This is the second 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.™ In this installment, we look at the first — and perhaps most important — step in the methodology: identifying the right market opportunity and having the discipline to focus on where your business has the strongest opportunity to win. Read Part 1 | Part 3 | Part 4
There is rarely a shortage of growth ideas inside a company.
Ask your sales team where the business should expand next and they can probably name several possibilities:
- A customer has been asking about a new application
- A competitor seems to be gaining ground in an adjacent industry
- One region is showing unexpected momentum
- A product developed for one purpose is starting to find a following elsewhere
Before long, the conversation can turn into a long list of markets the company could pursue. And that’s where things get difficult.
Because identifying possibilities isn’t the same as identifying the RIGHT opportunity. Every new market requires time, people, investment and attention, and very few B2B organizations have enough of those resources to pursue everything that looks promising.
The first step in the DeanHouston Attack-A-Market methodology is Define It., and in many ways, it may be the most important. Before deciding how to win a market, a company has to make a deliberate choice about which market is actually worth winning.
A Good Opportunity Isn’t Necessarily the Right Opportunity
For more than four decades, Attack-A-Market creator and DeanHouston founder Dale Dean has worked with B2B manufacturers trying to answer that question. One of the lessons that emerged from those years is that companies don’t usually struggle because they have too few opportunities. More often, they struggle because they have too many.
When a promising market appears, the natural reaction is to go after it. If several appear at once, the temptation is to pursue all of them. Sales starts making calls, marketing develops campaigns, product teams respond to new requests and resources gradually get spread across an increasingly wide range of priorities.
Each decision may make sense on its own. Taken together, however, they can leave the organization investing a little bit everywhere without creating enough momentum anywhere.
“One of the hardest things for a growing company to do is say no to a good opportunity,” said Dean. “But focus isn’t about finding every place you could compete. It’s about finding the places where you have the strongest reason to win.”
That’s an important distinction because the biggest or fastest-growing market isn’t automatically the best one for your business. A smaller market where your company already has technical expertise, customer relationships or a meaningful competitive advantage may offer far greater potential than a massive market where you’ll be just another supplier fighting for attention.
Defining the right market means looking beyond its size and asking a more useful question: Why us?
Sometimes the Clues Are Already There
The answer doesn’t always come from a market research report or a brainstorming session. Sometimes a company is already participating in a promising market without realizing the significance of what’s happening.
- A product originally developed for one application has begun selling into another
- Several customers from the same industry have approached the company with similar problems
- A distributor could be seeing demand in a segment that hasn’t received much attention internally
- Sales data might reveal that one relatively small customer group is buying more products
Individually, those signals can be easy to dismiss. Together, they may point toward something much larger.
This is where defining a market becomes part analysis and part curiosity. Instead of simply asking where else the company could sell its products, leaders begin asking why certain customers are already choosing them.
- What problem are we solving particularly well?
- What do these customers value about us?
- Are there more companies with the same need?
- Who else is serving them?
- Where are competitors strong, and where are they vulnerable?
- Do we have the capabilities to serve this market at a larger scale?
Walter Bonnett, co-creator of Attack-A-Market, believes that understanding this intersection is critical.
“A market can look incredibly attractive from the outside, but that’s only half the equation,” said Bonnett. “You have to understand the customer need and then be very clear about what your organization brings to the table that gives you a legitimate opportunity to win.”
Those questions begin turning a vague growth opportunity into something a company can actually evaluate.
Focus Gives the Rest of the Organization Somewhere to Go
Defining a market does something else that’s easy to overlook: it creates clarity.
Consider what happens when a company tells its sales organization simply to “grow.” One salesperson pursues an opportunity in food processing. Another sees potential in pharmaceuticals. Someone else has a relationship in automotive. Marketing is generating leads from several additional industries, while leadership is discussing expansion into an entirely different market.
Everyone is doing what they’ve been asked to do. Everyone is working toward growth. But they’re not necessarily working toward the same growth.
Now imagine the organization has identified a specific market where it believes it has a genuine opportunity to become a leader. The questions become much more focused.
- What does that market care about?
- Which companies should sales be talking to?
- What problems should marketing be writing about?
- What expertise do we need to demonstrate?
- What product capabilities matter most?
- Which trade shows, associations and media outlets influence the people we’re trying to reach?
Instead of scattering effort across dozens of possibilities, the organization begins accumulating knowledge and momentum in one place.
That’s the real value of Define It. It’s not simply choosing a target audience for a marketing campaign. It’s making a strategic decision about where the business believes it can create meaningful value and concentrating enough attention on that opportunity to give itself a chance to lead.
The Goal Is to Find Your Market
There will always be another interesting industry, another application and another potential source of revenue. Good businesses should continue looking for them.
The discipline comes in recognizing that discovering an opportunity and deciding to pursue it are two different things.
Attack-A-Market asks companies to slow down at precisely that moment. Look at the data. Listen to customers. Understand the competition. Examine your own strengths honestly. Then determine where those pieces come together in a way that gives your organization a genuine advantage.
Because once you’ve made that choice, the conversation changes. You’re no longer asking, “Where could we grow?” You’re asking, “What would it take to win here?”
And that’s when it’s time to Attack It.
Learn more about the Define It. approach and explore the complete methodology behind the new business book Attack-A-Market®: Define It. Attack It. Own It.™ on the Attack-A-Market landing page.