51ºÚÁÏ

Here is a question most building product manufacturers never ask: of every dollar your existing customers could spend with you, how much are you actually capturing?

Not your revenue. Not your growth rate. The share of available spend — from accounts you already own — that you are leaving on the table.

For most manufacturers, the honest answer is: we don’t know. And that gap is often the highest-return growth opportunity in the business.

The cheapest path to growth is almost never a new market. It is the full potential of the customers you already have.

White space exists in two places. The first is inside your existing customer base — untapped upsell, cross-sell, and add-on potential that most account teams never systematically map. The second is outside it — in markets, geographies, and facility types where demand is building and competition has not yet caught up. Both are real. Both require a different strategy. And the first is almost always the lower-cost place to start.

 

Track 1: The White Space Inside Your Existing Accounts

Most account teams manage relationships. Very few systematically map the gap between what an account currently buys and what it could realistically buy. That gap — the distance between current spend and full potential spend across your product portfolio — is account-level white space, and it is the most underworked growth lever in the business.

The exercise requires two things:

• A clear picture of what each account is not buying — which upsells, cross-sells, and add-ons are absent from their purchase history.
• An honest assessment of which gaps are actually relevant for that account — not every product fits every customer, and treating all gaps as equal produces unfocused outreach that goes nowhere.

This is the work of taking a TAM to a SAM and then a SOM — applied at the account level rather than the market level. Done rigorously, it drives rep assignments (point effort where potential is highest, not where relationships are easiest), informs bundling and pricing decisions, and sharpens messaging from broad product promotion to a specific conversation about what this account is not yet buying and why they should be.

Your most valuable untapped market may already be on your customer list.

51ºÚÁÏ surfaces account-level white space in a specific way: by showing you the full scope of construction activity each of your accounts is driving, and which segments they specialize in beyond the work you currently win with them. If a firm is specifying your roofing products but BuildShare shows they also manage significant healthcare construction volume, a segment where your wall panel line is qualified and competitive, that’s the next conversation, mapped for you.

BuildShare makes this visible at the firm level across 677K+ tracked companies in commercial construction. You can see specialization patterns by building type, project size, and geography, identify which of your accounts are most active in segments where you have a competitive product, and watch how their work mix shifts over time. The opportunity is visible. Most manufacturers just aren’t looking.

Track 2: Finding White Space in New Markets

The second track is market expansion — entering geographies, facility types, or material categories where you currently have no presence. This is a higher-cost path than mining existing accounts, but in a growing construction market it is essential for long-term share growth.

A critical word of caution: moving into a new market does not mean moving into an uncontested one. Healthcare construction has competitors. So does every other established building category. The actual white space in market expansion is narrower than it first appears, and it realistically takes one of two specific forms

Type A: Markets growing fast enough that competition hasn’t caught up yet

These are the genuinely untapped opportunities — sectors or geographies where construction volume is accelerating faster than the competitive field has recognized. Data center construction, life science facilities, and advanced manufacturing plants have all entered rapid growth cycles before most manufacturers’ sales strategies reflected the shift. When a market grows fast enough, first movers establish specification habits, distributor relationships, and brand awareness before the market becomes contested.

The window is short and shrinking. Markets that stayed open for 18 months are now contested within 6 as data tools enable faster competitive response. Being first to spot the trend is not a nice-to-have — it is the entire strategic advantage.

Dodge One and MarketShare are built to find these signals before they become obvious:

• Dodge One surfaces projects at the design phase — before specifications are written and before most competitors have engaged. If a facility type is entering the planning pipeline at an accelerating rate, you can see it there long before it shows up in any industry report.
• MarketShare provides a 5-year MSA-level forecast with 10 years of historical context, organized around Dodge’s 22 forecast categories — such as Office & Bank (which includes Data Centers), Manufacturing, Healthcare, Education & Multi-family Residential. This is the right tool for identifying durable growth trends in established building categories and separating a multi-year shift from a single-quarter spike before committing headcount or capital to market entry. It his worth noting that Dodge has multiple service offerings in the realm of construction market sizing data, including custom data deliverables, when needed.  Your Dodge rep can walk you through additional data options.

Type B: Adjacent markets where you are well-positioned to win — and competitors are not

Not every new market requires being first. Some require being better-positioned than the competitors already operating there. The question is whether you can win on price, quality, service, or some combination — and whether rivals are deeply entrenched or merely present. An adjacent market where a competitor has nominal specification presence and you have structural advantages in distribution, product fit, or customer relationships is a fundamentally different opportunity from one where they are dominant.

Before entering any adjacent segment, you need to know exactly how your competitors are performing there. SpecShare shows your specification rate head-to-head against rivals by region and project type — where their presence is strong, and where it is thin. That analysis is the foundation of a credible entry strategy. Without it, you are guessing.

Adjacent white space most commonly surfaces in three forms:

• Geographic gaps: Regions where construction is surging but your brand has near-zero specification activity. Sweets will often show architect search behavior rising in a region months before it appears in the project pipeline — giving you a materially earlier entry point.
• Project-type shifts: Facility categories growing faster than your pipeline reflects. If your sales strategy was calibrated to a construction landscape from three years ago, you are likely overweighted in contracting sectors and underweighted in the ones expanding now.
• Material-type trends: Specification shifts that concentrate in one region before spreading nationally. Low-carbon concrete, reflective roofing, and mass timber all followed this curve. Sweets search and download data surfaces these 12–18 months ahead of mainstream adoption — before the specification habits are locked.

Starting the Work: From Concept to Action

White space analysis is only useful when it changes how you operate. Both tracks require a structured process to move from data to decisions.

For existing accounts:

• Map each account’s purchase history against your full product portfolio and identify the gaps.
• Filter for relevance — which upsells and cross-sells are actually appropriate for this account’s project types and buying patterns?
• Use Dodge project data to validate: what construction activity is this account driving that your untapped products could serve?

For market expansion:

• Use Dodge One and MarketShare to find segments with accelerating early-stage pipeline volume and minimal specification presence from your brand.
• Run a SpecShare competitive analysis before entering. Know exactly where rivals are strong and where they are thin.
• Validate durability with a 5-year MSA forecast. Commit resources only to opportunities that will still exist when your investment matures.

 

The question is not whether white space exists. It does — in your account base and in the markets around you. The question is whether you find it before your competitors do, and whether you pursue the lower-cost path first.

 

Start with your existing customers. Map what they are not buying and why they should be. Then look outward at the markets developing without you. The manufacturers who grow their share of the market — not just their revenue within it — are the ones asking a different question.

51ºÚÁÏ provides the project intelligence, competitive data, and market analytics to find white space across both tracks — and act on it before the window closes. Start asking the right question now.

 

Related Articles:

Are You Growing Ahead of the Market — or Falling Behind?

How Our Data Compares to Our Competitors

How Central States Saves 250 Sales Hours Per Year