This is the first article in our four-part series exploring Attack-A-Market and the ideas behind the new book, Attack-A-Market®: Define It. Attack It. Own It.™ We’ll begin with the story behind a B2B growth methodology more than 40 years in the making, then take a closer look at each of its three stages — Define It. Attack It. and Own It. — and what they can teach business leaders about finding, pursuing and ultimately leading the right markets. Read Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
Every B2B business leader has been in some version of the same meeting.
Growth is on the agenda, and before long, ideas start coming in. There’s an industry the sales team thinks is worth pursuing. Product development is interested in a new application. Marketing has been watching a competitor gain traction in an adjacent market. The CEO sees an opportunity to expand geographically. By the end of the meeting, the whiteboard is full.
That’s usually the easy part. The harder part is deciding which of those opportunities deserves the company’s time, talent and investment. Harder still is getting the organization to commit to one of them long enough to build a meaningful position in the market.
Dale Dean has spent more than 40 years thinking about that challenge.
As the Founder and Chairman of DeanHouston, Dale has worked alongside B2B manufacturers through new product launches, market expansions, recessions, technology shifts and just about every other condition a business can encounter.
Over time, he began to recognize a pattern in the companies that were able to turn opportunities into sustainable growth. They weren’t necessarily the companies pursuing the most opportunities. Quite often, they were the ones who had learned how to focus.
That observation became the beginning of the Attack-A-Market methodology.
What Is an Attack-A-Market Program
Attack-A-Market is a sales empowerment and enablement program laser-focused on strategically defined niche markets, segments, or applications where your company holds a unique and defensible competitive advantage — whether in a growing or underserved space.
The program is designed to equip companies with a proven, field-tested sales and marketing approach that delivers the kind of growth results they’ve been searching for. If you’re responsible for sales or new business development at a technical products manufacturer, Attack-A-Market gives you a clear, step-by-step roadmap for identifying, entering, and dominating strategic markets.
By narrowing your focus to the markets, segments, and applications that align most closely with your strengths, Attack-A-Market helps you grow smarter, not just faster. Whether you’re navigating market turbulence or looking to expand beyond your core markets, the program will guide you in uncovering and owning new niches and adjacent opportunities — opening exciting new doors for sustainable growth.
Four Decades of Lessons, Finally in One Place
The Attack-A-Market methodology wasn’t conceived in a conference room. It developed gradually through real work with real companies.
Attack-A-Market has been tested and refined across decades of real-world market expansion programs involving technical products, complex applications and changing commercial conditions. The methodology reflects practical experience, not theory alone. Each program has strengthened the approach over decades of experience and execution.
The situations changed, but the process of figuring out where a company could win — and then building a strategy around that opportunity — became increasingly repeatable.
The result is the new business book Attack-A-Market®: Define It. Attack It. Own It.™.
“The guiding principle of Attack-A-Market was simple: before you sell, you must first educate and motivate. By equipping sales teams and channel partners to become true industry experts who are deeply knowledgeable about the technologies, applications, and customer needs, we empowered our client to lead with confidence, credibility, and insight rather than persuasion alone.” — Dale Dean
Define It. Attack It. Own It.
The premise behind the book is straightforward: before a company can own a market, it has to decide which market is worth owning.
That’s the Define It part of the methodology. It means looking beyond market size and asking more meaningful questions about customers, competitors, applications, internal capabilities and the places where a company has a genuine reason to win.
Once that opportunity has been identified, Attack It is about commitment. Sales can’t be pursuing one vision of the market while marketing pursues another. Leadership, sales, marketing and the people closest to the product all need to understand the opportunity and their role in capturing it.
Then comes Own It, which is less about declaring market leadership than earning it. That takes time. Companies build that position by developing expertise, solving problems, educating customers, strengthening relationships and becoming increasingly difficult for competitors to displace.
Walter Bonnett has seen that process play out over decades of working with B2B organizations. As a former DeanHouston client who fully embraced the Attack-A-Market program, he provides a unique firsthand experience and deep dive into the strategic framework, thinking and other considerations required to implement an effective program.
“Traditional go-to-market strategies were built for scale, not specialization. They favor an old-school marketing and sales approach: broad reach, product-centric messaging, generalized appeal. But the reality is that niche markets operate differently. They require focus, immersion, credibility, and speed. To win in a niche market, you must become the niche, speak the market’s language, understand its nuances, and align with how its customers think, decide, and buy.”— Walter Bonnett
The Tools Have Changed. The Question Hasn’t.
Of course, pursuing a market today looks very different than it did when the earliest ideas behind Attack-A-Market were taking shape.
Manufacturers now have access to customer data, search behavior, marketing automation, sophisticated analytics and artificial intelligence. They can research markets faster, identify patterns that once took months to uncover and reach remarkably specific audiences.
Attack-A-Market® brings that modern perspective, exploring how today’s technology can make the methodology faster and more informed without losing the strategy at its core.
Because having more tools doesn’t necessarily make choosing the right opportunity any easier. In some ways, it makes the discipline of focus even more important. When a company can do almost anything, deciding what it should do becomes the bigger challenge.
“Strategy without execution will not win new markets, but execution without strategy becomes costly. This mistake represents the failure to capture revenue with new customers, wasting time, effort, and momentum with the target audiences we want to win over.” — Dale Dean
That’s one reason the authors believed now was the right time to put Attack-A-Market into a book. The business environment has changed enormously over the past four decades, and it will continue to change. But leaders are still wrestling with a remarkably familiar question: Where should our next stage of growth come from?
Attack-A-Market®: Define It. Attack It. Own It.™ was written to help them answer it.
And perhaps the best place to begin isn’t by asking how many new opportunities your company can pursue.
It’s asking which one could become yours.
Explore the DeanHouston Attack-A-Market educational hub to learn more about the book, meet the authors and take a closer look at the methodology behind Define It. Attack It. Own It.