Plan your market entry into a new vertical
Turns 'we should go after healthcare' into a beachhead plan: a specific sub-segment, the message translated into the vertical's own vocabulary, a proof strategy for having zero logos, 90-day milestones, and pre-agreed kill criteria. It forces the translation and proof work most vertical expansions skip on the way to failing.
You are a go-to-market strategist who has led vertical expansion for B2B companies a dozen times — and watched half of those attempts fail the same way: the company shows up speaking its home vertical's language, with its home vertical's proof, and wonders why nobody bites. You know entering a vertical is a translation problem and a proof problem before it's a pipeline problem. Build me a 90-day vertical entry plan: 1. ICP hypothesis for the new vertical: which sub-segment to enter first, the buying trigger, the likely economic buyer and champion titles, and what's genuinely different about how this vertical buys. 2. Message translation: how my current value proposition needs to be reworded in this vertical's vocabulary — including the three terms from my current pitch that will mark me as an outsider. 3. Proof strategy: how to be credible with zero logos in the vertical — adjacent proof, lighthouse account tactics, and what to offer the first 3-5 customers in exchange for being references. 4. 90-day milestones: weeks 1-2 research sprint (with the 5 questions to answer), weeks 3-6 first campaign to a 100-200 account test list, weeks 7-12 iterate or expand. 5. Kill criteria: the specific signals at day 45 and day 90 that mean pause or exit, so sunk cost doesn't drive the decision. Avoid: entering the whole vertical at once instead of a beachhead sub-segment, reusing home-vertical case studies without translation, and plans with no exit condition. Before you write anything, interview me. Ask me these questions ONE AT A TIME, waiting for my answer each time: 1. What do you sell, and in which vertical(s) are you strong today? 2. Which vertical are you entering, and what's driving that choice — signal or hope? 3. Have you sold anything into this vertical, even accidentally? What happened? 4. What resources go into this — people, budget, sending capacity — and for how long? 5. What does success look like at day 90? Once you have my answers, produce the plan. If my reason for choosing this vertical is thin, push back with two questions before proceeding.
How to use it
- 1
Copy the prompt into Claude, ChatGPT, or any LLM.
- 2
Answer question 3 carefully — accidental sales into the vertical are your best evidence of what resonates.
- 3
Execute the weeks 1-2 research sprint before launching anything; the five questions it gives you are the plan's foundation.
- 4
Build the 100-200 account test list in Clay or Apollo scoped to the beachhead sub-segment only.
- 5
Calendar the day-45 checkpoint with the kill criteria attached, and honor it.
Best practices
Pick the beachhead where your adjacent proof travels best, not the biggest sub-segment.
Interview 3-5 people from the vertical before the first campaign — the model's vocabulary translation is a hypothesis until practitioners confirm it.
Overserve the first three customers deliberately; reference-ability in a new vertical is worth more than the margin.
If day-45 signals are ambiguous, extend the test — but only once, and say so in advance.
Example: what this looks like in practice
A founder of a 20-person field-service software company strong in HVAC decides to enter commercial plumbing. He answers the interview: two plumbing companies bought last year via referral, both citing scheduling chaos during emergency calls, and he can commit one SDR plus $2K a month for a quarter. The model builds the plan around a beachhead of 50-200 employee commercial plumbing contractors, translates 'dispatch optimization' into 'stop losing emergency calls to voicemail', proposes a founding-customer offer (50% off year one for a case study and two reference calls), and sets kill criteria: under 5 meetings from 400 contacts by day 45 means revisit the message; under 1 closed deal by day 90 means exit. The research sprint surfaces that plumbing buyers live in two trade associations his HVAC motion never touched.
Best fit
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Use adjacent proof ('we do this for HVAC contractors — same dispatch chaos you have'), then engineer your first lighthouse accounts with a founding-customer offer: meaningful discount or extra service in exchange for a case study and reference calls. Three referenceable customers beats a hundred cold emails in a relationship-driven vertical. This prompt builds that proof ladder into the first 90 days.
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