Additive business opportunities are built on how effectively you utilize what you learn from past experiences and how you combine and deploy them currently and in the future.
That perspective means your focus is continuously multi-factorial.
If you are a wear-wash-rinse-repeat professional, you have a straight-line approach to identifying business opportunities. You set your sights on the latest lead that is in front of you, to the exclusion of all that is around you.
You lose your sense of peripheral business vision.
If you are a marketing and sales organization, you have some sort of lead generation machine going. Is waiting around to receive this list your sole source of identifying additive business opportunities? What types of customers are you missing out on as a result of your short-sightedness?
That’s linear mindset. No peripheral vision there.
If you are an IT, engineering or manufacturing entity, is your pipeline comprised of responding to RFPs and RFQs, predominantly for repeat business? That path is passive, linear selling. This strategy doesn’t allow you to create opportunities with companies who are identifying and prioritizing upcoming projects. What an opportunity to showcase the breadth and depth of your company’s core competencies.
When you consider breadth and depth, you exercise your peripheral and additive professional vision.
Additive business opportunities result from taking the positives and negatives from past projects and customer discovery and simultaneously applying them towards the next opportunities.
As a result, you continuously provide your customers with a more compelling reason to do business with you than you did the last time you spoke with them. You become more interesting, valuable and relevant to them. You start to cultivate the types of customers who are more interesting to you, as well.
Additive business opportunities are created by managing your knowledge acquisition. Why limit yourself to one article in your sales enablement platform that you keep referencing over and over? Take a holistic view. Become a go-to resource for customers. Keep up on current trends in your industry vertical.
Only peripheral vision is permitted when you focus on creating additive business opportunities to fuel your sales pipeline.
Additive business opportunities are created when you:
- acknowledge that business isn’t static;
- recognize that business is never conducted in a vacuum devoid of internal and external influences; and
- accept that the most dynamic and impactful variable involved in identifying additive business opportunities is Time.
You never sell or manufacture in the same place twice. Your customers aren’t frozen in Time during their vendor selection process, either.
Consider the impact that an additive business opportunity strategy can have on your current business development outcomes. How can you utilize continuous insights to engage, develop and acquire future business?
Something to chew on?
Babette N. Ten Haken is a management strategist and team-building leadership coach. She helps teams, startups and businesses who wrestle with unpredictable revenue streams. Her Workshops and Playbooks create more productive and profitable teams in healthier organizations. Her Playbook on leadership and business strategies, including tools, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon.com.
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