Client Overview
The client, a $1 billion revenue environmental services company with a $2.5 billion market cap is a dominant player in the abrasives industry on the U.S. East Coast. To drive growth, the corporate development team aimed to explore opportunities for expanding operations to the West Coast—a market with untapped potential.
The Challenge
Despite a strong presence in the East Coast market, the client faced critical knowledge gaps in expanding to the West Coast:
- Market Mapping : No comprehensive overview of the abrasives industry across the United States.
- Competitive Insights : Limited understanding of regional competitors, market size, and pricing strategies.
- Strategic Direction : Absence of a data-driven, actionable go-to-market plan tailored for West Coast entry.
These gaps meant the client faced two costly options:
- Extensive Research Investment: Devote significant time and resources to gather market intelligence.
- High-Risk Entry: Enter the market with insufficient knowledge, incurring additional costs and delays to learn and adapt post-launch.
Espalier’s Approach
To address these challenges, Espalier deployed its AI-powered platform to deliver precise insights and actionable strategies. The approach combined Espalier’s proprietary knowledge assets for the waste management industry, consisting of comprehensive data on the waste industry and AI-driven decision-making tools to address the client’s challenges.
- Leveraging Espalier’s Industry Expertise
- Espalier has a unique knowledge asset for the waste management industry which consists of raw data from diverse sources such as company websites, filings, public news, EPA manifest and other web and geospatial sources. The platform extracts and updates the data in real-time.
- Raw content is transformed into AI-ready datasets such as product and service data, M&A and funding data, company profiles, waste generators data, service providers data, innovation trends etc.
- AI-Enabled Intelligence Extraction Using Advanced AI Techniques
- Market Taxonomy: Analyzed over 15,000 companies to develop a comprehensive taxonomy of product groups and variations within the abrasives industry across the United States and Canada.
- Industry Analytics: Developed a market size split by region, state, and product group using a four-part methodology:
- Value Chain Analysis: Granularly analyzed entire abrasives value chain from Raw material supply, processing to end user segments. Developed a comprehensive view of regulations in the abrasive industry.
- Supply-Side View: Detailed analysis on 120 competitors was conducted. Category-wise revenue, key clients and pricing data was analyzed
- Demand-Side View: Demand for abrasive products by Industry was estimated
- Top-Down Analysis: Economic model-based view
- Triangulated the results to ensure a reliable market-size estimate.
- Competitor Analytics: Created a proprietary dataset of U.S. abrasives manufacturers, detailing products, pricing, and market shares. Benchmarked competitors’ pricing across regions.
- Customer Analytics: Profiled distributors and direct customers with account-level intelligence, including warm introductions to key contacts.
- Decision Insights
- Lead Prioritization: Identified and ranked high-potential accounts for focused sales efforts.
- Pricing Strategy: Delivered location-specific pricing insights to support competitive market entry.
Client Impact
Espalier’s data-driven approach empowered the client to enter the West-coast region with confidence and achieve remarkable results such as:
- Revenue Growth: Secured $2 million in new sales within the first year, with a projected $10 million in the second year.
- Sales Efficiency: A highly targeted strategy with advanced account intelligence enabled a 3X higher lead conversion rate.
- Scalable Expansion: Delivered a repeatable, data-backed framework for future market entries.
Our AI-driven approach not only saved the client significant time and resources on initial market research and strategy development but also delivered a highly targeted pricing and customer acquisition strategy. This ensured greater success and minimized errors during the first year of market entry.
