From an earlier article: “What’s your ICP?” What is your Ideal Customer Profile? Who is your target market?
This infographic from Masergy (now Comcast) showed up in the partner portal this morning:
That’s 5 verticals but still. It isn’t all of them. The company size is clear: we don’t work with companies under $50M in annual revenue.
One other company was pretty clear about the target size: Smoothstone (now somewhere inside Intrado). “What we’re really trying to do is use the ‘as-a-service’ delivery model to give enterprises from 50 seats up to 5,000-plus, multi-location businesses, the full benefits of convergence,” the Smoothstone VP of Marketing said in 2007.
Everyone else thinks they are P&G selling Ivory soap, Charmin, Tide and Crest toothpaste — all mass market products. Unfortunately, most UCaaS providers do not have a brand like Tide, Crest, Ivory or Charmin. P&G spends $4.7 Billion a year on marketing globally. If the marketing budget is a fraction of what P&G spends per year, why would the plan be to market to everyone?
There are fundamentals to marketing that are forgotten. There are 4 P’s to marketing – product, price, place, and promotion – see HERE.
Easiest step for any marketing head: look in the CRM or billing system to see what the average seat size is; who was the buyer (title or department); what industry/vertical have you sold to. If this information is missing, hire someone to collect it. Now you have Data to work with. It will probably be upsetting to some in the org because they want to sell to Enterprise but so far the sales have been to small business. (Lots of reasons for that but that will be a different blog post.)
Yet now you have some idea what the Average Buyer looks like – and that allows the company to create marketing to/for that persona; and around that vertical. (If they were smart, they would find software to integrate with inside the two largest verticals to get an advantage there.)
In 2015, 8×8 was one of only two UCaaS providers integrated with Allstate’s eSurance platform. (The other was Fonality, now a part of Netfortris.) Newly minted insurance agents for Allstate would have a choice between a premise system from Fonality or a cloud PBX from 8×8. It made for a good amount of leads. Surprising to me that more providers had not branched out beyond Salesforce. (I once railed at Broadsoft to integrate into Slack for an obvious advantage. Never happened.)
Here’s one reason yo have a real target market: If the target given is 1-1000 employees, that is too Generic. The sales rep or partner will sell it where they think it fits (or are comfortable). The provider ends up in the under 25 seats segment, due to being too vague. When Smoothstone hammered home that it was 55+ employees, that stuck with partners. It produced salience – being top of mind when the Prospect showed up in front of the partner.
Weave is known for the small medical and dental offices. Revenue has grown to $100M but it sells to other verticals like accounting and salons. Verizon OneTalk is the only mobile UC offering on the market. When I was consulting there in 2016, salons was the number one vertical. Bluip is a Broadsoft shop that started out in the white-label business until VoIP Logic sold. Now it focuses on hospitality. You can make hay in a silo where the word of mouth echoes louder and the price sensitivity goes away.
Who is your Target? Next to your Value Proposition it is a critical component to success.