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Why Your Outbound Needs a Vertical (Not a Rebrand)
"Should I niche down in my prospecting to a vertical or an industry?" That question came up on an office hours call yesterday with a bunch of MSP business owners. Here's what I told them based on managing 50 different IT companies in our fractional sales program and listening to thousands of prospecting calls: Yes, you should absolutely niche down—but you don't have to rebrand your entire company to do it. Most people think going vertical means becoming "the law firm IT company" and changing everything. That's wrong. You niche at the campaign level, not the company level. This episode breaks down how to compartmentalize your outbound: build a law firm-specific list, create landing pages with their language and acronyms, develop messaging that speaks to their specific IT fears and problems—all without touching your homepage or inbound script. The benefits are massive: your scripting has immediate relevance, you stand out from the 100 other calls they're getting, and you can feed patterns back into your campaigns through AI analysis of recorded calls. Learn why law firms have different IT concerns than manufacturing companies, how to stack verticals over time without getting diluted, and why this approach lets you leverage specialization into better specialization once the flywheel starts moving
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Welcome to Repeatable Revenue, hosted by strategic growth advisor , Ray J. Green.
About Ray:
→ Former Managing Director of National Small & Midsize Business at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he doubled revenue per sale in fundraising, led the first increase in SMB membership, co-built a national Mid-Market sales channel, and more.
→ Former CEO operator for several investor groups where he led turnarounds of recently acquired small businesses.
→ Current founder of MSP Sales Partners, where we currently help IT companies scale sales: www.MSPSalesPartners.com
→ Current Sales & Sales Management Expert in Residence at the world’s largest IT business mastermind.
→ Current Managing Partner of Repeatable Revenue Ventures, where we scale B2B companies we have equity in: www.RayJGreen.com
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Transcript
Here is the transcription of the podcast episode "Why Your Outbound Needs a Vertical (Not a Rebrand)."
"Should I niche down in my prospecting to a vertical or an industry?" That was one of the questions that came up on an office hours call that I was on yesterday with a bunch of MSP business owners, a bunch of IT businesses. And here's what I told them. I said: "You know, based on my experience—which is not just, you know, 20 years of general sales—just in the past year, we've brought 50 different IT companies into our fractional sales management program. And we're listening to hundreds, if not thousands, of calls that are for prospecting for outreach for outbound and listening to different offers and who's selling what. And we have all the data, right? Like, we're the sales manager. So we've got calls, we've got talk time, we've got, you know, conversions, and we know what they're calling on and the scripting. We're helping with that. And that's what's informing this answer, not just general experience here."
And the answer was: Yes, like you should niche down. Calling into a specific vertical has significant benefits and I've got proof to back that up.
That being said, you don't have to niche your whole company in order to niche a campaign or an outbound campaign that you're doing. In other words, a lot of people think: "Hey, if I'm gonna niche down into a vertical, I've gotta like turn my company into a specific type of company. Like if I'm gonna... I want to focus on law firms. I want to provide IT services for law firms. And so that means I've got to become the law firm IT company in, you know, such-and-such place."
And you don't. You can still maintain a somewhat broad, you know, category—like I still recommend having some aspects of a target market for your business, you don't want to just be completely diluted—but you don't have to double down into a vertical in order to take advantage of the impact that you get there.
And the way to do that is that you niche on the vertical per campaign instead of at the company level. Meaning: for a period of time, say for this quarter or for the first six months of next year, what we're gonna do is we're gonna focus on law firms. So we're going to get a list that's law-firm specific and we're going to work on getting that list cleaned up and ready for some outbound. We're going to build some landing pages—or a landing page—for law firms. Meaning we're gonna take the acronyms, the language, the all the stuff that we typically offer, and we're just going to gear it towards law firms. We're going to use the language that they use and we're going to put that on the landing page. We're going to create some outbound, we're going to create some messaging, we're going to create, you know, the materials, the enablement, that are going to be used in this campaign are going to be specific to the law firms that we're going to be targeting.
But that doesn't mean I need to change the whole homepage, right? It doesn't mean that I need to change the inbound script when somebody calls to say "Hey, welcome to the IT company for law firms." It means you kind of create a segment. You compartmentalize it. And you say all the materials related to this campaign are going to be specific to law firms.
And the benefits you're gonna get from that are significant because your scripting is going to have relevance right away. If I'm making an outbound call and I'm able to say in the first 10, 15, 30 seconds that we specialize in law firms and I'm able to use a couple terms or words or names or, you know, whatever it is... that are relevant to you, what it says is: "Hey, I took the time to somewhat personalize this call and it increases the perceived relevance of that call."
If I'm gonna get 100 calls from sales people today, the one that is able to speak my language really quickly and has some credibility and prove some relevance and some degree of personalization—at least a little bit—is gonna stand out more than the ones that don't. So it allows you to do that. It allows you to understand the industry. It allows you to make a bunch of phone calls to the same types of businesses and listen to the questions that they ask. Listen to the words that they use. Listen to the problems that they have. And then you can take the recordings of those calls, you can put them through AI, you can look for patterns, you can work that back into your landing page, you can work that back into your script, you can work that back into your emails.
And once you get going, now you're able to leverage the specialization into better specialization. And that motion, when that flywheel's in motion, what you're gonna see is you're gonna see better results. The connectivity is going to increase, the conversions are going to increase, the response rates are going to increase because you're speaking the language that they understand. You're talking about the things that they care about most.
Law firms, I'm sure, have different IT fears, concerns, problems, and symptoms than a manufacturing company, right? And the better you understand those and the better you can bake those into your sales and marketing efforts, the better off you're going to be and the better the results that you're gonna see. And you can leverage that.
And then, after six months, you can say: "You know what? This is excellent. Let's keep going. Let's double down." Or: "Hey, let's now incorporate a manufacturing campaign. And let's do the same thing. And let's get going. And let's learn those events and the language/vernacular and all the stuff that they're using, they're talking about, they're complaining about." And you get the opportunity to start stacking verticals on top of each other and specializing.
Now there is a point at which you can do this too much and then you get diluted. Or you don't give it long enough—like you do it for, you know, three weeks and you're like "Hey this doesn't work for me" and you bail and then you just keep doing that to the next list. You don't want to fall into that trap.
But short answer: Yeah. Absolutely. Let's niche down. Let's focus on a very specific target market. And let's do that at the campaign level. That doesn't necessarily mean you've got to do it at the company level. Hope this helps. Adios.
