Are You Selling to the Wrong Customers?

In The Trenches

This episode is brought to you by Avidbank. Avidbank is one of the most experienced search fund lenders in North America, having funded over 40 separate transactions since 2014, for a total of over $300M. They are deeply familiar with the search fund model, and understand the nuances of the fundraising process, dealing with sellers, communicating with your equity investors, LOI reviews, and everything else in between. Reach out to Anthony Rodriguez ([e-mail]) or Conor Tidgwell ([e-mail]) to learn more.

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This episode is brought to you by The Profit Line. The Profit Line is a boutique finance and accounting firm that provides a wide range of accounting services to small and medium businesses generating anywhere between $5M to $50M in revenue. On a fractional, outsourced basis, they do day-to-day bookkeeping, bank reconciliations, month-end accruals, tax compliance, and financial statement preparation, among countless other things. I was a customer of theirs for 7 consecutive years while running my own company, and am speaking as a happy customer. Book a call with Founder and CEO, Fern Gordon ([e-mail]) or visit their LinkedIn page to learn how they might be able to help you exactly as they helped me.

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Among the countless strategic decisions that software CEOs must make, the decision of which end markets to serve doesn’t seem to command the time, attention, and level of thoughtfulness that it probably should. More specifically, substantially every small or medium-sized software company must answer the following two questions:

1. Should I sell to SMBs or to larger enterprises?
2. Should I sell my product into a single industry vertical, or multiple industry verticals?

Though these are of course not the only questions that software CEOs must answer with respect to the markets that they serve, they tend to be among the most important and most frequently posed ones. The purpose of this blog is to speak to both of these questions in turn.