Four Ways to Identify New Opportunities
Growth and innovation require you to have the business vision to identify key opportunities and jump on them. A heads-down focus on the day-to-day demands of running a company is a dangerous impediment to clear business vision.
Try these four tactics to keep your sights on important expansion opportunities:
Assess outside factors
Internal company issues can easily become the influencer of all business decisions if you are not careful. To keep a balanced view, track and carefully consider external forces such as competition, new legislation or regulations, shifts in the economy, changes in global markets and other factors. These outside influencers provide valuable information about emerging opportunities and threats to your business.
Profile your customers
A thorough understanding of your existing customers will help you to find more customers as well as new opportunities to serve the ones you have. Analyze customer demographic characteristics such as who they are, what they do and how they make purchases. This process will likely reveal multiple customer segments with different purchasing behaviors, enabling you to develop profiles of your best customers. Armed with this, prospecting opportunities will be more evident.
Determine profitability
Do you know the value that each of your customers or segments provides to your company? Only by understanding which type of customer is the most and least profitable for your company can you identify worthwhile opportunities. A detailed analysis of the sales, delivery, customer service and other effort required for each customer or customer type can provide a clear picture of customer value. If you are new to tracking customer profitability, a good starting point is to assess the income you receive against the time and effort it takes to serve a certain customer or segment.
Look for occasions to cross-sell and up-sell
New opportunity doesn't have to mean new customers. Your current customer base may actually be the most fertile (and profitable) ground for new business. Consider what other products or services you can sell to your current customers. Does your marketing plan include tactics that ensure the long-term loyalty of your existing clients? In other words, the new opportunities you may need to grow might be right there in your current customer list.
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