As the pace of change and the drive toward digital transformation accelerate, vertical markets present opportunities for more customized, unique sales approaches. The key to successful vertical selling is focusing and fully understanding the specific needs of each customer.
This focus on the customer’s client—or, in the case of our dealer channel, our dealers’ customers and their clients—radiates through all areas within Ricoh to create solutions that are valuable and relevant to end users’ specific needs. Every vertical market provides its own differentiation that can only be met by fully understanding the customer requirements and delivering products and solutions that support them.
Ricoh takes a unique approach to addressing these needs, focusing on thoughtful program execution and portfolio development to deliver meaningful products and solutions. One example is our approach to information management within the health care market, which is centered on supporting the critical data needs of this sector. As we look to the future, we see new opportunities developing in business services, life science and technology, and we continue to innovate with print and digital services to help these unique markets overcome their information management challenges.
Ricoh’s success and learnings from working with many of the Fortune 500 leaders has informed our approach to helping empower our dealer partners with practical tools to grow their business, particularly in vertical markets. Here are some recommendations:
Recognize What You Can Accomplish Horizontally
While it’s true that some needs are unique to specific vertical markets, there’s also a strong opportunity for horizontal selling—implementing solutions that work well across multiple verticals. It’s vastly more efficient to identify what needs are the same among your vertical customers and how they can be met in similar ways, rather than create different solutions when they don’t need to exist.
For example, the accounts processing departments of business services, manufacturing and retail customers share similar needs, but their business focuses are drastically different. Dealers can save a lot of time and money by meeting their needs in the same way. This philosophy holds true for other standard business functions, such as marketing, human resources, customer support and others. Ricoh’s Cloud Fax solution, which was initially developed to support the health care market, is a great example of this horizontal approach, as today it is also used by our customers in manufacturing, insurance and banking. While these markets serve different customers with their own unique challenges, identifying the consistent thread between their common needs allows you to meet customer requirements effectively and efficiently with value-added solutions.
Of course, you’ll want to keep in mind that understanding the needs of the business is equally as important as understanding the needs of the individual departments. This requires a multi-pronged approach to both horizontal and vertical sales and marketing to be both relevant to the customer and efficient in selling.
Become a Trusted Partner and Move Beyond Standard Business
Sales opportunities evolve based on industry dynamics, so it’s critical to fully immerse yourself within your customers’ environments to witness challenges first-hand, experience common trends as they occur in real time and grasp the main thread of their day-to-day hurdles. This consultative approach enables you to become a trusted partner offering valuable expertise, thereby potentially opening the door to opportunities that expand sales into new areas beyond standard business.
Once you familiarize yourself with a specific market’s needs and become a trusted resource with valuable expertise, you’ll also begin to anticipate future market trends and potential industry changes, such as regulations, technological shifts or new business models.
Looking again at the health care industry, Ricoh has worked with customers to transform an environment of inefficient and insecure paper processes to a digital patient experience stretching from initial registration to insurance claims management—it covers the entire patient engagement cycle. One example is our work with a large, West Coast-based medical center that was processing 1,000-plus claim correspondences manually every day, spanning more than 200 types of documents. On average, processing one document took roughly 20 minutes, which resulted in a backlog of up to two weeks. Together, we were able to deliver a 400% improvement in processing time, consolidate correspondences into just over 20 document types and help enable staff to seamlessly work remotely due to a newly built browser-based portal. All of this resulted in claims now being processed, on average, in less than two days.
Once you familiarize yourself with a specific market’s needs and become a trusted resource with valuable expertise, you’ll also begin to anticipate future market trends and potential industry changes, such as regulations, technological shifts or new business models. This allows you to be better positioned to offer solutions that meet both your customers’ current and future needs.
Consider the Nuances Specific to Each Vertical Market
Growth has been steady across many verticals for different reasons, either due to expanding business, new ways of working in hybrid office environments or fluctuating market needs. It’s important to consider and address the nuances specific to each vertical in order to successfully meet its needs as this growth occurs. For example, we at Ricoh expect to see substantial growth in the public sector market over the coming months as governments support the recovering economy and public safety requirements. To assist our direct and dealer sales teams in capitalizing on this growth, we’ve developed tools for them, including research from both Ricoh and external partners, that consolidate the specific requirements for accessing these funds. We then deliver them via a webinar series for sellers in all sales channels to navigate through the various federal funding acts of the last 15 months, providing differentiated solutions to meet emerging technology needs in this segment.
Another good example of a particularly nuanced market is retail. As the economy and purchasing pick up while the pandemic recedes, it’s likely that retailers will rapidly bounce back, requiring agile solutions that can be implemented quickly. If dealers are aware of this and poised to meet customers’ needs, they will almost immediately benefit from their own awareness and understanding of the rebounding retail market. Areas such as point-of-sale printing to more rapidly react to consumer programs, automated workflow processes to keep all locations connected, and visual communications interactive panels to connect with customers in new ways are all differentiated offerings that will continue to thrive in this market.
Tailor Your Approach to Local Markets
Ricoh’s dealers have been strong in the state and local government, health care, and K-12 and higher education markets, primarily due to their ability to act quickly locally while receiving national support from Ricoh. This is an important distinction—and one that is specific to Ricoh’s dealer/direct business model—because our dealers have the agility to successfully meet the needs of local vertical market opportunities and succeed in areas that require a more personalized or locally based approach without constantly competing for sales with the product manufacturer.
Lean on Subject Matter Experts
Ricoh has established experts across the organization who combine industry experience with focused expertise for developing sales, marketing and portfolio plans that meet each vertical’s specific needs. We apply this focus both to the industry leaders within each vertical and to the smaller, developing organizations looking for consultative expertise in growing their businesses. Due to the way we’re intentionally organized, our dealers benefit from access to and support from these industry and subject matter experts. This partnership approach is equally beneficial for Ricoh and our direct customers as we engage in non-selling thought leadership forums, exchanging ideas that help us collectively develop new offerings that solve customers’ most pressing problems.
Share What You Know
We understand that our dealers’ success is our success. We don’t compete for business; rather, we partner for mutually beneficial success. By focusing on regional and national accounts through direct sales and de-emphasizing our involvement in smaller business in support of our dealer community, we foster a partnership wherein our dealers know we are 100% invested in their success. We’ve found this cohesive approach makes both our dealer and direct organizations stronger and is the best way to support the market across all vertical industries.
Seek New Learnings Every Day
All vertical selling activities at Ricoh begin with an obsession around our customers’ evolving needs, and that translates into how we approach the market and assist our dealers in meeting their customers’ needs. Through ongoing customer engagement surveys and panels, thought leadership sessions with key industry leaders and dedicated vertical industry strategists within Ricoh, we’re constantly engaging our customers to ensure we have products, services and processes to help them both now and in the future. We then translate that knowledge into dealer support packages that include weekly webinar training for growing through focused marketing support, vertical sales kits that highlight new go-to-market strategies and technology councils that share our strategic direction with key dealers.
By focusing on regional and national accounts through direct sales and de-emphasizing our involvement in smaller business in support of our dealer community, we foster a partnership wherein our dealers know we are 100% invested in their success.
Our dealer support teams take advantage of training opportunities to ensure they have strong knowledge of how we differentiate ourselves in each vertical market. We provide access to our industry experts throughout the organization for next-level discussions and share our knowledge with dealers via our vertical sales kits. These kits are a collection of tools—including a 30-day campaign calendar, key messaging, discovery questions, phone and email scripts, an email automation tool, social media posts, videos, and more—designed to integrate with dealers’ existing sales process and help them assist customers through Ricoh products, solutions, and services in vertical markets.
We also share seminars, which we host along with leading analysts, so our dealer partners can hear unique ideas from a variety of sources. Our goal is to share what we know and what we learn from our customers so that our dealer community can be successful with theirs.
It’s a natural fit. The more successful our dealers are, the more successful we are, and we’re always looking to raise the bar for our dealer partners.
