Effective industry marketing strategies for enterprise SaaS

This article is based on Andrew’s talk at Product Marketing Misunderstood in February 2022.

Hey there! I'm Andrew Keating, and I’m here to share my thoughts and ideas about industry marketing strategies.

We'll explore how you can construct an industry-vertical go-to-market motion within your enterprise Software as a Service (SaaS) product marketing organization.

I'll share with you:

My background in enterprise SaaS product marketing
How to build an industry-specific go-to-market motion
Pitfalls to avoid

My background in enterprise SaaS product marketing

To begin with, let's touch on my background. I've taken on a variety of roles related to industry verticals over my career. I view the industry go-to-market approach as critical to success – it's certainly been a major contributor to my own achievements in product marketing – so that’s what we’re going to focus on today.

I kicked off my career in the higher education vertical at an organization called Internet2. Then, at Box, I managed go-to-market strategies for the healthcare and education industries.

From there, I moved to Splunk, where I led the industry marketing organization. More recently, I've been working with startups like Qumulo and now Beamery, leading their product marketing and industry marketing initiatives.

How to build an industry-specific go-to-market motion

When we talk about enterprise software, particularly cloud-based SaaS, we tend to think about use cases and user stories. We focus on how we can make our products appeal to the widest possible variety of customers, with the organizing principle being the use case – how the customer will be using our software.

In contrast, customers usually think about revenue, lines of business, and types of business activity. They're oriented around what they need to secure revenue, which is often linked to an industry classification.

So, the big question is, how can we align these two perspectives to build a go-to-market motion? That's what we'll delve into today.

Step one: Define industries and sub-industries

The first step is to define your industries and sub-industries. You need to identify which ones are most important for you, your business, and the products that you're bringing to market.

It's easy to list some industries off the top of our heads – retail, manufacturing, healthcare, education – but each of these has many "flavors" or sub-industries.

For example, consider the public sector, which encompasses a wide range of government organizations. In the US, this includes the federal government with its myriad agencies, as well as state and local governments.

Within state and local governments, there are K-12 education, city governments, and state agencies, to name a few. In short, as you start to unpack each industry, you'll find countless sub-industries.

There are many ways to classify these industries; one of the most notable is the North American Industry Classification System. This taxonomy and other similar ones can provide a useful formal classification of industries.

However, as with any organizational system, there are always trade-offs and limitations. For instance, some taxonomies might come across as stale or bureaucratic and may not reflect newer organizations, startups, or evolving business activities.

Take Apple or Amazon as examples. These are large multinationals grounded in technology but also function as retailers. In Amazon's case, it's also a cloud provider. These companies straddle multiple lines of business, and it can be a challenge to categorize them neatly using a single classification system.

To navigate these limitations, you’ll need to delve into your record systems, especially your customer relationship management tool (CRM), where (unless you're in the earliest stage of a startup) there's likely existing industry data. A tactic I've found valuable in my past roles is studying this data as part of my onboarding.

You should also coordinate with your operations teams, whether it's marketing ops or sales ops. They're the ones maintaining these data elements and fields, and it's important to understand which industry classification system they're using and the rationale behind their choice.

What trade-offs have they noticed? What's working, and what hasn't been as useful? Ensuring consistency across all your systems of record about the industry of your customers is critical.

In addition, you might want to consider creating or augmenting your own taxonomy. Whether you inherit an existing system or, in partnership with operations, create your own.

Having a field associated with the customer record labeled "our company name-industry" can be particularly useful. It's your way of classifying customers by industry.

Step two: Understand your product-market fit by industry

Once you've nailed down your industry classifications, the next step is to assess product-market fit by industry.

To do this, analyze your existing customer base, looking at where you currently have customers and what industry groupings already exist.

As I mentioned before, choosing a classification label that suits your business is crucial.

For instance, if you're dealing with a company with multiple lines of business and your product is mainly used in their retail segment, you might want to classify them as a retailer, regardless of their other business activities. It's all about making sure that your classification aligns with how customers use your product, rather than sticking rigidly to other groupings.

Once you've determined the appropriate industry classifications, you can start breaking down metrics like the total addressable market and growth rates by industry.

You could examine whether one industry is growing faster or slower than your company overall. Essentially, you want to slice the data according to industry labels and classifications.

Next, delve into the top accounts for each industry and inventory their use cases. You might not be able to do this for a massive number of customers, but examining the top five, ten, or twenty per industry can give you valuable insights. As you analyze these use cases, you'll likely start noticing certain trends.

Also, don't forget to look at deals that didn't work out. You might well be doing win-loss analysis already; if unsuccessful deals tend to fall within a specific industry, it could signal a gap in feature functionality or compliance. Keep an eye out for feature requests too. If they're integrated with a customer record in your CRM, you can filter and sort by industry and get some valuable insights.

A tool I've found especially helpful at this stage is a heat map spreadsheet. You can create one using Google Sheets or Excel, where the x-axis represents use cases, the y-axis indicates industries, and the heat map element is color-coded based on whether the use case is fully supported, partially supported, or on your roadmap.

This visual representation allows you to quickly identify where you have a good product-market fit. In other words, the "hotter" areas on your heat map show the industries where your product's use case is a particularly good fit.

Step three: Market research

Next, it's time to take all this internally collected data and start validating your hypotheses and assumptions externally. This is where a bit of market research comes into play.

At this juncture, it's worth noting that the order of inside activities (like analyzing your customer data, CRM, and systems of record) and outside activities (like customer interactions or research) isn't set in stone.

While I tend to prefer examining internal data first, formulating hypotheses, and then testing them externally, you could easily flip this around by starting with external research and interviews, then combining that data with what’s in your CRM. Choose the order that works best for your organization; it might depend on your company's growth stage and what research has been done already.

So, how do you conduct this research? As a product marketer, research is likely second nature to you. In fact, you're probably already conducting customer interviews, so consider adding a few broad, open-ended questions to your agenda.

For example, if you're speaking to a customer at a hospital, ask them about emerging trends in healthcare and the technology landscape within their industry. A few carefully chosen questions during each interview can build a wealth of knowledge about what’s important to customers in specific industries.

Similarly, you're likely already interacting with industry analysts or your internal analyst relations team. While it's helpful to consult with major firms, don't overlook the value of niche analyst firms that offer industry-specific perspectives. Some of their insights might even be freely available through blogs.

You also shouldn’t underestimate the value of competitor research. Visit your competitors’ websites, scrutinize their messaging, and see if they highlight specific industries or use cases.

This kind of research can be so informative. If they're not mentioning specific industries, that can be telling as well. By adding these additional dimensions to your research, you'll be well-equipped to build a robust, industry-specific go-to-market strategy.

Conferences are another valuable source of information. You're likely already attending some events; however, it’s essential to focus on those specific to the industries you're interested in. For instance, if you're targeting healthcare, attending a healthcare-focused conference like HIMSS is a smart move.

This is where having preliminary hypotheses about which industries are crucial for your organization comes in handy. These hypotheses should ideally be formed by analyzing your own company data and product data – that inside activity I mentioned before.

It's also important to note that this isn't a one-and-done task. Whether you're starting a new motion as an early-stage startup, or it's time to refresh your strategies in a larger, later-stage company, you should revisit this process at least once or twice a year to make sure you keep up to date with the industries that are most crucial for your company.

Step four: Develop your strategy and messaging

Next, we get to a stage familiar to product marketers – developing your strategy and messaging. You’ll need to orient around the use cases and solutions you’ve identified. What is it that customers in specific industries use your product for? What value are you driving for them?

But here's a critical question: Do you really need industry-specific messaging? Surprisingly, the answer could be no. If your product messaging is robust enough, it might be effective across various industries.

You need to understand the 'why' behind creating industry-specific messaging. If there's a unique use case or specialization involved, industry-specific messaging might be worthwhile.

However, the key focus should be on customer value and the outcomes they can achieve using your product. These factors form the foundation for your messaging and narratives.

It’s also crucial to have a strong understanding of the right terminology to use when you’re crafting your messaging. For example, if you overuse industry-specific terms, this can come across as insincere or excessive.

Also, you may want to avoid certain words due to their connotations within a particular industry. An excellent example is the word 'employees.' While all companies have employees, a university might refer to them as 'faculty,' or 'staff.'

Similarly, if you’re talking about a hospital, you might want to use words like 'nurses' and 'doctors.' The idea is to consider the specific roles of people using your product and map them to your use cases and personas.

Step five: Build and implement GTM plans

Once you've created your messaging, the next step is to build and implement your go-to-market plans. As a product marketer, you’re already familiar with this step, but how does it look through an industry marketing lens?

First, you’ll need to bring together a cross-functional team of stakeholders. That’s something PMMs do all the time, so no surprise there, but the specific roles you need to involve may vary depending on the industry.

For instance, if you’re looking at heavily regulated industries like financial services or government entities, legal and compliance stakeholders will likely be a crucial part of your team.

Creating go-to-market strategies for certain industries might require a broader range of stakeholders than a typical product launch would. However, the process is pretty similar to a standard product launch.

As with any launch, you'll need to prepare a bill of materials outlining what you'll need to put your message in front of your customers and prospects in this industry. This could include a customer deck, collateral, and sales enablement training to enable your sellers to effectively communicate your product's value to this particular customer group.

It's important to align your messaging with your audience. Think back to the 'employees' example I gave earlier. If your sales team is presenting to a university, they need to discuss how students, faculty, and staff would use your product. Training and enabling your sales team with this industry-specific information is vital.

You’ll also need to build feedback loops with your product team. This is going to help you identify common requests coming from customers in a particular industry.

For instance, maybe all your healthcare customers are asking for a certain feature or that feature because there’s a specific use case that’s important to them. That is valuable intel that’s going to help you with both your messaging and your product roadmap.

Next, you need to think about the industry-specific channels and tactics you’re going to use to engage potential customers. By collaborating with field marketing, events, and campaigns teams, you’ll be able to identify the most effective channels for a given industry.

Many organizations also have the role of 'industry expert' as a sales overlay. Depending on your organization's structure, this could be you – you could be the specialist who supports sales presentations or gathers customer feedback for a particular industry.

If you’re lucky enough to have an industry expert sales overlay already, make sure you engage with them – they’ll have some incredible insights to share.

Finally, tracking key metrics is crucial. Of course, as a product marketer, you’re regularly tracking various metrics already, but when it comes to industry marketing, it's about looking at these metrics through a different lens – an industry-specific one. You’ll need to analyze the data in your marketing and sales systems of record and your CRM but with a focus on a specific industry.

This analysis may end up turning into industry-specific quarterly business reviews (QBRs) or even monthly scorecards. Either way, it involves taking a unique slice from the company-wide data to illustrate growth rates, bookings, and churn rates for customers in a particular industry.

Pitfalls to avoid

Before we wrap up, I want to highlight a few pitfalls you should avoid.

Pitfall #1: Doing too much

Firstly, don’t try to go too big or do too much. Acting like you can support use cases that you can't fulfill is going to make you lose credibility with customers. If you don't have the necessary functionality or compliance certifications, don’t fake it. Instead, concentrate on what you know you can do and do well.

Another way to do too much (which, again, you want to avoid) is creating personas and messaging for every single industry. Remember: there are a lot of them! It's best to focus on those with the biggest potential addressable market for your business, and those where you've already achieved some success and want to expand.

Pitfall #2: Doing too little

On the opposite end of the spectrum, doing too little can also be a problem. Hopefully, I’ve convinced you that industry go-to-market strategy can enhance your effectiveness as a product marketer, so using standard product-oriented messaging for every single customer is one way of doing too little. It would be beneficial to introduce some industry-specific nuances to your messaging.

Treating industry marketing as a one-and-one exercise is another example of doing too little. It's crucial to continually reassess where you're seeing success and where you may want to invest in the future.

Pitfall #3: Overcommitting

Implementing these kinds of motions requires time, so you need to establish realistic success metrics and manage leadership expectations about the growth they can expect.

Just because you've invested resources, time, and effort into industry-specific marketing doesn't necessarily guarantee instant customer acquisition – it takes time to build up the market.

For instance, I heard of a scenario where a company invested a lot of time and resources into entering the federal government market in the late summer.

However, as the federal fiscal year ends on September 30, large purchases weren't reflected for another six to nine months. So, manage expectations about when you can start to see the results.

Summary

Alright, it’s time to sum things up. Here are a few key pointers for you to take away:

Define your industries and get to grips with market research,
Use that research to feed your strategy and messaging,
Implement industry-specific go-to-market motions, particularly around key industries, where you've already found success,
Avoid doing too much or too little,
Plan for continuous motion, and consistently track the impact of your actions.