If you aren’t certain, you’re leaving value on the table…

In the scramble to scale, many B2B media and events businesses suffer from a common affliction: they are busy, but they aren’t necessarily focused. Lack of focus – or misdirected focus – is often observed in sales teams, with many deploying their efforts on market segments and / or clients that don’t have the highest growth or revenue potential.

Here, we often see leadership teams basing their sales team territory strategy on market maps that haven’t been refreshed in years. These businesses tend to ‘rabbit hole’ themselves, focusing intensely on a narrow set of market segments while remaining blind to lucrative adjacencies or shifting market dynamics. On the flip-side, we also see sales teams that have no particular segment focus, spreading their efforts randomly across an incohesive set of accounts.

The result? Sales teams spread their effort thin across low-potential accounts, while the real ‘Tier 1’ goldmines – those with high Average Order Value (AOV) potential – remain under-penetrated.

At Collingwood, we believe that to navigate the scaleup journey successfully, you require a considered Market Mapping & Client Tiering approach that focuses sales team efforts on areas with the highest potential for quality revenue growth and retention.

Looking beyond past performance 

Most companies think they know their market. But usually, they only know the market they’ve already won. Our Market Mapping & Client Tiering work is designed to lift the blinkers. We don’t just look at who you are selling to today; we map the entire market ecosystem. This view typically exposes ‘revenue leakage’ – i.e. areas in which there is untapped potential for revenue growth – by revealing or validating the potential of adjacent segments. 

Crucially, for businesses that rely on vendor revenue (or develop new vendor revenue streams), we look specifically at the interaction between buy-side (audience) and sell-side (commercial partners), identifying exactly where your business facilitates the most valuable industry interactions. This enables clients to move beyond seeing their business as ‘just’ a publisher or events organiser and instead reposition themselves as a high-value market maker. 

Furthermore, by identifying and solving the specific points of friction between your audience’s needs and your partners’ commercial goals, you can build products that create the most valuable ‘handshakes’ in your industry, thereby justifying premium pricing or even generating brand new revenue. 

What is market mapping?

A systematic approach to visually analyse a market’s customer base. The primary goals are 1) to identify the highest potential client segments and 2) pinpoint specific segments that are currently underserved or overlooked. Both types of segment represent growth opportunities for the business.

What is client tiering? 

A strategic process of categorising a client base into distinct groups (or ‘tiers’) based on their value and potential to the business.

The primary goal is to optimise the allocation of resources – such as sales time, marketing budget, and client support – to ensure the highest-value clients receive the most attention, while still nurturing other segments.

An evidence-based approach: The Collingwood Market Report

What makes our approach unique is that it isn’t built in a vacuum. Every year, we release the Collingwood Market Report, our proprietary piece of IP that tracks company valuations, investor sentiment, and M&A trends across the information, media, and events sectors.

We know exactly what buyers and investors are looking for; from stable Quality of Earnings to market dominance. We bake these real-world insights directly into our Market Mapping & Client Tiering engagements. This ensures that the way you segment your market today is perfectly aligned with how investors will value your business tomorrow.

What Market Mapping & Client Tiering delivers

We undertake a structured ‘sprint’ that moves your market and account growth strategy from ‘best guess’ to ‘investor-ready’. The core elements of the analysis and the deliverables include:

  • AI-Enabled Market Research: We use proprietary AI workflows to conduct deep-dive research on your market and ecosystem, identifying segment volumes, growth potential, and key macro drivers.
  • Comprehensive Market Map: We build a definitive segmentation matrix that visualises your key market segments (on both the buy- and sell-sides, where relevant), including the identification of vertical and product adjacencies for expansion.
  • Bespoke Client Tiering Criteria: We define the potential of your key accounts, moving beyond simple historical spend metrics to a sophisticated scoring methodology based on future growth potential, engagement, and strategic fit, all informed by our annual M&A research.
  • AI-Powered Tiering Database: You receive a validated client database enriched by AI research (revenue, employee counts, etc.). This tool is yours to keep, allowing your team to re-tier your market as it evolves long after our engagement ends.
  • A Simple Sales Servicing Plan: A clear action plan for how to appropriately service each client tier, ensuring your highest-cost sales resources are spent on the highest-potential accounts.
  • Investor-Ready Outputs: Polished, evidenced presentations of your market potential designed to be dropped directly into a business plan or an Investment Memorandum.

The culture shift 

What changes once the mapping and tiering are done? 

Market Mapping and Client Tiering are tools for confident resource direction. They give your commercial teams the ‘permission’ to stop chasing low-value accounts and refocus their energy on the clients that will actually drive your valuation, whether you are eyeing a capital event in two years or building a legacy business for the next twenty.

By the time we finish, you won’t just have a map; you’ll have a permanent, AI-powered capability to ensure you never fall back into the ‘rabbit hole’ again.

Collingwood’s Market Mapping & Client Tiering offer was built using our domain expertise, to help companies like yours grow faster and achieve transformational outcomes. Ready to objectively assess your market and unlock growth potential? Get in touch for a confidential discussion and learn how our tested methodology can help you maximise your business’s value: hello@collingwood.group.