On the first of February, RapidScale held the next installment of our 2017 webinar series about selling cloud into various verticals. If you missed it, you can catch up with our written recap below or watch the recording here.
RapidScale has seen great success in selling cloud with a focus on customers’ verticals. You may ask why would their vertical or line of business matter? We will get to the important reasons why; however, we thought we would also provide the exciting statistics around the verticals that have brought some of the biggest wins for RapidScale’s partners:
- The cloud computing market in healthcare is expected to grow to reach $9.48 billion by 2020.
- Manufacturers consider cloud computing among the most important technologies in strengthening their competitive edge in the next five years.
- 81% of manufacturers say that having a scalable, secure cloud platform improved mobile access to data.
- A study by Skyhigh Networks shows that the average financial services firm is using over 1,000 cloud services.
- 45.2% of attorneys agree that mobility and freedom of access are the highest value benefits expected from cloud services.
How to Penetrate a Vertical Market
As a technology seller, you know as well as we do that your time is valuable. Therefore, an overarching sales strategy is incredibly important and one we know that works is looking to penetrate certain verticals, become experts with that line of business, and then sell as a true partner to a customer with a wealth of knowledge from past experiences within their vertical that they would never receive on their own.
When a seller becomes immersed within a vertical, they will reap other benefits as well.
- Customers within a vertical will typically encounter similar problems in the sale and implementation process. When a seller knows how to avoid these speed bumps, they can repeat the process while acquiring more customer references, which is easily marketed.
- These successes will garner you a reputation within a vertical’s community, which can be very tight-knit.
- Cloud applications are typically vertically aligned so once a seller becomes an industry expert, they can confidently sell a certain suite of applications when approaching a given customer within this vertical.
Obstacles
With the strategy and benefits being said, it can still be very difficult to penetrate a vertical for a myriad of reasons. First off, as previously mentioned, verticals can be a tight-knit group; therefore, it can be difficult to gain the specialized knowledge to confidently convince these companies that you may be a better vendor than an incumbent that has already garnered their trust. These can be daunting obstacles to overcome but remember that with RapidScale’s white-glove service, we are here to lend you our credibility and knowledge when selling.
Verticals
Healthcare
In RapidScale’s experience, the healthcare vertical was the first to make a major move into the managed cloud services arena because the regulations they have to keep up with are constantly changing. Therefore, they looked to managed service providers, such as RapidScale, to keep up with compliance requirements when it comes to IT practices.
When selling into the healthcare vertical, it is important to understand the preferences that are driving these organization’s IT purchasing decisions. Overall, the healthcare industry is becoming more digital, collaborative, and data driven than ever before. In addition, doctors are looking to improve connections with their patients to ensure they are providing personalized healthcare. This means they want to connect to their sensitive patient information from anywhere. The development of cloud services has offered a trusted remedy to these needs.
Common Healthcare Applications
When you begin selling into the healthcare vertical, you will begin seeing common software applications used by most practices. We have a compiled a list below:
Manufacturing
The manufacturing vertical presents very particular needs. However, manufacturers can still be satisfied via cloud computing. In general, these clients have to manage a diverse set of locations and complex supply chains. They still have to standardize how they do business and share information across their organizations even with these constraints.
Cloud computing can provide the necessary infrastructure to power each location, and the ability to establish communication from one location to another through a virtual and secure environment. In addition, cloud computing is more efficient, cost effective, collaborative, and compliant.
Common Manufacturing Applications
Finance
In the past year, RapidScale has seen a significant uptick in opportunities in the next vertical: finance. The finance vertical is fraught with many of the same IT challenges encountered in the healthcare industry and just like healthcare, these organizations have pivoted hard to embrace cloud computing.
As a whole, finance organizations are facing concerns around data security, a need for agility, and compliance around various laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley. Cloud computing services can enable enterprise-grade security to keep sensitive data confidential while improving agility and collaboration between employees and clients. Some of the security measures that can be offered by RapidScale include encryption, filtering, and control over the ingress and egress of data off of the data center. Lastly, it is important to emphasize to finance prospects that cloud computing offers automated and completely visible reporting for these firms to be compliant.
Common Finance Applications
Legal
Legal is another industry that has seen a significant pivot to cloud infrastructure in recent years. In addition, it has to deal with the same requirements as healthcare and finance. Legal firms require the highest level of security and accessibility for confidential client information. Lastly, legal firms typically do not want to spend an excessive amount of money on their IT infrastructure. They do not want to deal with the back end. Rather, they just want their business to work, with a superior backup system and security.
Cloud computing for legal firms can provide the most advanced backup, failover, recovery, and secure access to applications from any device.
Common Legal Applications
RapidScale’s Differentiator: Account Management
RapidScale can provide businesses with the world-class cloud services to penetrate each one of these verticals and more. However, we also provide another differentiator that will entice your customers and prospects even more: an Account Management team.
RapidScale’s Account Management team can be brought in at any step of the sales or implementation process. The team is responsible for some of the following tasks for our sellers and users: quarterly business reviews, issues preventing contract retention, ticket review, expertise needed for pre-sale and post-sale operations, and navigating a customer’s merger or acquisition. Overall, our strategy converges with a single focus in mind: excellent customer service in order to breed long-term relationships focused on development, growth, and retention. Hopefully we can help you win more business with our best-of-breed services today!
And don’t forget – Sales Webinars, moderated by President Mark Szotkowski, are on the first Wednesday of every month at 9am PST, and our new Technical Webinars, moderated by SVP, Cloud Engineering, Duane Barnes, are on the third Wednesday of every month at 9am PST. Make sure you register here!
Happy Selling!
