Going Vertical: 5 Key Considerations
Visit any Web site, read any piece of collateral or examine any marketing program, and you won’t find too many b-to-b organizations marketing products. The age of solutions is now upon us, and vertical-specific solutions have rapidly become the approach of choice to capitalize on this growing craze. Most organizations correctly understand that the value of a vertical focus is in its ability to leverage and target specific features and benefits to specific needs within specific markets, but it’s never that easy. Today, I’ll share five key gates that b-to-b organizations wanting to go vertical must navigate.
1. Segmentation Every vertical market actually comprises many sub-verticals, each of which is its own “industry within an industry” with highly specific business drivers, buying processes and macro factors that will greatly affect the proclivity to buy what you sell. When b-to-b marketing or sales leaders tell me they target the “financial services” market, my first question revolves around asking whether they have taken subsequent cuts. Is it banks? Insurance companies? Brokerage houses? Buy side? Sell side? And most important, what are the selection criteria that have been used to prioritize one or more against the others? The creation of a ranking framework helps to ensure that the best sub-verticals are selected, not the ones that for one political reason or another carry the loudest voices.
2. Solutions Delta
Few issues within specialized marketplaces can be solved through the purchase of a single product; vertical positioning is the most powerful when a complete industry-specific solution is offered. Few organizations have an existing product that by itself solves a sub-vertical need, unless it was developed specifically for that purpose. For example, unless you have intentionally developed a straight-through-processing solution for online trading, it is unlikely an existing product in your portfolio has the right capabilities. To go vertical, products will have to be enhanced or adapted, or partnerships with complementary vendors will need to be forged. Armed with a list of sub-vertical targets and key issues, a ranking framework and an understanding of what the solutions delta would be within each, you can now adequately prioritize and select your targets.
3. Domain Knowledge
There are many reasons that someone in a particular marketplace will buy something. There might be a catastrophic event that forces their hand in an immediate sense, or they are convinced over time by influencers that they trust that a change needs to be made in the way they have grown accustomed to doing business. As marketers, we must be able to understand these potential catastrophic reasons and the sub-vertical-specific impacts of waiting until disaster occurs to find a solution, as well as to align ourselves with the specific influencer communities that can credibly assist us to drive change. With buying triggers in hand, we can begin the gathering of domain knowledge that relates to the way that prospects buy within a specific marketplace.
4. Messaging
The first step in marketing any vertical solution is to review your messaging architecture. This involves auditing your existing messaging and positioning and updating them to communicate value to individual marketplaces/sub-verticals. Taking this step will transform your organization’s messaging as well as impact how it is delivered by sales. The next step is to learn the language of the marketplace(s) you are targeting. After you have developed new messaging and positioning, validate it with any customers in the space, and refine both as necessary.
5. Sales Readiness
Vertical success does not start and end with marketing; sales must also be able to internalize and communicate value propositions, business needs and capabilities against relevant audiences that it will manage within buying processes. A sales readiness function can play a key role in moving sales to a solutions mentality by working with product marketing to gather content and training materials necessary to equip sales to sell vertical solutions and to release this information in a sales playbook that can be more easily absorbed by the field.
Executed incorrectly, vertical marketing can be a very dangerous business. Although some organizations may find a quick boost with better messaging in the short term, long term they will be challenged to deliver on implied promises, a fact that competitors can and will expose. Taking a measured approach to sub-vertical selection and execution not only ensures sustainable success in the short term, it becomes the foundation for future solutions expansion
