In the world of sales, it’s almost always better to niche down by industry.
Specializing in this way allows you to hone your focus, develop expertise more quickly, stand out from competitors, and build deeper and more lasting connections with your prospects and customers.
There’s strength in being seen as a specialist in one area instead of merely a generalist, okay at everything and exceptional at nothing.
In this article, we’ll look at why MSP sales teams should niche down by industry, and how to do it effectively.
Why Niche by Industry?
There are many good reasons to choose a niche and focus on it. Let’s take a look at some of the most important.
Clients Feel Like You “Get” Them
When you specialize in a specific niche, clients and customers in that niche will choose you over more generalist competitors.
Clients want to feel understood — managed services is a serious matter and your customers want to feel reassured that you understand their unique needs and can get them results. If they can see concrete evidence of you helping out other companies in their niche, you have a strong foundation for a relationship.
Build Targeted Expertise
By niching down, you can develop deeper and more specific knowledge in your chosen area. Instead of spreading yourself thin to learn about a wide range of industries, you can go deep on just one — becoming smarter and more educated in that area than any generalist.
When you have a nuanced and advanced understanding of the unique challenges, vulnerabilities, trends, compliance requirements, and solutions in your niche, you’ll be able to offer more tailored and effective solutions to your clients.
Establish a Formidable Reputation
When you choose a niche, you can focus exclusively on developing the expertise and skills relevant to that niche, allowing you to quickly establish a reputation as an expert in the field. Clients will gravitate toward you over others, seeing that you’re an authority in this area.
Compliance and Regulatory Knowledge
In the world of managed services, especially around issues like cybersecurity, it’s essential to comply with regulations and ensure your company remains on the right side of the law. As a result, your clients will be looking to work with someone who fully understands the regulatory landscape and can keep them safe.
Every industry has its own set of compliance and regulatory frameworks around things like security and data privacy. When you niche down, you have the time to stay up-to-date with the specific regulations that apply to your industry, so you can give clients peace of mind that you fully understand the landscape.
Build an Impressive Network
When you focus on a specific industry, you’ll find it much easier to develop and nurture relationships with others in that industry — key decision-makers, groups, and thought leaders. This will elevate your own status, as well as make it easier to connect with new clients, form useful partnerships with other companies, and access cutting-edge information.
Better Marketing
By specializing in a certain industry, you can run much more focused and tailored marketing campaigns. You’re able to write more relevant copy, targeting more specific pain points and challenges and using exactly the right approaches and channels. This not only allows you to use your marketing resources much more efficiently, but it also makes it easier to connect with potential clients.
Stay Ahead of the Curve
Specialized MSP sales teams are able to have their fingers on the pulse of a particular niche by focusing on one industry alone. That makes it much easier to predict and respond to trends, gain quick insights into new technologies and emerging threats, and quickly adapt. You’ll be able to offer innovative, cutting-edge solutions and make confident predictions.
How to Choose Your Industry
Now that we’ve explored some of the main reasons to niche down as a MSP sales team, which industry should you specialize in? This is a question worth taking some time to consider — here are some factors to take into account.
How Well Do You Know the Industry?
It makes sense to specialize in an industry you already have some experience with. Ideally, you’ll have case studies and real, concrete examples of companies you helped in this industry that you can show to future clients. You may already have a network of contacts in this industry and a solid understanding of how things work.
Market Size and Growth Potential
Look at how large your possible industry is. Is there much potential for growth? Ideally, you want to niche down in an industry that’s expanding, healthy, and has a significant market size with lots of opportunities.
Competition
How competitive is your target industry? Assess the existing MSPs and what they are currently doing — can you compete? Find out if there’s room for you, and how you’ll be able to effectively stand out from the competition.
Access to Target Customers
How easily will you be able to connect and engage with your target customers in your chosen industry? There are many factors that influence this — your existing connections and experience and the availability of industry-specific events and groups.
It’s also important to consider how aware your target clients are of their needs, and how open they are to new solutions in this area.
Longevity and Stability
When choosing a niche, don’t just think in the short term. Think about the long-term stability and prospects of your chosen industry — will it still be a stable and prosperous niche in five, 10, or 20 years, or is it likely to be significantly disrupted or even obsolete? Choosing a niche with better longevity will help you build longer-lasting relationships and maintain a more stable base of customers.
How to Create a Niche Profile
When deciding on the right niche, it can be useful to put together a profile for your ideal industry. The best approach here is to pick a vertical, a client size, a geographic region, and a specific technology to market, and create your ideal industry profile from there.
It’s important to avoid being too broad — you want a market that’s big enough to offer opportunities but narrow enough to get engagement.
Work with DYOPATH
At DYOPATH, we can help you through the entire process of niching down by spelling everything out from scratch. We’ll help you build your perfect niche profile, drive more engagement, and build a playbook for each service you sell.