Infrastructure and industrials are subject to significant legal and regulatory requirements. From safety to emissions to stakeholder management, there are hundreds of thousands of laws and regulations that dictate the way these industries can operate.
In energy, operating facilities must adhere to OSHA safety standards and local environmental requirements. In construction, state-specific mechanics lien laws dictate when contractors and suppliers must be paid for their materials and services.
Adhering to legal and regulatory requirements typically involves the completion of forms, documents, and excel spreadsheets with information compiled from multiple parties. Today, most of these compliance processes are undigitized and are managed in SharePoint.
Enter software. Software to manage compliance processes is an excellent wedge to acquire an industrial customer. The compliance processes (and the budget for managing these compliance processes) already exist at the customer. You’re not re-inventing the wheel. Instead, simply digitizing compliance processes streamlines the customer’s manual work, saving them time, improving the fidelity of their data, and ensuring that the customer’s regulatory requirements are met.
But that’s not even the most exciting part. Compliance software can go even further. Usually add-on products such as payments, marketplaces, or data analytics can be built as an adjacent module to the compliance software. The compliance product acts as a “wedge” to acquire the customer, and then the customer can be cross-sold with other valuable products and features stemming from the data collected in the compliance module.
Because compliance software manages critical legal and regulatory processes, once the software is installed, it is not often changed. And as an already-approved vendor, you have a higher likelihood of the customer purchasing your second product (than if you approached the customer cold). So, if you’re an entrepreneur building industrial software, consider compliance software as your “wedge.” It’s an undigitized, mission-critical category with high stickiness and high opportunity for cross-selling. What’s not to like?