To start with an obvious truth, businesses generally want to make more money tomorrow than they did yesterday. Revenues and margins should trend up with time. For an established business, there is a basic choice to be made on how to achieve the goal above. A business can continue with what has worked in the past – which in many scenarios is the sensible and effective course of action – or it may choose to be more proactive and seek new market opportunities for revenue and margin improvement.

This could involve introducing innovative products or services to existing customers, venturing into uncharted customer demographics with existing offerings, or even revamping the commercial model—be it through innovative pricing strategies, enhancing profit margins, or adopting an ‘as a Service’ model. However, it’s crucial to remember that your competitors are likely plotting similar moves. As Jeremy Irons’ character insightfully remarks in the film Margin Call, “There are three ways of making money in this business: be smarter, be the first, or cheat. Now I don’t cheat.” The strategies he identifies should be on the lips of any decision-maker looking to find new market opportunities before their competitors whisk them away.

Be First to Market Opportunities

The challenges businesses face evolve, and when these new challenges come up, market opportunities to sell solutions appear as well. In those moments, “it sure is a hell of a lot easier just to be first”.

Triggers for changing business needs that generate revenue growth opportunities can include legislation see the mad scramble to sell European drinks manufacturers caps that attach to bottles after the rule change that required the phase out of loose caps by July 3rd – but it can also be as simple as reacting to changes in demand for your customers’ services and products.

As their demand increases, or as their market matures, barriers that stopped them buying certain services or products drop overnight as the investment case for better HR software, automated manufacturing, or supply chain partners suddenly means what was once “we don’t need that” becomes “that would really help me”. Keeping a finger on the pulse of these potential changes is crucial to being first to offer relevant solutions.

Be Smarter in Spotting Market Opportunities

By being smarter here, we really mean:

– Solving your clients’ needs in a way that costs them less (and ideally you even less so that your margin benefits)

– Solving your clients’ needs more deeply in a way no competitor can

– Solving multiple disparate client needs all at once, again in a way nobody else can do

– Solving a need the client didn’t even realise they had

To achieve these points above, innovation is essential. But every company knows the feeling of running a deep, thoughtful, expensive innovation project and at the end of it all, the product or services just doesn’t sell. It should be a market-leading offering, but the buyers just aren’t there.

The answer here is brutally simple. Innovation needs to be centred upon a concrete understanding of what the client pain is. Assuming that because you can develop technology that could be useful to a client without thoroughly interrogating the market to check if they really have pain can lead to disappointing results. “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so”.

But on the other side of the coin, targeted, market-led innovation creates new market opportunities, often accompanied by lucrative margins.

How to Put This Into Practice

Understanding customers and markets are at the core of both of these strategies, and renewing this understanding regularly to identify changes will help businesses stay ahead of the pack. For more insights on navigating market challenges, check out our blog on Decoding Market Uncertainty: Strategies for B2B Success.

Assigning market & customer understanding to a specific role/roles will ensure it doesn’t drop off the bottom of to-do lists and a regular tempo is maintained. Alternatively, working with third parties can help provide focused resources for identifying new market opportunities.

At White Space Strategy, we regularly help B2B organisations identify growth opportunities, supporting innovation and strategy teams to develop and refine propositions. If you’re looking to stay ahead of the competition, get in touch with our team to discuss how we can help.