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The old cliché is that you can’t see the forest for the trees. In finding new sources of sales growth, the more relevant analogy is the reverse: by looking at the forest of average data, it’s easy to miss where growth truly lies. For example, it is widely known that US manufacturing is in a state of decline. In 2008 alone, manufacturing GDP fell by $44 billion. But if you disaggregate that number, you will find that there were healthy pockets of growth that amounted to almost $32 billion – four times India’s total growth that year.4 The hidden pockets of growth in your industry may lie in your own backyard.

In the previous chapter, we showed how sales leaders can get ahead of competitors by capturing growth based on trends and investing ahead of demand. This chapter takes a look at sales executives who unearthed growth by undertaking micro-market analysis, identifying which markets have the highest growth potential, and aligning their resources to capture them.

A global chemicals and services provider increased the growth rate of new accounts from 15 percent to 25 percent in just one year. The big breakthrough, a sales executive told us, was adopting a more granular view of the market. Instead of looking at current sales by region, as it had always done, the company developed a new and far more revealing view by examining share within customer industry sectors within specific US counties. This deeper level of analysis revealed that although the company had 20 percent of the overall market, it had up to 60 percent in some micro-markets, while in others, including some of the fastest-growing segments, its share was as low as 10 percent.

Sales leaders used this insight to turn the planning process on its head. Instead of relying solely on historical data to allocate resources, they included forward-looking opportunity data at a much finer level of analysis. They adjusted how the sales force was deployed to exploit the growth opportunities and ensured that reps were equipped to win in the opportunity hot spots they had discovered.

The sales leaders we interviewed across a range of sectors agreed that taking this sort of granular approach to growth is essential in deciding where to compete and in translating market insights into actions. The most successful sales leaders were extremely proactive in mining the growth that lay right beneath their feet in what seemed to be mature markets. Many have delivered impressive results thanks to this micro-market approach to growth, even under the strain of the recent financial crisis. At the core of this approach to find growth ahead of competition, leading sales organizations do three things:

1. Find the pockets of growth. Using micro-market analysis, companies can identify where opportunity lies at a very granular level based on a combination of market characteristics, including competitive intensity and market attractiveness.

2. Look beyond sales to mine growth. To maximize the benefits of micro-markets, leading organizations recognize they need to involve functions beyond sales.

3. Keep it easy for the sales team. Micro-market strategies by their very nature are heavy on the analytics, so it’s important that sales teams on the ground don’t get bogged down by the detail and can simply harness the information in the most effective way.

The company had 20 percent of the overall market but only 10 percent in some of the fastest-growing segments.