From Goal Setting to Goal Getting: What Market Intelligence Can Do for Building Product Manufacturers

Darwin got his from over 100 pigeons. Galileo used crude telescopes to get his. Marie Curie had a pocket watch. George Washington Carver a microscope. And Florence Nightingale saved lives with it.

These men and women's extraordinary contributions to humanity depended on many factors and circumstances. But their abilities to locate and understand data to their advantage (and ours) stand glaringly as examples of the transformative power of information. Where would we be without Carver's approaches to restoring nutrient-depleted crop soil or Nightingale's disease-sparing methods? Their discoveries, like countless others, hinged on the successful insights gleaned from data.

Now, consider this: Where will you be without the right data? Where will your sales objectives land if you don't have the right market intelligence to position your team, your assets, and your thinking?

An Increasingly Complex, Data-Rich Marketplace

Marketplace complexity for building product manufacturers continues to march forward at a staggering pace. Opportunities for innovation, expanding into new markets, and grabbing product market share, for example, face the continuous potential threats of increased competition, changing customer behavior, and emerging trends.

Advancing at a breakneck pace and intensifying an already complex marketplace, the construction industry churns out massive volumes of data as technology adoption escalates. An ever-present threat to informed decision-making is no longer the lack of data but the ability to turn relevant information into actionable insight. Information overload and "paralysis by analysis" are not only genuine issues but also common ailments for decision-makers that hobble the best-laid objectives.

The Value of Market Intelligence

Competitive advantage is deeply seated in a company's ability to use market intelligence. However, some companies fail to use the available market knowledge. The challenges and complexity of the marketplace are too robust and constant not to have and use market intelligence.

Obtaining market intelligence is essential, but its utmost importance is not only that you have it and use it—the essence of its value is what you get from it. What good is data if it does not produce better results, lead to more informed decisions, and provide a greater understanding of your world? What insights are you able to gain from the data you have?

As Galileo did with his telescope, transitioning from 8-power to 20-power, he improved his ability to see deeper, to explore data by getting closer to it. Quite literally, in Galileo's sense, he built more powerful telescopes and brought the moon, Venus, and satellites of Jupiter into his lap. And unlike most others who peered skyward, Galileo's resultant insights proved correct.

You, too, can bring meaningful data close and realize its insightful value.

What Can Market Intelligence Do for Building Product Manufacturers?

At its ground floor level, market intelligence is information that building product manufacturers use to better understand and successfully compete in the business environment. An organized market intelligence program has become a business necessity because of the construction industry's complex, changing, and high volume of data.

When coupled with the insights that exist within a building product manufacturer already, the insights from market intelligence software deliver systematic improvements to decision-making for competitive advantage.

Better Decisions and Better Outcomes

Better decisions lead to better outcomes like increased sales opportunities and profits. Particularly when the information is at your fingertips, thereby eliminating the systematic searches for needed information that gobble up time and money. Instead, market intelligence software speedily delivers data-backed information that helps identify opportunities and manage risks. Decision-makers can, therefore, shift their time from looking for and compiling information to reflecting on it and integrating decisions into their strategies and objectives.

Market intelligence software can answer questions that would otherwise prove difficult or impossible to address without its capacity for collecting, storing, and processing meaningful outcomes. Here is a small sampling of the power of ConstructConnect Analyze on the Insight platform:

• Build a comprehensive picture of your market and your competition.
• Visualize your company's specification rate and market share.
• Engage with organizations specifying your competitors' products.
• Use historical data to analyze long-term market trends.

Market intelligence delivers impactful and meaningful information to strategically position resources and achieve results that otherwise would not be accomplished.

Turn Data into Insight or Risk Being Left Behind

The ability to process relevant, valuable data and produce meaningful insights is paramount to understanding and thriving in the modern marketplace. Like those explorers and discoverers in science that preceded our lifetimes, you too can get the information advantage.

We are here to help you build your business strategy with market intelligence. And building product manufacturers of all sizes and in any United States market stand to benefit.

Insight Analyze by ConstructConnect delivers actionable, data-driven market insights. You can evaluate current market opportunities and threats, align resources and systems with growth opportunities, visualize gaps in your market, and build a roadmap for strategic growth.

An upcoming article in this series will explore an important piece of market intelligence—your market share. You'll learn how to find it and the benefits it brings to optimize decision-making and its potential for boosting sales performance.

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