Profit in Your Own Land: Expand Sales by Owning the Aftermarket

Many industrial companies lack a clear sense of the full size of their potential market, particularly for aftermarket services and solutions. They may have outsourced those services, or left them to independent technicians serving a local area, or simply added a few percentage points to last year’s revenues to come up with next year’s target. It takes a more rigorous exercise to identify the many hidden pockets of demand. One European industrial component manufacturer, which struggled to reach its growth plan, conducted a bottom-up diagnostic of its segmentation, customer share of wallet, and sales coverage in each country. It developed a more sophisticated customer and prospect database for each local market. Then it identified roughly 60 sales actions in five countries that together would increase revenue 30% over a four-year horizon. The new market sizing positioned the company well to start executing these sales actions for each target customer segment in each country.