Creating your market when none exists

One of our companies had a sales consultant audit their sales team and methodology. Our portfolio company’s market has some interesting traits: i) the market is greenfield and almost all homegrown; ii) ‘no decision’ is the company’s primary competitor; and iii) the market as it stands is currently small, but large enterprises are the target customers. The consultant’s recommendations for approaching the market were as follows:

Focus on one vertical. Target a particular vertical and only focus on that vertical until you’ve saturated it. Go to every conference in that vertical, get industry publications for your reps, and make you product as applicable as possible to the vertical. In our case, tech companies are our initial vertical of focus.

Land a ‘buffalo’ in the vertical. Sign the industry leaders in the vertical, prove the ROI out to them, and then use that buffalo or buffalos as case studies and references to win the rest of the vertical.

Move into other tangential verticals. In our particular case, the first vertical to target was hardware and software companies. Once we dominate that vertical, the goal will then be to move into IT Services and Electronics, which are complimentary. As you dominate verticals, the next vertical should be somewhat related so that when you refer to past successes, new customers will be able to relate. For instance it makes no sense for us to go from hardware/software companies to food companies, because food companies may not fully appreciate our past successes in the hardware/software space.

If your company is a SaaS business with similar characteristics as ours (greenfield market, no decision is your competitor), then taking a sales approach similar to the above may be the way forward.

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