Market mapping is the process of interpreting and characterizing the part of the Sales Ecosystem that your company lives within—the market. In my experience, this analysis tends to become hyper detailed, filling pages of spreadsheets and a multitude of charts. The amount of hours and cost can become prohibitive, especially for the start-up or small business.
I once undertook an exercise like this for a local start-up looking at the global mining industry. I spent two solid weeks collecting data and compiling a spreadsheet of planet wide mine sites and their statistics. Of course, this resulted in a highly complex dataset. It was so detailed that the CEO had to code an algorithm to interrogate it.
Luckily for them I conducted this exercise free of charge. If they had been paying for someone’s time I don’t think the application would have been half as appealing.
A better use of my time would have been spent getting a high level understanding of the global industry and then talking to the people within it. You can’t beat real time feedback.
Unless you are a multinational conglomerate with very deep pockets I believe you must keep your market mapping simple. All you require is a broad analysis of the main constituents, enough to allow decision making around industry and segment priorities.
Simple Market Mapping
A simple market analysis involves the following steps:
Geography. Which region does your business development responsibility cover? Whether it is a particular region within a single country, or a group of countries, the boundaries must be defined.
Site Type. In what sort of sites is your product or service going to be used? Hospitals, contaminated land, mines, factories, water treatment plants, lawyer offices, you need to be specific here.
Site Numbers. Establish how many of the sites identified above are present in your geographical area of responsibility.
Market Size. Consider how much money a site is likely to spend on your offering over the next three years. Average this number out across all the sites for a single year. The total of these figures is the market size that your company is operating within. If you are operating within multiple site types, do this for each and combine the total.
Market Share. Think about how much market share you can realistically attain over the next year. Linking it back to the Planning Hierarchy, what types and sizes of projects you are looking to win? How many competitors are out there? Will you be playing in a blue ocean with no sharks, or a red ocean full of sharks competing for your customers? If your company is well established, your market share could be at 30% or more. If you are just starting out in a market with many competitors, 1-2% may be more achievable.
Available Market. Using the formula: Market Share x Market Size = Available Market, provides a good indicator of where the opportunity for your offering is greatest.
Affordable Research
The research required is often considered an overwhelming task, especially if you are expecting to collect millions of data points. However utilizing market researchers on gig economy sites like www.fiverr.com can get you the specific site data for your region quickly and cheaply. Surprisingly, a hundred dollars can get you a decent data set, listing the relevant sites within your region, in the fraction of the time it would take you to source that information yourself.
Example of a Simple Market Analysis
The table below shows a simple analysis that you would conduct for each of your segments. It allows you to prioritize which segments to pursue. I’ll use the following example to show how it works.
Jen is an experienced water engineering consultant with strong industry connections who has recently decided that she is going to start her own consultancy. She knows her services are in demand in both the water utilities and mining sectors. While she has contacts in both industries she wants to know where she should be prioritizing her valuable business development time.
Using a freelance website, Jen requests all the water treatment plants and mine sites in her region. She estimates that the water treatment plants would be likely to require $50,000 of her services a year, while the mine sites would only need $10,000 per year. There are five water treatment plants and forty nine sites, so Jen created the following table:
| Segment | Site | No. of Sites | $ per Year | Market Size | Market Share | Available Market |
| Water Utilities | Water Treatment Plant | 5 | $50,000 | $250,000 | 25% | $62,500 |
| Mining | Mine | 40 | $10,000 | $400,000 | 5% | $20,000 |
While the mining segment has a larger market size, Jen determines that the number of competitors and her own network in the mining industry provides a share of only 5%. Whereas, her work is well known and valued in the water utilities sector. Though the market size is smaller, she should be able to capture 25% share for water utilities.
This allows the available market to be calculated providing a very clear picture of where Jen’s business development priorities should be focused. That is not to say that she would not seek opportunities in mining, this could be a longer-term strategic play. However, the immediate low hanging fruit is definitely within the water utilities segment.
Call to Action
I hope you can see that market mapping doesn’t have to be complicated. Why not run through the same exercise I highlighted in the example. It may support you’re current strategy or it may get you thinking differently about where to focus your business development efforts.
As always I’d love to hear your thoughts. Get in touch through the normal channels or leave a comment below.