MT Magazine July/August 2025

FEATURE STORY

THE SALES & MARKETING ISSUE

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1. Where is my customer, and in what concentration? 2. How can I effectively allocate my salespeople in that area? Answering these questions allows marketing and sales leaders to effectively segment in real time. Layering longer-term industry trend data on top of a snapshot of regional customer concentration can accelerate this analysis

Step 6: Leverage Partnerships To Accelerate Market Insights and Access Partnerships are crucial for the success of an in-house marketer. You can’t handle

everything yourself, and you will need to bring in resources either due to bandwidth limitations or a need for specialty expertise. Partners such as marketing agencies, media organizations, influencers or subject matter experts, and industry associations and trade groups can help you accelerate your growth, particularly if you work with a smaller team. Choosing the right partner also requires understanding both your “why” and being tactical in the resources available to you. You may have access to more resources than you realize. For instance, when considering the market research questions that we explored above, you can access complimentary market research services through your AMT membership. AMT Research Services has a range of industry expertise and access to proprietary datasets and market forecasts to conduct deep market penetration research. The top categories of research requests are used to achieve business goals related to strategic planning and development (38% of requests) or marketing and sales (22% of requests). One of the more popular marketing requests pertains to building regional marketing and sales strategies. When it comes to regional analyses, most marketing and sales leaders want to understand:

even further – by providing you with insights not only on how to allocate resources now but to plan for a long-term marketing and sales approach. Further tactical insights on regional sales strategies and sales training can also be found at events such as the Distribution Summit, occurring Nov. 18-19, 2025, in Carmel, Indiana.

Case Study: One Member’s Journey Into the Live Tooling Market When Larry Robbins, president and CEO of SMW Autoblok, was asked by his European parent company to evaluate the U.S. market for live tooling, he knew the stakes were high. Their longtime importer was preparing to exit the business, and the company needed to understand whether it made sense to reenter the market directly. “I had to do the research before I agreed to it,” Larry said.

STEP 3: Identify Your Data Sources

STEP 2: Define Your Key Market Questions Based on Your Business Objectives

STEP 1: Clarify Your Business Objectives