Just because there is a seemingly limitless number of commercial buildings and so many of them are so BAD – that is, uncomfortable, energy wasting and otherwise lacking in productivity features – there is always a huge potential market for any solution to make them better. However, whether you pick a segment by building type, metropolitan/suburban region, or vertical industry, there will only be a small percentage of the total available market that is ready to buy, or even just to begin a conversation.

To paraphrase Rob Day of Black Coral Capital, the hard lesson that many start-ups coming from experiences in Enterprise IT and general consumer markets learned in recent years is that the challenge is not how to build brand and scale operations fast enough to meet this huge potential, but rather how to find and win that small portion of receptive customers in a given segment – at the lowest cost of acquisition possible.

He writes, “New harvesting-oriented Sales means using digital marketing to collect a high-volume of unqualified leads into a funnel. Lure them with free content.  Those that bite have self-selected into the sales process. Putting in a lot less conversion effort per customer, and grabbing easy wins and moving on.”

Rob is another source of great insight about Buildings Content Marketing. Black Coral has invested in a portfolio of start-up firms targeted to the buildings industries, both commercial and residential. For example, Digital Lumens and Noesis. He shares his insight through his blog which is syndicated on Greentechmedia.com.