Vertical software

Many of the best vertical software businesses make money with a well-established playbook: pick leading market positions and must-have products, drive pricing, up-sell and cross-sell; make the right bolt-on acquisitions to fill out the vertical.

We believe this playbook has largely capped out – it has become too widely used and understood, and its upsides are already ‘in the price’. In this insight we propose an additional playbook for software CEOs and owners to drive value growth in the years ahead.

Our top three ‘plays’ are:

• Get to a new level of sophistication on pricing.
• Target a progressive customer segment, be their champion, actively manage a SaaS migration strategy.
• Build value in data, seek out network effects to replace legacy stickiness, default to adding services not avoiding them.