What is Vertical Selling Strategy and Why use it?

What is Vertical Selling?

Vertical selling is a Sales strategy where you focus on the selling in a hyper focused Industry niche. This strategy is more prevalent in Industries dealing with complex solutions which require deep consultative selling expertise.

In this strategy, the solutions sold to a particular Industry’s client tends to be largely customized solutions and hence it is a highly personalized approach of selling.

For .e.g. if you are selling software for operating large scale machines specifically used in Manufacturing Industry, then it can fall under Vertical Selling Strategy.

Why should you use Vertical Selling Strategy?

1. Keeps you Focused

Using Vertical selling strategy, you can keep your sales and operation team focused on a particular Industry niche so that there is lesser context switching. It helps build better productivity among the sales consultants and operation staffs. This way they can channelize their effort and learning within that particular industry to provide better solutions for the customers.

2. Standardization of Business Processes

When you are dealing with a similar group of customers in a particular Industry niche, you will find a common pattern in the way all of them operate. This will help you keep common business process for all the clients wheter it is sales process, finance and accounting process or procurement process. This will ultimately help your business to scale up better due to standardization of multiple business processes.

3. Better Utilization of resources

Vertical selling strategy can be a boon for the business having limited resources in terms of human capital. If you have a lesser team size, you should avoid spreading too thin into multiple verticals and instead focus and nail on one or two key verticals before trying to scale up. This helps in more efficient and effective utilization of human resources.

4. Better Positioning in the Industry

If you work solely in a certain Industry niche, gradually you will end up accumulating more niche specific skills compared to competing solution providers operating in multiple verticals. In this way you can easily provide more value addition for the customers. This will help your organization to create a strong brand positioning in the Industry and be recognized as an Industry leader. With better positioning, the trust and acceptance of your brand will improve in the market. This will ultimately lead to a better business growth.

5. Builds knowledge Power house to provide similar solutions

When the business operates solely on a particular niche, overtime it will build up on its experience of working with similar customers in the same Industry niche. These experiences, if documented well as case studies, recommended processes and best practices can build up a large power house of knowledge and expertise. This knowledge base can be leveraged further in multiple ways such as to sell solutions faster, to improve the delivery and operations, to streamline finances and many more things.

To wrap up, Vertical Selling can be a great sales strategy if you are looking to tap a certain specific Industry niche and want to position yourself as an Industry leader.

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