Most brands have Pro data. Very few have Pro segmentation.
A roofer, an electrician, a remodeler, and a landscaper all qualify as professional buyers. They may even shop at the same retailers. But treating them as one audience isn't an effective way to think about the market, and a top-line Pro number is what makes that an easy mistake to keep making.
Category size, Pro buyer counts, a general read that brand matters. Those numbers are available to almost anyone selling into this market, which is why they explain so little about how to win it. What actually moves a strategy is what sits underneath them: the differences between one Pro and the next, and which of those differences are big enough to act on.
The nuance isn't abstract. It sits in a short list of attributes that separate one Pro from another:
Primary trade
Size of the business they work for
Type of work they primarily perform
Customers they typically serve
Products and materials they purchase
Retailers they purchase from
Role in the purchase decision
How important brand is to them
Read one at a time, each attribute is mildly interesting. Read together, they describe fundamentally different professional buyers, and those differences are big enough to change what you do about them.
According to OpenBrand’s Pro Insights data, across more than 11,000 Pros surveyed in the first two quarters of 2026, 49% told us brand is "very important" when purchasing products or materials. Another 36% said brand is important for some products and not for others.
So roughly 85% of Pros say brand matters at least some of the time. Interesting? Yes.
Enough to build a strategy around? Not quite.
The more valuable question: which Pros care more about brand, which care less, and why?
According to OpenBrand’s pro data, by primary trade, the share saying brand is very important varies between 44% to 54%.
By the type of product purchased, it varies from about 47% to 55%.
And by where Pros shop, the spread gets much wider. Roughly 40% to 60%.
That last one is a 20-point difference in brand importance across Pros who shop at different retailers. Two brands could sell the same category to the same trade and still reach Pro populations with very different attitudes toward brand.
The point isn't any single number. It's that the answer changes depending on how you define the Pro you're trying to reach.
That gap shows up plainly in two companies selling the same category into the same professional market.
Company A has the top-line view. Market size for their category. Rough count of how many Pros buy it. Maybe a syndicated panel number or one-time trade association survey. Most of their competitors have some version of this information.
Company B knows all of that, plus which trades over-index on brand importance, for which product categories, where those Pros shop, what size companies they work for, and who their customers are.
Both companies have some form of Pro data. But only one has the depth to strategically act on it.
The value isn't knowing how many Pros buy something. Everyone eventually gets that number, and nobody wins a category with it. The value is understanding which Pros are buying, what makes them different, and how those differences should shape the way you go to market. That reads through to brand investment, product positioning, channel strategy, retailer conversations and customer targeting.
That distinction is the difference between a segmentation strategy and a segmentation slide.
The professional market isn't one audience. It is thousands of combinations of the attributes above.
Nobody needs 10,000 segments.
But brands and retailers do need to know which differences matter for their business, and that is the part the top-line number will never tell you. Company A's data describes the market. Company B's data describes who inside it is worth going after.
"We sell to Pros" may describe your customer base. But it isn’t a winning channel strategy.
Knowing which Pro you need to win is often the difference between participating in the market and stepping in front of demand and taking share.
Learn more about OpenBrand Pro Insights data.
Blog article written by: David Kaelin, VP of Growth, OpenBrand
OpenBrand tracks Pro buyer preference and practice data for home improvement brands and retailers, covering trade, business size, work type, customer mix, purchase categories, retailer usage, purchase role and brand importance. If you want to know which Pro differences actually matter for your category, that is the conversation worth having.