Selling Business Catalyst to Specific Vertical Markets

Hey. What's up? This is Brent from BC Gurus. I want to thank you guys for tuning in today.

I want to touch on a concept that I think is really important to the Business Catalyst community and can help partners really grow their business and make a lot of money, and that concept is understanding how to sell Business Catalyst to a specific vertical. If you aren't familiar with the difference between a horizontal market and a vertical market, I will kind of touch on a little bit of that today as well.

We know that Business Catalyst it's a great online business tool. It's got things that a lot of business owners really enjoy. They want to be able to manage their website with their content management system. They want to be able to sell stuff with the e-commerce platform. They want to be able to communicate with their customer database through email marketing. They want to be able to build their customer database so that they can continue to market to their clients, and they want to be able to analyze and run reports against their data and also the information coming in through their website.

Verticals are exciting. I really like talking about them. I think there's a lot of partners out there that are really doing some great things with verticals already. The idea is that you've got your markets. So if you were to draw a line across here, this is what we would call our horizontal market line. So because Business Catalyst is just a base set of tools and it really applies to almost any small business out there. We personally market this even very well to a lot of non-profit organizations.

Business Catalyst isn't really pigeonholed into providing great value for just one kind of market. It's really up to partners to identify verticals that they think this would be a great piece of software for and to go after them. So examples of different verticals would be your barber shops or salons. One thing I'll bring to the table here is that there's a limitless amount of verticals. I think if you were to grab the Yellow Pages, the only good thing that the Yellow Pages are probably any good at anymore is for you to open up the Yellow Pages and just go through by category and you'll see verticals like restaurants and lawyers and dentist. All those things are really great verticals.

If we take our verticals here, I'll bring three examples to the table today. Verticals for the barber shops and salons. A vertical called dentists, and then we'll do one called restaurants. Let's think about this. If you were say a web generalist and you're like, "You know what? We're going to do business with anybody that comes to our door." You're going to be really reinventing the wheel a lot, and we've definitely been in this company the last give or take ten years. We've had some pretty good success of our own in specific verticals. Restaurants is a space that we currently are active in. We've developed a name for ourselves.

The nice part about focusing in on a vertical is that if you were to say I want to focus in on just my barber shops or saloons, I think one thing you would find yourself doing is as you go have meetings with say your first client, you're going to do a lot of learning on that very first specific client that you pick up within a vertical. But then the second time and the third time and the fourth time, you're going to sound more professional because you're going to understand their language a lot better. You are going to understand their needs a lot better, and the incremental sale starts to take less and less time and you probably start to produce something that's better and better quality.

You've got your barber shops and salons. What kind of things would they want? I think with the content management system, you know they want to be able to update their site. Maybe the hairdressers, they're changing hair dressers that are actually active at their salons all the time. So they need to be able to go in and update that specific piece. So you can create focused benefits for that vertical and go out there and really try to earn that business and that vertical.

With dentists, they might want to use the form system for an initial scheduling inquiry. When somebody hits the website, that's the call to action and it all drives somebody to try to contact that dentist and maybe keep that customer database to email people on their anniversary date to remind them to come in and have their yearly or semi-yearly cleaning.

So you kind of see that if you focus your energy with the dentists, I mean, say for instance that's the only websites you've built was for dentists, your attention, instead of trying, you know, your next client that calls you up is from a barber shop and the next one is from restaurant. You have already built this website framework that works really well for dentists. But now, if you're take every single phone call, you're going to have to relearn what the needs are for this restaurant, horizontal market. Then maybe you added lawyers or you added car mechanics or whatever you want. Every time you do that, you're going to have to basically relearn a client's needs, which is totally okay. But what you might find is that if you focus and hone in on a single vertical, you're going to start get some economies of scale. You're also going to learn that market a lot better.

A lot of times within a specific vertical, you can start talking about within this space right here, there are focused newsletters. There are conferences. There are industry journals. These are all place you can go in and start advertising. Marketing becomes much easier when you are focused in on one type of market, and what you'll find is that you can grow your business by specifically focusing in on a vertical.

There are tons of verticals out there. I will get more into this in future post. I just wanted to kick out something that really honed in on what a vertical was. I think that a very good first step is obviously to start with something that you're interested in or you have a connection to or you have somebody that you know is passionate about something. You can basically be the producer end of it or the business end of it, and you can really have them be the internal champion for it. But somebody that maybe knows a lot about a specific vertical, it is going to get you a lot farther and much faster than you just say opening the phone book and picking one. The point there is that there are a ton of verticals to choose from.

In Business Catalyst, all of these services you can kind of look at them and you can specifically market them to match up to a specific vertical, and I think you can have a lot more success within these types of systems with BC than every single time as a web company going back to the drawing board and reinventing the wheel.

I am going to definitely dive more into verticals later. But I wanted to just kind of shove this post out there. Get it into your hands as fast as I could, because I think once you change your mindset and start thinking verticals, I think that Business Catalyst is a product that the potential starts to explode in your head and I think you would have a lot of fun with it.

I would love to hear some more questions or even if some people have some successes about some great vertical marketing within Business Catalyst, I would definitely love to hear those stories so we can keep this conversation going.

I appreciate you guys' time and stay tuned for more.