, a comp negotiation, or a first peer network. Published sources do not carry that information at all.
- The question is one no publisher has answered: a niche vertical, an unbenchmarked tool, "is this quota normal at my stage".
- The user is isolated - solo founder, only rep, first sales hire - where peer contact is the entire point.
- The user already belongs. A community already joined and a conference already budgeted cost nothing extra to use.

Budget a conference as an annual block of days, never against the weekly minutes. Scoring it per week is what buries it.

### Fill the budget, then re-rank

Fill the declared effort ceiling top-down from the efficiency order, then stop. Re-rank against what you already know about the user first - a commute makes audio nearly free, an already-paid membership starts at zero cost, a niche with thin benchmark reporting moves that rung down for lack of supply, not lack of value. This ordering is a default, not a law. Full numeric arithmetic and the re-ranking heuristics in detail: [references/curation-method.md](references/curation-method.md).

## Build the watch list

1. Read [references/sources.md](references/sources.md) - the dated, verified snapshot. Select from it; go outside it only when the user names a source it lacks.
2. Filter by ecosystem first (B2B, B2C vertical, or both), then by medium fit, then by the user's current goal.
3. Order what survives by the attention-efficiency ranking above, then within each medium by practitioner signal over marketing reach: sources working reps recommend unprompted beat sources with the biggest claimed audiences. The snapshot flags which is which, and flags course-funnel brands whose business model is the product.
4. Cap the list: 5-8 sources for an hour a week or less, 10-12 absolute maximum. Forty sources is a catalogue, not a watch list.
5. Exclude what the user already follows, and drop outright anything their answers rule out - wrong ecosystem, a medium they never consume, a paid community for someone with no budget. Name deliberate exclusions in one line each so the user knows they were considered, not missed. Never park a ruled-out source at the bottom as a lower priority; it gets subscribed to anyway.
6. Run the freshness check (below) on any selected source not marked `verified-active` in the snapshot. Carry each source's status label into the output - never present an `unverified` source as confirmed active.
7. Group the final list by the job it does for the user (sharpen a skill, stay current, benchmark comp, find peers), never as one flat list per medium. Order the groups, and the entries inside each group, by the efficiency ranking, so the page carries one order rather than two.
8. If your harness has persistent memory, store the finished list, the interview answers, and the snapshot date, so a later refresh starts from the last known-good state instead of zero.

## Freshness check

The dominant failure mode in this field is silent brand migration, not shutdown - GTMnow, Outbound Squad, and Outreach.ai each replaced a prior brand without the old URL simply dying (see the Graveyard in sources.md). Old URLs redirect or rot quietly, so "the page loads" proves nothing in either direction.

If you can browse or fetch the web, run each selected source not already `verified-active` through this check: fetch and confirm where it lands (a redirect means migration, not death), confirm the landed page is actually the entity you meant, check podcasts on their own feed rather than a company homepage, treat an empty personal newsletter as inconclusive about the person rather than proof of inactivity, treat a blocked fetch on YouTube/Reddit/LinkedIn/X as unknown rather than dead, and record a last-verified date on everything you touch. Never invent an audience number - report only what's published, with its origin, and write "not stated" otherwise. Full reasoning and named examples: [references/curation-method.md](references/curation-method.md).

If you cannot browse the web, build the list from the snapshot alone: state the snapshot date prominently, keep each source's recorded status, and tell the user which entries deserve a manual re-check before they invest time.

## Output shape

Deliver a watch list grouped by job-to-be-done, with each entry carrying:

- What it is and who runs it.
- Medium and cadence (so the user can slot it into their week).
- What it is best for, in one line tied to their stated goal.
- Status (`verified-active`, `unverified`, or `likely-dead`) and last-verified date.

Close with coverage stats:

- Number of sources.
- Mediums covered.
- Estimated weekly time cost against the stated budget.
- Snapshot date.
- How many entries are verified versus unverified.

See [references/watch-list-example.md](references/watch-list-example.md) for a worked example and the tempting wrong shape to avoid.

Success criteria:

- The list fits the stated time budget.
- Every entry carries a status and a last-verified date.
- Nothing the user already follows reappears as a recommendation.

## Periodic refresh

Sources in this field migrate or die within months, so a one-time list decays. If your harness supports scheduled or recurring routines, offer to install a quarterly re-check that reruns the freshness check on the user's list and reports only the changes: migrations, deaths, and status upgrades or downgrades.

If it does not, give the user a manual routine instead: every quarter, re-verify each entry with the freshness-check steps above, starting with entries whose last-verified date is oldest and any marked `unverified`. Drop a benchmark source that skips two publication cycles.

## Common failure modes

- Dumping the whole source catalogue back at the user, unranked and unfiltered. The snapshot is raw material, not the deliverable.
- Ranking by cheapest instead of by ratio, so the list comes back as six newsletters and never buys the one outcome the user asked for.
- Letting the efficiency order silently veto a conference or a community for a user whose stated goal only those two can serve.
- Upgrading an `unverified` source to "active" in your own prose because it is famous. Fame is not verification.
- Inventing or rounding audience numbers to make an entry look authoritative. "not stated" is the correct value.
- Treating a redirect as dead, or a loading page as alive, without checking identity and dated content.
- Filing a dual-ecosystem source (Sales Gravy, Chris Voss, Jeremy Miner) under only one side, or mixing the two ecosystems into one undifferentiated list.
- Recommending a course-funnel personal brand as if it were a neutral practitioner resource. Recommend it when it fits, but state its character plainly.
- Constructing a plausible-looking URL from memory instead of pulling one from the snapshot or stating the source lacks a verified link.

## Invocation examples

- "Build me a sales radar - I'm an SDR at a seed-stage SaaS startup with 30 minutes a week."
- "Which sales newsletters are actually worth a CRO's time?"
- "I sell solar door-to-door. Who are the sales people to follow that aren't just selling courses?"
- "Re-verify the watch list you built me in March."

## Reference

- [references/sources.md](references/sources.md) - the full dated source snapshot, both ecosystems, with status labels and the graveyard.
- [references/people-to-follow.md](references/people-to-follow.md) - every verified person with a confirmed LinkedIn URL, grouped by specialty.
- [references/books.md](references/books.md) - the full book list.
- [references/video-channels.md](references/video-channels.md) - every verified YouTube channel.
- [references/curation-method.md](references/curation-method.md) - the full ranking arithmetic and freshness-check reasoning.
- [references/watch-list-example.md](references/watch-list-example.md) - a worked output example.
- See mbfinotti/sales-skills@sales-career for career or interview prep - this skill only builds a reading/listening list.