#48: Win Bigger Deals with a Vertical GTM Strategy

Chip Royce, Flywheel Advisors

My client’s sales team was obsessed with their feature set. But they were losing to cheaper competitors. It was a bloodbath. When asked how to compete against cheaper SaaS products, their answer was always the same: “add more features.”

They were wrong.

We shifted their priority from ‘what our product does’ to ‘the problem our product solves for nurses.’ This shift redefined their vertical GTM strategy.

The result? Their average deal size jumped by 30% in 6 months.

It wasn’t magic. It was a change in priority. And it’s a change you can make, too.

I’m going to lay out the exact b2b solution selling framework we used to work smarter, not harder.. It’s a 3-step plan to find and win your first high-value vertical.

The Priority Gap: The Real Reason You’re Losing Deals

Most founders think their top priority is building the best product. They’re wrong. Your product can be loaded with features, but it means nothing if they go unused. The result: A huge percentage of software features go entirely unused, a massive waste of time, money, and talent.

You’re stuck in a feature war, and it’s a race to the bottom on price.

The real problem is a priority gap. You are focused on your product’s features. The customer is focused on their business problems. They don’t care about your new dashboard widget. They care about why their top engineer is spending half his day on manual data entry instead of writing code.

Your “better” product is losing because you’re selling a tool to everyone. The solution is to close that gap. Find a group of customers with a shared, expensive problem. Understand the problem better than anyone else.

Step 1: Your Niche Down Strategy: Find Your High-Value Vertical

Stop trying to sell to “small businesses” or “enterprise companies.” That’s not a market. It’s a vague wish. The first step in any effective vertical GTM strategy is finding a niche market for your SaaS. This is your high-value vertical: a specific industry or customer segment that gets massive value from what you do and is willing to pay a premium for it.

How do you find them?

Don’t guess. Look at your data.

• Who are your happiest customers? The ones who send you unsolicited praise.
• Who pays you the most? And who never complains about the price?
• Who has seen the best, most quantifiable results?
• Who was the easiest to onboard?

There’s a pattern there. It could be an industry (e.g., dental labs), a company size (e.g., 50-100 employees), or a specific role within a company (e.g., Heads of Safety). That pattern is your starting point.

A great example of this is Toast. Instead of building a generic payment processor for every main street business, they built a platform specifically for restaurants.

They understood the unique, chaotic workflow of a restaurant, from front-of-house to the kitchen. Instead of selling “payment processing,” they sold a way to turn tables faster, manage inventory better, and streamline ordering.

They didn’t sell features. They sold a solution for a restaurant’s biggest headaches. That focused niche-down strategy allowed them to dominate the vertical. You need to find your Toast.

Step 2: Uncover the Core Problem

Once you have your vertical, you need to become an expert on their problems. This is the part everyone skips. They run a few surveys and think they get it. You have to go deeper. You need to understand their world so well that you can describe their pain back to them better than they can.

This isn’t about asking, “What features do you want?” That question leads to minor tweaks, not game-changing solutions. It’s about understanding their business.

Get on the phone. Get on Zoom. If you can, go visit them.

• “Walk me through your day. What’s the most frustrating, broken process?”
• “Where does work slow down? What feels like a constant bottleneck?”
• “What do you spend money on that feels like a total waste?”
• “If you had an extra 10 hours in your week, what would you do with it?”

Listen for the language of pain. Listen for the workarounds, the spreadsheets, the manual “if-this-then-that” processes they’ve cobbled together. That’s where the gold is.

They won’t say, “I need a bi-directional data synchronization tool.” They’ll say, “Every Monday, I have to export a CSV from our sales system and manually upload it into our finance software. If I mess up one line, our projections are off for the whole week. It’s terrifying.”

That’s the core problem. That’s what you’re selling against.

Step 3: How to Sell Value Not Features

The journey from a horizontal product to a vertical solution is significant, but starts with one step: identifying the right niche. The benefits of dominating a niche market are vast, but you must choose wisely.

Feeling stuck with commodity pricing? A niche GTM strategy can help you dominate a vertical, lower customer acquisition costs, and command premium pricing.

You’ve found your vertical. You understand their core problem. Now, you must change your entire sales narrative to focus on value, not features.

Your new sales pitch is a story about their business.

Before (Feature-Selling): “Our platform has an automated data-syncing feature, a customizable dashboard, and real-time analytics. Let me give you a demo.”

After (Solution-Selling): “I’ve spoken with several heads of finance in the manufacturing space, and they all report losing 5-10 hours weekly to manual data reconciliation, which risks critical projection errors. We built a process to eliminate that, giving your team back a full day of work while ensuring 100% data accuracy.”

See the difference? The first is about you. The second is about them.

When you master this, the conversation shifts from price to value. And that’s how to increase average software contract value.

You’re no longer selling a $100/month tool. You’re selling a solution that saves a company $50,000/year in wasted time and prevents costly errors. Framing it that way makes a $1,200/month price tag feel like a bargain.

The data is clear: this B2B solution-selling framework works. Companies that excel at value-based selling see higher win rates, shorter sales cycles, and significantly higher average contract values.

You’re not selling software. You’re selling a documented, predictable business outcome.

Your Plan to Win

Stop competing on features. It’s a losing game that leads to burnout and commoditization. You can win bigger deals. You can beat cheaper competitors. But you have to change your priority. You need a real vertical GTM strategy.

• Niche Down: Find the customer segment that needs you most and is willing to pay a premium for the value you create.
• Uncover Their Core Problem: Become an obsessive expert on their most expensive, frustrating business challenge.
• Sell the Solution: Rebuild your entire sales and marketing narrative around solving that specific pain, not listing your features.

This is how you escape the race to the bottom. This is how you win on value, not price.