Forecast Your Industry Sales Future

Targeting the business IT needs of specific industries is now one of the most common customer segmentation strategies. Despite conventional wisdom, it turns out that vertical segmentation is a relatively recent phenomenon, with many companies only just embarking on industry marketing. Forrester recently asked 18 senior sales and marketing executives to talk about how they organized, developed, and measured their industry sales teams. We were able to identify four distinct stages through which technology companies might pass as they evolve their industry marketing and sales practices. We then created a self-assessment tool to show what stage a company is in and what needs to be changed to move it to the next stage.