If you're a B2B company with a horizontal platform considering vertical expansion, how would you structure your approach for deciding what new vertical(s) to enter into? More specifically, how do you handle the tradeoff of addressing many/most of the needs for a specific vertical vs. only addressing 1-2 needs for multiple verticals?

Great question, and always exciting to be at a juncture where you're considering expanding your GTM to address specific verticals and opportunities. Getting a vertical right is not always easy, but when you have the right structure and offerings, the work across other opportunities is very repeatable.

There are several ways to think about this from a marketing approach:

1. Picking the vertical: Spinning up a vertical marketing strategy within marketing is a big bet because you have to orchestrate a lot of bespoke programs and content across demand gen, content marketing and sales enablement, to name a few. So stack ranking and picking the right bets will be essential. The way I've seen us pick verticals, whether it was at Google or Matterport was to keep our ear to the ground with sales and other customer-facing parts of the organization as to where we were seeing repeated requests from a particular industry or functional area. This could be financial services or retail (industry verticals), as much as it could be marketing or sales (functional verticals).
   
   Seeing where the chatter is can help you prioritize. If those teams are busy you can also analyze the opportunity data yourself, and look at deals that might be stuck in a particular area for lack of a solid product offering. Ideally, sales leadership should have that information and as a marketer you should make it a point to be across those weekly touch-points. Having the right hygiene in salesforce about this will be key for everyone, but in a pinch, you can also hopefully quickly scan recordings of those sales calls to further validate which areas could be ones of opportunity. That's the best approach in my mind as it's organic and rooted in the reality of the conversations you are currently fielding, but perhaps not crushing.
   
   The other way of picking the vertical is to do the market research and opportunityr leadership team and develop sizing with you a strong view of where you could go next. You'll have to sift through a lot of opinions there, and as a product marketer, you'll need to be very aligned with the product team on what the product is ready to tackle to enable sales to have the most authentic conversations. I'll leave you with one anecdote here. Google Sheets didn't have page numbers enabled for printouts for the longest time. Not surprisingly, that was the number one complaint we got from customers in financial services for not adopting the tool, because it meant we didn't understand the needs of that particular vertical. They weren't wrong. For all our talk and focus on moonshots, we shot ourselves in the foot by not clamoring for those table stakes.

2. Focusing on one or two verticals at the most: A common pitfall when adopting a vertical marketing strategy is taking on too many verticals at one time. Sure, you might have hired an industry solutions whiz, or brought some capabilities that should be replicable across several verticals, but you still have zero flight time going deep in understanding what makes those customers tick, how they procure things, who do they trust, etc. You have to get the psychology right, and then, if you're doing full stack marketing against those opportunities you have to obviously get the physics right. That's very very hard to nail all in one go, let alone across multiple verticals. So my recommendation is to start small but go deep. It might take a quarter or two to land that first big vertical customer, but when you do, you'll have a goldmine of insights on how to knock out the others. At Matterport, we started with a lofty goal of "Winning the Verticals" and had all the right people involved in terms of building an encompassing strategy to go after them. We had a robust plan, but were spread to thin. We then shifted to a Win a Vertical strategy, and that then helped set the stage for great, repeatable work.

3. Nailing the offering in a way that's replicable: We talked about focusing on the few vs the many, I'd argue that's also the outlook that product marketing can advocate for with product in terms of what will be the set offerings that are bespoke and essential to acquiring those verticals. It'll be tempting to go after a particular vertical and advocate for a whole set of features that cater to them, but the key ones are more foundational. Are you FedRamp/ISO/HIPAA compliant. Ironically, a lot of industry-based stage gates to penetration are process-driven vs feature-driven. There are checkboxes you'll need to seek out and make sure your offerings can meet before being considered a serious contender.
   Of course you also need to build the right features. That's where understanding the psychology and workflows of the users you're targeting will matter. Which leads me to my last recommendation

4. Accelerating your execution via SMEs: A total cheat code for accelerating your vertical penetration is to hire or consult with a SME from that industry who either was in sales or in BD there, but may be looking for a job or advisory gig in tech. Sounds crazy, but anyone who has that industry experience will help you understand the psychology and physics of that industry in record time. I learned that from my consulting days where a key-opinion-leader or KOL provided us with all the right inputs on how to frame our analysis. Ideally you want to have someone like that across each vertical. You don't have to hire them, but if you're serious about that vertical, they're worthy every penny.