Existing customer base. While it may seem obvious, taking stock of the current list of customers is a critical first step. Your existing portfolio of customers may already have a high concentration of companies from a particular vertical industry, even if that wasn’t a conscious effort or focus. That should definitely factor into planning.  Even one prominent customer from a specific industry can be a huge asset as you’re trying to establish a foothold in a market segment and expand on it.

Industry prospects. A key criteria to consider is the overall health of the market, and the industry’s expected trajectory of growth or contraction. For example, with the financial incentives the HITECH act provides for investment in systems that support electronic health records, the prospects in healthcare have been bright for MSPs. In other industries, recent years have been tough, and, while disruption can create opportunities for MSPs, it can also pose risks.

Culture. It is important to take an honest look at the existing culture within your business and determine whether there’s a match with a potential target industry. Obviously, if you have a pre-sales engineer wearing flip flops and the client’s wearing wing tips, that would be a warning sign. While attire can be a simple thing to change, the underlying culture isn’t, so be sure that there’s a cultural fit with the organizations you’d be looking to work with.

Openness to outsourcing. By their very nature, organizations in some industries are more likely to outsource their IT than others. It’s critical to take a hard look at past outsourcing tendencies of organizations in a particular vertical, and make sure that there’s ultimately an opportunity to win outsourcing business.  That said, in some cases a history of reluctance to outsource could represent an opportunity. For example, a service provider may see that their targets in financial services have been reluctant to outsource a specific service to cloud providers in the past. They could carve out a successful niche by delivering a service that addresses compliance requirements.