How to achieve growth through specialization
MTI Selling
In these days of holidays, year-end and planning, surely you continue thinking and analyzing how to make your business grow, exploring successful trends and mentors’ contributions that you can apply in your IT company.
It is a fact that the large number of generalist technological partners competing to achieve greater market share challenges us to get out of the standard model of being only suppliers of an in-a-box solution, to become agents of change, true business allies of the customer.
A few days ago, from MTI Selling we had the opportunity to interview Alejandro Luna, Regional Sales Director for Mid-Market in Salesforce Mexico, with a long history leading partners in major brands, specialist in strategic planning, channel development and customer relationship.
Alejandro shared very valuable contributions on how specializing in a niche market boosts growth in IT companies.
Today I would like to share some highlights of his exhibition with a focus on specialization, which you will find really useful:
Post pandemic perspective
The current reality tremendously boosted the analysis of data, leading companies to be able to know their customers in depth and to focus all this knowledge on a vertical or use case. This evolution has led the customer to move from seeing IT companies as a supplier to seeing them as a business partner, an agent of change that contributes in the digital transformation and optimization of processes.
How to move from being a generalist to a specialist?
It is recommended to start taking an industry and studying the cases that you have of that industry. From there, investigate what other needs that customer may have. With this information in hand, you can move on to drawing a road map of the life cycle of customers and their pains completely.
Getting into the customer’s processes is essential, since it allows us to detect their needs at another level, bringing in predictability in the necessary resources in the implementation, and consequently recurrence arising out of the trust generated with your service.
Internationalizing your service, meanwhile, is another great opportunity to position yourself as a specialist in a specific niche. Opening a market in certain countries, and even in a region, along with this deepening in the quality of service in a niche, will position you as an expert, expanding your market.
Benefits of specializing in sales
Specialization generates greater trust in the quality of the service delivered. This generated trust will bring in greater recurrence, fostering loyalty to the installed base of customers. In turn, recurrence will provide greater commercial predictability, shortening closing times and bringing clarity to planning. Finally, the solid relationship between trust and quality of the customer experience will result in referrals (happy customers = best promoters of your solution).
And this is how we achieve sustainable growth, optimizing both retention and acquisition of customers.
Conclusions:
- When you work on a niche strategy, you do not lose market. On the contrary: by becoming an agent of change, the market turns out to be expanded. It can grow to the point of going from 1 million USD to 15 million USD in just 5 years following this focus on specialization and incorporating technology (real case of a partner).
- A well-treated customer is willing to pay 80% more for a service where they feel well treated.
- When you know an industry in depth you can understand its flow and propose how to make it more efficient, from logistics to delivery. You become an expert.
- Your success stories and your customers become your credentials.
- Retention/maintenance of the installed base of customers is key to growing efficiently (see article ¿Cómo ser eficiente en la generación de demanda con clientes actuales?)
- Prioritizing focus on industry over focus on processes and solutions is recommended for technology partners to achieve growth.
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If you want to know how in MTI Selling we can support you with our strategies of demand generation and positioning with tailored digital selling, I invite you to watch this video and follow us on YouTube and LinkedIn.
