There are two often overlooked sources of significant additional revenue. Both come from innovation.
The first overlooked source of additional revenue is innovation that comes from your existing customers.
Every organization has a set of customers that are more profitable than others. For multiple reasons this subset of clients, usually less that 20%, values very highly your company’s contributions to their growth. Unfortunately, in a fast-changing world their perception of your value can change suddenly. Your competitors are not sitting idly by. They are calling on your key customers with innovative and attention-grabbing ideas. If you are complacent, you will lose these customers. The key to growth and accessing significant additional revenue streams is to focus on how you can help these customers grow in a challenging marketplace.
The advantages you have over your competition are:
- the deep relationships with the key stakeholders
- the proprietary insights you can gain about the external forces and internal challenges the company is facing
The second overlooked source of additional revenue is innovation that comes from non customers.
Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne highlight this point in their ground-breaking book: Blue Ocean Strategy. The idea is simple yet effective. Rather than swimming in the red ocean of hyper competition and commoditization, every organization can unlock enormous demand by simply figuring out how to tweak their current solutions to creatively address the most pressing needs of people they do not currently do business with. The authors outline the step by step process for this approach in their latest book: Blue Ocean Shift, which I highly recommend.
It has been very gratifying for me as both a consultant and facilitator to help my clients grow their companies using these strategies.
If you would like to know more about these strategies, please reach out to me and I’d be happy to share my insights.