Understand a sector before you spend a year selling into it.
Most firms enter a new market on assumption and learn how it actually works one lost meeting at a time. This agent maps the sector first. Who is in it, how it buys, what it is currently dealing with, and which firms are worth approaching.
What the sector research agent does
Map the sector. Learn how it buys.
Entering a new sector usually starts with a list. Somebody filters a database by industry code and location, and the team begins working through names. The list is not wrong, it is just uninformed. Nobody knows which of those firms have the problem, who signs, or what the market calls the thing you are selling.
This agent does the work before the list. It maps who operates in the sector and how the market is structured, identifies what the sector is currently dealing with, and captures how the industry describes its own work. That produces a target list where every firm carries the reason it qualifies, and messaging that reads like it came from somebody who knows the industry.
Where you are already competing in a market rather than entering one, the competitor research agent is the closer fit. It tracks named rivals over time rather than mapping a sector from the beginning. For what is happening in the market week to week, the sector news researcher covers the traffic rather than the map. Firms frequently run more than one.
Capabilities
What it handles.
Sector mapping
Builds the picture of who is actually in the sector. The firms, their size, where they operate, who owns them and how the market is grouped. The starting point most firms skip because it takes a fortnight by hand.
How the sector buys
Identifies who signs, who influences, what the approval path looks like and what a typical buying cycle involves. Selling into a sector without knowing this is where most expansion budgets go.
Pressures and drivers
Surfaces what the sector is currently dealing with. Regulatory change, margin pressure, hiring difficulty, consolidation. The problems a sector is already spending money to solve are the ones worth building an offer around.
The vocabulary the sector uses
Captures how the market describes its own work, including the terms it uses and the ones it never would. Your outreach and your website stop reading like an outsider wrote them.
Target list with reasoning
Produces a ranked list of firms worth approaching, with the reason each one qualifies recorded against it. Your team gets a list it can argue with rather than a scrape of every company in a category.
Kept current, not filed away
The sector picture is refreshed on a set rhythm rather than written once. New entrants, ownership changes and shifts in what the market is dealing with are added as they happen.
Who it is for
Built for firms moving into a market they do not yet know.
Firms entering a new sector
Understand how a market works before committing a year of sales effort to it. The expensive version of this lesson is learning it one lost meeting at a time.
Sales and business development leads
A target list built on reasoning rather than a filter, and the language to approach it with. Outreach that lands because it names the problem the sector actually has.
Marketing teams
Sector pages, campaigns and messaging grounded in how the market describes itself. Positioning stops being a guess made in a room with nobody from the industry in it.
Consultancies and professional services firms
Build a credible sector proposition without hiring from that industry first. Useful where the firm sells expertise and cannot afford to sound unfamiliar in the first conversation.
What is included
What you get.
A written sector brief covering structure, buyers, pressures and vocabulary.
A ranked target list with the qualifying reason recorded against each firm.
The buying path for the sector, including who signs and who influences.
Messaging input drawn from how the sector describes its own work.
Refreshes on your chosen rhythm as the sector changes.
Public sources only, with the source recorded against every claim so your team can check it.
How it gets built
How it gets built.
01
Define the sector and the boundary
We agree exactly which market you mean and where it stops, including geography, firm size and the parts of the sector you would not sell to. A tight boundary is what makes the output usable rather than general.
02
Agree what qualifies a firm
Before any list is built, we set out what makes a firm worth approaching in your terms. Size, structure, ownership, recent signals. This is what the agent reasons against, so the list can be challenged on its logic rather than accepted on faith.
03
Test against a sector you already know
We run the agent against a market your team knows well and check what it produces against what you already understand. If it misses something obvious about a familiar sector, it is not ready to be trusted on an unfamiliar one.
04
Set the refresh and the route
You decide how often the sector picture is refreshed, what counts as a change worth flagging, and where the brief and target list land so the people selling into the sector actually work from them.
Why Delancy
Against a market report or a month of desk research.
Built for a decision, not a bookshelf
A market report tells you a sector is worth £4bn. That does not tell you who to call on Monday or what to say. The output here is a target list and the language to approach it with.
Narrow enough to be useful
Research is scoped to the sector and geography you actually sell into. A national overview is easy to produce and rarely changes what anyone does.
Every claim carries its source
Nothing reaches the brief without a link and a date behind it. Your team can check a claim before repeating it in front of somebody who works in that industry.
No ongoing dependency
The agent runs in your environment, configured to your sectors, with the price agreed before build. You are not committed to a subscription that renews whether you use it or not.
Frequently Asked Questions
Common Questions.
The competitor research agent tracks a named list of firms you already compete with and reports what changes about them. This agent maps a sector you are moving into, where you may not yet know who the players are or how the market buys. Firms often run both, one for the market they are in and one for the market they are entering.
Publicly available sources only. Company registers and filings, trade bodies and industry publications, job listings, published pricing and public commentary from people who work in the sector. The agent does not access anything behind a login or misrepresent itself to obtain information.
Narrow works better than broad. Marine services in Gibraltar produces something useful. Professional services in Europe does not. The scope is agreed during the build and can cover more than one sector.
No. A filtered database export gives you everything matching a category, most of which is not worth approaching. This produces a ranked list with the reason each firm qualifies recorded against it, so your team can disagree with the reasoning rather than working through names blind.
Then the value sits in maintenance rather than discovery. Firms with genuine sector knowledge use it to keep that picture current and to make what one or two people know available to everyone else in the business.
Pilots start from £2,500. The price is agreed before any build starts. Where the agent relies on third-party services to run, those operational costs sit with you and are made clear before build begins.
FREE ASSESSMENT
Is an AI agent the right shape for this?
Ten questions on the task, the volume and the output you need. You get a diagnosis of whether an agent fits, not a score.
Take the assessmentFind out what you do not yet know about the sector you are entering.
Book a discovery call. We will scope the sector, agree what qualifies a firm, and show you what the brief would contain.
Book a discovery call →