This month, the deals continue to heat up in industries impacted by pandemic-related shifts. Here are four areas on which to focus for deals and opportunities. Also don’t miss bonus tips for CPQ and FSL, and the $10k Disco question at the bottom.

• Credit unions: Credit unions, like many other financial institutions, have faced increased pressure on digital interactions and call centers due to the pandemic. With their regional/local footprints and relatively small employee counts, the approximately 5,000 credit unions in the U.S. are less equipped for these pressures than larger financial entities.
  • Read more here.
  • Use this angle: Focus on the benefit and competitive advantage of better digital customer onboarding and engagement.
• Telehealth-adjacent businesses: We touched on home health last month, and the growth of healthcare-related services delivered in the home will continue. Be sure to target any telehealth and telehealth-adjacent businesses in your patch, including at-home lab testing, remote patient monitoring, digital therapeutics, medical records sharing, etc.
  • Read more here and here
  • Use this angle: Grow the right way. From sales to field service, these growing industries will benefit from optimized processes in the cloud.
• Additive manufacturers: Manufacturers of hardware, software, and materials related to additive manufacturing could be poised for a breakout year. Additive manufacturing demonstrated its versatility in 2020, allowing some manufacturers to pivot towards more pandemic-friendly products, and is increasingly being used by manufacturers for everything from prototyping to production.
  • Read more here and here.
  • Use this angle: This sector is heating up, with increasing competition and acquisition activity. Capture more market share more quickly with better sales platforms and processes.
• Health sharing: There are more than 100 health care sharing organizations across the country. Many families will consider their options for health care expenses during health insurers’ open enrollment period starting in November – so now may be a great time to reach out to health sharing organizations.
  • Read more here and here.
  • Use this angle: Hit the ground running this fall by getting a jump on your sales and marketing efforts prior to open enrollment.

Bonus tips:

• Smaller territory? Look for CPQ Opps. Even if your patch is smaller this year than last, you can often expand deal size by adding CPQ for existing clients with less than optimal processes or configs. To find these deals, look for accounts that: (1) Have a high usage of estimating staff to configure deals (2) Have a high usage of bundled products, subscription services and complex terms and conditions (3) Have a high occurrence of mistakes in configs. All of these scenarios produce a hard ROI from savings. Also, when businesses rely on estimating to support deals, they may also have a time-to-market issue that well-configured CPQ can help address.
• Ditto for FSL. Look for use cases that are a good fit for FSL wheelhouse cases- scheduling/optimization, work orders, and maintenance/entitlements. Side note: Stay tuned for our FSL Quickstart offering – coming soon.
• Digital customer interactions will be a key selling point. More than ever before, businesses are open to conducting customer interactions digitally. From a McKinsey report: ”A McKinsey survey published in October 2020 found that companies are three times likelier than they were before the crisis to conduct at least 80 percent of their customer interactions digitally.” In addition, Harvard Business Review reports that “at the end of last year, the most widespread challenge for U.S. midsize companies was maintaining customer relations.”
  • Read more here and here.
  • Use this angle: Customers EXPECT digital interactions now. Salesforce provides the best holistic view and toolkit for this.
• The $10k Discovery Question: FSM Senior Account Executive Barry Thomason has some solid advice for how to get to the heart of the opportunity in a discovery call. Check it out (43 seconds).

Interested in receiving this type of content every month?

Request our Fast Forward newsletter, exclusively for Salesforce Account Executives, by submitting your @salesforce.com email address below.