Category Archives: Customers

Diversify Revenue

It is very easy to fall into the trap of being very good at one thing. You start with a successful sale. You follow it up with a similarly applied successful sale, then another, and so on. Soon you have what you feel is the “recipe” for your product/service and a market. The key item to be aware of here is “a”, as in singular market.


 


Being very good at one thing is great while that market is good, but no market is good forever. You need to make sure you are diversified in your revenue sources.


 


I am in the communications and technology industry. It has been a rollercoaster ride for over a decade. Companies have flared up very large by taking advantage of the various technologies and needs bubbles, only to almost disappear completely when that particular market bubble bursts.


 


Good rules of thumb are to focus on the needs and uses of the end users of your product or service. This means you must potentially have to “see through” your customer, to their customer, if you are not dealing directly with the final end user of your product or service. As the communications industry learned in a very painful way, it was not the network that drove the end user; it was the end user that drove the network.


 


Examples of revenue diversification can include understanding the various demographics and needs within the market and grouping like ones as targets. This would be an example of vertical market definitions and diversification. Markets such as “Governments”, “Financial Entities”, “Education” and “Manufacturing” are good examples. That way you diversify yourself into specific markets that hopefully do not move fully in coordination with each other.


 


Another methodology is to move into complementary goods and services. If you are an equipment or product provider you may want to look at moving into providing services that are associated with your product. That way when customer capital expenditures are reduced, you can still generate revenue from the service associated with your product.


 


It sounds simple, and it sounds like common sense, but it seems that all too often in the heat of the drive for ever increasing revenues, we end up focusing only on what we have done well before, and not on other potentially unfamiliar markets that we should do well on in the future.