Researching industrial prospects.
Most of the work we have run has been for industrial and B2B suppliers: companies selling equipment, consumables and services to distributors, manufacturers and site-based operations. The research is different there, and this page says how.
Why industrial research is different
A head office tells you what a group does. It rarely tells you what happens at one plant, depot or branch, and in industrial sales that is usually where the decision is made. A maintenance lead raises the need, a site manager decides, procurement at group level sets the panel the decision has to fit inside. One contact at head office is not coverage.
The facts that decide fit are specific too. Whether a company is a distributor, a manufacturer or both. Which sectors it actually serves rather than the ones its website lists. Whether it carries the brands you compete with, or its own. How many sites it runs and where they are. Those facts are findable, but they take more than one source, and some of them cannot be confirmed from outside.
What we research
- The business model: distributor, manufacturer, contractor, end user, or a mix, with the evidence for each
- The sectors served, from the company's own material, trade press and the customers it names
- Product categories, own brands and distributed brands, which is often what decides whether you compete or complement
- Sites: how many, where, and what each one does, from site pages, job advertisements, public registers and permits
- The buying roles at the site level as well as the group level, with an honest status against each email
- Size, from staff listings and public filings, kept as an estimate when the sources disagree
The worked example
Meridian Industrial Supply is the fictional distributor used across this site. It scores 84 out of 100 against a profile for an industrial supplier selling into mining, construction and manufacturing. What counted: the sectors it serves, its trade-ordering distribution model and the product categories it stocks. What was ambiguous: it carries own-brand lines that may compete with yours, its revenue is an estimate from two sources that disagree, and the number of sites could not be confirmed. Five of six buying roles were found; the safety lead is still open. The complete record shows every field with its source.
The ambiguous cases
Group or site. A capability described on the group website may exist at one location only. The record carries the association the evidence supports, and a site that turns out to be a sales office does not get a maintenance lead invented for it.
Distributor that also manufactures. Own-brand lines change whether a company is a channel or a competitor. We record both and let the score reflect your profile's view of it.
A site listed under a parent's name. Common after acquisitions. The site gets its own record when it has its own buying authority, and a possible duplicate is held for review rather than created twice.
A branch with its own buying authority. Sometimes the branch manager buys locally under a group agreement. That is a site-level role worth finding, and a group-level contact worth knowing about, and the record shows which is which.
What the research cannot establish
Reporting lines, unless they are published. Whether a site manager has the authority the title suggests. Whether a company is in the market this quarter. Those come out of the first conversation, and the record says plainly which of them it does not know.