Vertical Market Insights Specialist

The Timken Company builds on a legacy of innovation that has powered space exploration, global infrastructure, and renewable energy. Join a team of 19,000 people across 45 countries and contribute immediately to work that improves industrial efficiency and shapes the future of motion.

About the role

The Vertical Market Insights Specialist generates market, application, customer, and competitor insights that enable Timken to develop robust growth strategies for its strategic vertical markets. This role performs primary and secondary research and applies proprietary frameworks to identify and prioritize growth opportunities, helping cross-functional teams make confident where-to-play and how-to-win choices.

Responsibilities

• Develop market and application maps:
  • Map strategic verticals by market, application, product, customer segment, and geography.
  • Build application maps showing where Timken solutions create value, demand concentration, and growth opportunities.
  • Help the data team size opportunity spaces using primary research, secondary research, and clearly stated assumptions.
• Build customer and segment insight:
  • Conduct customer discovery to understand jobs to be done, unmet needs, desired outcomes, sources of value, and decision criteria.
  • Support customer segmentation by identifying meaningful differences in applications, needs, economics, behaviors, and buying dynamics.
  • Translate customer insights into segment profiles that inform targeting, value proposition, and market activation choices.
• Map buying process dynamics:
  • Investigate how customers recognize problems, define requirements, build consensus, evaluate alternatives, justify investment, and make supplier decisions.
  • Identify key stakeholders, decision roles, and buying barriers and drivers.
  • Translate buying process insights into implications for messaging, sales engagement, proof points, and enablement.
• Assess competitors and alternatives:
  • Analyze competitors, substitutes, internal customer workarounds, and status quo alternatives that shape customer decisions.
  • Clarify where Timken is advantaged, where it must improve, and what evidence is needed to strengthen its competitive position.
  • Incorporate competitive insights into opportunity assessment, value proposition development, and activation planning.
• Identify, size, and prioritize growth opportunities:
  • Identify growth opportunities at the intersection of attractive markets, high-value customer needs, Timken capabilities, and competitive advantage.
  • Apply frameworks and scoring criteria to assess attractiveness and ability to win.
  • Support prioritization of opportunities for validation, activation planning, investment, or strategy development.
• Inform value proposition development:
  • Use customer, application, and competitive insights to clarify the business outcomes Timken can enable.
  • Support development of value propositions tailored to priority applications, segments, stakeholders, and buying barriers.
  • Identify proof points, evidence requirements, and message themes needed to make value propositions compelling and actionable.
• Frame strategic options and support market activation planning:
  • Synthesize insights into clear strategic options that help cross-functional teams evaluate where to play, how to win, and what must be true.
  • Contribute to market activation plans that define target segments, priority applications, value propositions, channel approaches, sales motions, proof points, and validation needs.
  • Create concise artifacts such as application maps, segment profiles, buying process maps, opportunity briefs, activation hypotheses, and prioritization views.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Business, Economics, Engineering, Marketing, or related field; MBA or advanced degree preferred.
• 4+ years of experience in B2B market research, strategy, marketing, product management, business development, consulting, or a related commercial role; industrial market experience preferred.
• Strong curiosity and learning agility, with the ability to quickly learn new markets, applications, technologies, methods, and frameworks.
• Experience applying structured frameworks, methodologies, or playbooks to identify opportunities, develop insights, and support growth decisions.
• Demonstrated ability to conduct research, synthesize insights, and translate findings into clear business implications.
• Strong analytical, storytelling, communication, and collaboration skills; able to create concise, executive-ready materials and work effectively across functions.
• Proficiency in Excel and PowerPoint; experience with Power BI, survey tools, CRM data, or other analytical platforms preferred.
• Ability and willingness to travel for customer interviews, field research, and internal working sessions.