Short answer: Industry forecasts point to the German construction market returning to real growth from 2027. That reads like a reason to wait, and it is the opposite. When there are fewer projects to go around, teams with better visibility, timing and focus capture a larger share of what is left — so the gap between the leaders and everyone else widens during a downturn rather than narrowing. The structural advantage being built now does not disappear when volume returns.
Why a tighter market separates rather than levels
The intuition is that a downturn hurts everyone proportionally. In project sales it does not, for a specific reason.
When project volume drops, the number of teams chasing each remaining project rises. In that situation the differentiator is no longer effort — everyone is working hard — it is who reaches the project while the specification is still open. Teams still running on manual research and gut-feel prioritisation are chasing the same projects as everyone else, usually later and with less context.
The result is a clear split among building product manufacturers right now: those who have built a system for finding and qualifying projects early, and those waiting for conditions to improve.
The market will improve. The advantage the first group is compounding will not evaporate when it does.
What "commercial excellence" is worth, according to someone not selling software
There is an argument to be made here that does not come from a vendor.
Roland Berger's Construction Radar 2026 assessed seven profitability levers across the construction industry. For building products companies, commercial excellence ranked among the highest-potential levers — ahead of portfolio adaptation, procurement excellence and financial restructuring.
That is worth sitting with, because construction has always been an industry where cost-cutting feels like the safe move in a downturn. The data points elsewhere: one of the largest available opportunities is not in restructuring or portfolio changes. It is in getting better at selling.
A company like Building Radar would say that. Roland Berger has no software to sell, looked at the full picture across the industry, and identified how you sell as one of the clearest paths to profitability right now.
Which makes the useful question: if commercial excellence is one of the biggest levers available, what is actually holding your sales process back?
What the companies pulling ahead are doing
Not anything revolutionary. Four things, consistently.
They know which projects are entering planning phase. Not at tender — at planning. That is the difference between influencing a specification and competing on price inside someone else's.
They know which key accounts are ramping up again. Existing customers start new projects without mentioning it. Monitoring that is a system function, not a relationship function.
They have reduced the manual load per project. In a weaker market, field sales ends up doing *more* manual work just to find the next viable opportunity. The teams pulling ahead shrank that load and gave expensive, experienced sales time back to selling.
They can state their coverage. How many relevant projects exist in the target market, and what share the team touched. Most manufacturers cannot answer this, which is itself the finding.
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Why waiting is more expensive than it looks
Three reasons the "we'll prepare when volume returns" position does not hold.
Sales cycles run 18 to 36 months. Projects that will produce revenue in 2027 are entering planning now. A team that starts building visibility in 2027 is building it for 2029.
Systems take time to become effective. Adoption, calibration, and the accumulation of relationship history in a shared system are not instant. The learning curve happens either during a quiet period or during a busy one.
The quiet period is when capacity exists to change. Reorganising how a team finds and prioritises projects is difficult when volume is high. It is considerably easier now.
What building the infrastructure looks like concretely
Four components, and they are not sequential — they reinforce each other.
Systematic discovery. Projects across the full footprint, detected at planning and design stage from permits, planning applications, developer announcements, trade press and local news. Building Radar covers more than 50 countries on this basis, alongside over 1,000 new tenders daily.
Consistent qualification. Every project scored against your specific portfolio rather than a project category — Jeane, the intelligence inside Building Radar, reads your website, product catalogues and technical data sheets — with relationship advantage factored in from the CRM and email history.
Automated administration. Drafted outreach, prepared meeting briefs, follow-ups triggered by project stage changes, records current in Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics or SAP C4C. Teams report roughly 80% less manual project sales work.
Measurement. Average project stage at first contact, specification rate, win rate from project found to closed. Without these, the improvement is invisible and therefore indefensible in a budget review.
Companies such as Schindler, Heidelberg Materials, Hochtief and Saint-Gobain Switzerland already use Building Radar to their advantage.
Frequently asked questions
When will the construction market recover? Industry forecasts point to the German market returning to real growth from around 2027, though projections vary and should be treated as estimates rather than certainties.
Why does a tighter market widen the gap between sales teams? Because with fewer projects available, the teams that reach projects while the specification is still open capture a disproportionate share, and effort alone no longer differentiates.
Is a downturn a good time to invest in sales infrastructure? It is arguably the best time, because sales cycles run 18 to 36 months and the capacity to change how a team works exists when volume is lower.
What does commercial excellence mean in this context? In Roland Berger's Construction Radar 2026 it refers to improving how a company sells — pricing, sales process, market coverage — assessed as one of the highest-potential profitability levers for building products companies.
What should be built first? Visibility of projects at planning stage. Everything downstream has a ceiling set by what you can see.
Ready to build the advantage before the recovery?
Find out how Building Radar's revenue engineering solution positions your team for the projects entering planning now.
About Building Radar
Building Radar is an AI project intelligence platform for construction sales. It discovers construction projects in more than 50 countries — including at planning and design stage, before any tender is published — scores each project against a company's specific product portfolio, identifies the decision-makers, and drives the resulting sales work through Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics or SAP C4C. Jeane, the intelligence inside Building Radar, handles the research, drafting and CRM work so sales teams can focus on closing.
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