Whether its technology, healthcare, manufacturing, transportation or northeastern sausage distributors, telling an industry’s story…solving an industry problem…is a critical way to differentiate yourself. And maybe the best way. Over the years we have observed some best practices of vertical business development that might get your motor running.
Put your opinions out there.
Saying you know an industry is fine. Demonstrating it is better. Offering your people’s point of view on the most important topics facing that industry is the easiest and biggest opportunity you have to drive new business. Your prospects don’t know as much as you do…about what you do…so be the expert you are. Give an outlook or opinion on a wide variety of impactful topics and do it VERY regularly.
Married with effective marketing (articles, videos, whitepapers, infographics, blog activity) and working with your sales, credit, asset, doc and legal teams, you’ll get prospects to come to you. Real, qualified, high quality inbound leads are far more fun than cold calling. This approach helps the prospect develop a relationship with you, before developing a relationship with you.
Track record is key.
Almost every communication needs to be laden with your experience in the industry. Number of deals, commitments under management in the industry, years of experience of your people, unique solutions that a tailored to the industry, case studies, success stories, testimonial videos. Nothing sells like success. If you have a long track record and aren’t using it as well as you need to, you are missing opportunity.
If you don’t have an extensive track record, strong marketing can help you. Lean less on your volume and more on the story of your track record. Spend more time on case studies and solutions for the industry, invest heavily in thought leadership articles and the like and you’ll get more at bats than many of your higher volume, longer standing competitors.
Make a commitment to your data.
The companies that regularly gain insights from the portfolio and prospect data, win. Just one example would be in the economic mess of the last several years most people saw lending vacate the transportation industry. And while that’s mostly true, we watched a client of ours with a transportation specialty move from OTR fleets to vocational transportation companies. Then they expanded into large moving and warehousing companies in 2010 and were well poised in 2013 to jump back into OTR fleets. Their total origination volumes never took more than a 5% hit and today are larger than they have ever been.
So how did they read the tea leaves so well? Data. A regular and rigorous review of the segments of transportation led this company to proactively attack the markets that were withstanding the storm better than others. Trends in deal flow, credit performance and even a survey of equipment dealers allow them to adjust the sails of the business to find the best opportunities regardless of the economic climate.
We can almost guarantee if you put the effort into these 3 things, you’ll see more and better opportunities more consistently than ever before. If you ever wanna chat about how to make your vertical fly, give us a holler.