Our team often talks about penetrating new industries. The challenge is that everyone wants to see a case study of a success story in their industry, however, we need a new client in order to have a new case study. As a result, we’ve waited until, by hap or by chance, a client from a new industry gives us a shot.
Then, it’s our responsibility to avoid what we refer to as “shiny object syndrome,” which is the misconception that we uncovered a brand-new vertical that we should shift our focus to. The actual process takes much longer than that. For one, we need to establish results.
A little background: we started by working with Professional Coaches, Consultants, and Solopreneurs because LinkedIn is an excellent platform for them to directly build relationships with potential clients. So, in order to scale we followed the small business golden rule and “niched down” – before too long, we became the go-to shop for executive, leadership, and professional coaches. We became excellent at getting coaches consistent results, which led to higher retention and referrals. This vertical still comprises more than 50% of our current client base.
Over the past year, we’ve been fortunate to work with clients in a variety of new industries such as Venture Capital, Telecommunication, SaaS, Realty, Cybersecurity, and City Government. I’d like to highlight our work with city government below.
Two months ago, we worked out a deal with a well-known city to assist their government initiative of incentivizing small businesses to relocate their headquarters. With a combination of excitement and nervousness we took on the project and began working tirelessly on their accounts. In the back of our mind was the question of whether Founders and CEOs would want to take calls with government officials – turns out, they did!
We’ve booked nearly 70 calls to their calendars already. This even surpassed the results we see with coaches, our original niche. Using this case study, we’re preparing to make a great effort to connect with other municipalities in early 2021.
We’ll continue heavy outreach to Coaches, Consultants, and Solopreneurs – the current focus of our entire sales team. But for next year’s diversification plan, I anticipate directing half of our sales team to shift focus to one of these new industries – each armed with a successful case study, of course.
