Understanding Your Market

Authored by Dave Petro, Vice President & National Client Director of CoreLogic


Whenever I look back on any of the roles I’ve played over the course of my professional career, I can see that the secret to my success has been my willingness to become a student of whatever market I was targeting. As a sales engineer right out of college, I became engaged in the rubber and plastics industry. Still further on I became involved with original equipment manufacturers and in a combined marketing/sales leadership role, I was highly focused on the heating ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) industry. Eventually I moved into a sales leadership role, focused on the banking and mortgage lending market.

In each of these positions, I devoted myself to becoming a thought leader, so that I could work with my clients on their individual levels, speak their language, and help them solve their problems as a trusted adviser. How I did that took a varied approach over a thirty-year period. Attending industry conferences and presenting my research papers also elevated my role and burnished my reputation. Striving for leadership roles on industry committees allowed me to interact with clients as one of their own.

It’s one of the most important aspects of sales: understanding your market. And this means understanding your clients. In order to accomplish this, you need to be in their shops, on their work floors, within reach of their machines, inside their offices, or meeting their president at a holiday party. And so I have.

I think it all started with my desire to learn and my curiosity. These have helped me in my many roles to learn quickly, ask questions, assimilate answers, and build my knowledge base. Logically, I can tell my readers that my thought process begins with understanding the industry structure, knowing who the leaders are, identifying the up and comers, and stratifying clients by complexity, opportunity, market position, and more. Once you have this understanding as a sales leader or in any sales role, you can build your sales strategy, structure your sales force, create position descriptions, build your team, and execute your strategy.

My desire to learn as much as I can about my client’s industry, their applications, the impact of industry or government regulations, and their own end clients has enabled me to work more closely with them, establish myself as a thought leader, and build credibility, not just as another salesperson making a sale, but as a partner trying to solve their biggest problems, help them speed cycle times, lower their overhead, and satisfy their own customers. It’s an approach that always has the end in mind, and never prioritizes making the sale. In fact, I focus my attention on understanding the market before I even think of making a sale to hit my quota. Losing credibility with your clients will eventually cost you the sale anyway.

My structured approach to learn my markets, clients, and their end customers applies almost universally in a business-to-business (B-2-B) environment and even in many business-to-consumer (B-2-C) sales roles. I’ve developed many sales plans, account strategies, and client presentations based on the foundation of understanding the market in which my client is focused. Without that foundation, most salespeople merely sell what they have instead of addressing the client’s deepest needs or problems. Without that foundation, salespeople will lose credibility with clients, because there’s a language barrier that prevents them from communicating at a deep enough level for real problems to be solved and relationships to be developed. Without that foundation, you’re essentially shooting in the dark as a sales professional, hoping that you hit your target.

If you start with the end in mind, that is, solving your client’s major problems, pain points, or leading them down a path to a problem they didn’t know they had without your technology, process improvement............