Case Study
Building Materials Leader Achieves $80 Million in New Pipeline Potential with STRATOS
Discover how this building materials market leader created a proactive, data-driven model with STRATOS to deliver market transparency across 12 countries and an annual growth rate of 3pp to 5pp above market.
Introduction
A global market leader in building materials has successfully shifted from a reactive sales culture to a proactive, data-driven model. This strategic pivot delivered full market transparency across 12 countries and set up an annual growth rate of 3pp to 5pp above market.
The challenge
A multi-billion-dollar global leader in building materials faced a significant and challenging decline in global construction volumes. Maintaining growth in a shrinking market required aggressively taking market share, yet the internal sales approach stayed largely reactive.
The organization struggled to move away from piecemeal growth initiatives that were historically individually driven and lacked systematic scale. While their work occasionally had pockets of excellence, the company lacked a consistent, cross-country approach to unlock its full global growth potential.
Previous attempts to scale growth had failed to provide full visibility of the market, leaving leadership with critical blind spots; they could not accurately identify which products or accounts to prioritize, nor could they effectively operationalize a “hunting” strategy across their 350 disparate sales reps.
To overcome this challenge, the company needed to target the most attractive specification business and top-tier applicators, but they lacked the data-driven map necessary to guide them.
Requirements
- Establish a clear view of current CRM projects to understand what the team is currently pursuing
- Compare current sales activities with the broader market potential to identify what the team realistically could and should be targeting
- Operationalize a systematic “hunting” process to ensure every rep is focused on the highest-value targets within their territory
- Unify “pockets of excellence” into a consistent, cross-country approach that can be managed globally
“The STRATOS approach allowed us to see the market as it truly is. We found our growth potential was twice what we previously believed.”
– Head of Commercial Sales.
Solution
STRATOS partnered with the Head of Commercial Sales to launch an 8-week pilot in two countries. This phase focused on creating a Commercial Digital Twin of the business to provide the market transparency required to fully operationalize growth.
The primary objective was to prove that a systematic approach could significantly increase growth at scale, even in a contractionary market. The resulting project provided full market visibility and identified approximately 200,000 building projects, more than 124,000 accounts, and 90,000 contacts.
This external data was then merged with the client’s internal information on 45,000 projects across 350 sales reps within their existing CRM. The Commercial Digital Twin’s 360-degree view revealed significant gaps in the company’s CRM data and allowed teams to see exactly where they were currently active versus the untapped potential of the broader market.
Crucially, the Commercial Digital Twin provided intelligence down to the individual project line, including the specific “chance of winning” based on historical win rate and existing relationships, the relevance of individual product solutions to specific builds, and a mapping of which stakeholders held the most influence.
Prioritizing roughly 4,000 projects allowed the team to demonstrate that a highly differentiated sales strategy was possible. While these represented only 9% of the addressable market, they accounted for more than 50% of the total market potential.
Remarkably, 60+% of these “must win” targets – alongside 50% of the top 2,200 identified accounts – were not currently in the client CRM, representing a massive blind spot in their previous strategy.
Results
Following the findings presented in the Board meeting, the STRATOS Commercial Digital Twin was rapidly deployed across 12 core markets, allowing the company to truly visualize its market and discover that growth potential was twice what business leaders previously believed.
This project came directly from the Board, ensuring champions at the highest level could drive a vision of running the entire business in a data-driven manner through a “think big, start small” philosophy. This line of thinking was critical to “taking the organisation with them,” ensuring that local teams felt truly empowered rather than replaced by the new technology.
Global execution is currently three-quarters through a four-wave rollout, engaging regional GMs through clear and lean kickoff meetings and workshops. These sessions were used to fine-tune the methodology against country-specific price points, local volume estimates, and specific AI filters to ensure the data reflected “on the ground” realities.
In the first country, this rigorous process identified a path to increase the sales pipeline from $1.1 billion to $1.6 billion – a 40% improvement – using the existing headcount by correcting a 10x disparity in territory potential. Defining a specific productivity target for each rep ensured that everyone pursued the ideal target projects within their rebalanced regions.
The organization is now moving forward toward a model in which AI agents scan the entire market 24/7 to ensure no high-value specification is missed, while focusing sales reps on high-probability targets with absolute clarity. Historical win rates and sales cycles were used to establish a concrete, clear growth path for both countries.
Leveraging AI at this scale has significantly increased internal confidence, establishing a scalable growth engine that reveals market realities previously hidden from view for the leadership team. The project was so effective that STRATOS’ initial cost was fully amortized within the first 6 months through immediate growth and new wins.
Key Performance Indicators
- $80 Million Growth potential identified across 2 countries.
- 120% Pipeline increase in Country 2, resulting in an increase from $50 million to $110 million.
- 3-5% Growth above market average – projected to continue annually in the years to come, driven by systematic execution.
- 6 months Payback period for STRATOS costs.
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