Updated · Originally published
What does "going vertical" really mean in the Dynamics world? Providing healthy product info, doing demonstrations and filling out RFP’s can all add a great deal to your sales costs, but one proven way to lower these costs and increase your sales rate is to go vertical with them. How do you accomplish that? Here's how: do a little research and find a specific industry that might not already have a go-to solution and decide whether they're both good to you and good for you in implementation.
Mark Richards, former Sales Director for Barlett, Pringle and Wolf had this to say about finding the perfect vertical partner.
“We were approached by a large Credit Union to provide Dynamics GP as their General Ledger solution. As we researched their needs and learned about their industry we found that there were no consistent General Ledger or Reporting packages. Their industry had developed several good teller services packages, but most had no or very poor back office solutions," Richards says, "We created a Dynamics GP package that utilized a custom import piece and fixed reports. Because we could essentially repeat our deployment process with very little change from client to client we took the leap and offered fixed fee implementations – an unheard of step in most industries. No one else offered a fixed fee - our close rate rose to 98%. We sold Dynamics GP to over 36 of the nations largest Credit Unions in less than three years.”
Your possible client sees risk. By showing them that you are shifting the risk off of them and onto you they see you have a stake in the deployment and that is a powerful tool. Not only that, but by shifting the risk you also control the price.
There are three factors in control of the opportunity: price, time, and the solution. If the customer wants more users (the solution) then the price and the time go up. If they want the price to be lower you can ask what part of the solution they want to sacrifice. Neither side can control all three.
The challenge is simply to find your niche. Whether it's , that is not an easy process or one that occurs overnight. If you work with your existing customers to uncover the aspects of their individual industries and do your research, you should find at least one area your firm can command, if not more. Sometimes the answers are already there you just never stopped to ask the right questions.
As you present and discuss how something like meets the challenges of an industry, you gain the credibility necessary to jump from vendor to business partner. As a trusted partner you then have the space to discover the entire realm of possibilities that Microsoft Dynamics has to offer.
About the Author: , a Certified Microsoft Partner. Journyx maximizes the value of Microsoft Dynamics by adding enterprise time tracking. allows companies to quickly implement a complete time tracking solution using existing business data in Dynamics.
by Journyx