Should My Business Diversify or Concentrate Its Offerings?

As an office technology dealership, you have the unique opportunity to help businesses and organizations meet their needs and improve their operations. When it comes to offering products and services, you have the choice of offering a diverse range of solutions or focusing on a specific area.

Both approaches have their own benefits, and it’s important to understand what each can offer to determine the best approach for your dealership. In this blog post, we’ll explore the benefits of diverse offerings versus concentrated offerings and provide insights and tips on how to make the best decision for your dealership.

Whether you’re looking to expand your customer base, improve your margins, or build your expertise, understanding the benefits of both approaches is essential to making the right choice.

Increased customer satisfaction

Offering a wide range of office technology products and services allows dealers to better meet the needs of their customers. When customers can find everything they need in one place, they are more likely to be satisfied with their experience and return for future purchases. This can also lead to increased customer loyalty as they are more likely to recommend the dealer to others.

Improved competitiveness

A diverse offering can help dealers differentiate themselves from the competition and position themselves as a one-stop-shop for all office technology needs. This can be particularly important in highly competitive markets, as customers are more likely to choose a dealer that offers a comprehensive solution to their needs, rather than having to source products and services from multiple providers.

Diversification of revenue streams

By offering multiple products and services, dealers can reduce the impact of fluctuations in demand for any one product or service. This can help to maintain a steady revenue stream, which can be particularly important during economic downturns or when demand for certain products or services is impacted by external factors.

Enhanced expertise

Dealing with a variety of office technology products and services can help dealers build their expertise and credibility in the market. This can attract new customers who are looking for a provider with a high level of expertise and knowledge, as well as partnerships with other businesses and organizations.

Increased market share

By offering a diverse range of office technology products and services, dealers can expand their customer base and capture a larger share of the market. This can be particularly important for dealers looking to grow their business, as a larger market share can help them to achieve economies of scale and improve their overall competitiveness. Additionally, a diverse offering can also help to reduce the impact of market disruptions and shifts in demand, as dealers are better positioned to adapt to changing market conditions.

Increased expertise

By specializing in a specific product or service, dealerships can develop a deep understanding and expertise in that area, which can be particularly valuable to customers who are looking for specialized solutions. This increased expertise can also help to attract new customers who are looking for a provider with a high level of knowledge and experience in a specific area. By focusing on a specific product or service, dealerships can become known as a trusted provider in that area, which can help to build customer loyalty and increase repeat business.

Stand out from the crowd

Specializing in a defined area of office technology can help dealerships differentiate themselves from the competition and position themselves as a go-to provider for that product or service. This can be particularly important in markets where there is a high level of competition and customers are looking for specialized solutions. By focusing on a specific product or service, dealerships can also become more efficient and effective in their operations, which can help to improve their competitiveness and profitability.

Higher margins

By specializing in a specific product or service, dealerships can often negotiate better pricing and terms from suppliers, which can result in higher margins. Additionally, by focusing on a specific product or service, dealerships can streamline their operations and reduce their costs, which can also help to improve their margins.

Targeted marketing

By specializing in a specific product or service, dealerships can focus their marketing efforts on a target audience and more effectively reach potential customers. This can help to reduce the costs of marketing and increase the return on investment, as dealerships are able to reach their target audience with more precision and accuracy.

Niche market opportunities

By specializing in a specific area of office technology, dealerships can identify and capitalize on new niche market opportunities that may not have been accessible to more generalist dealerships. This can help dealerships to grow their business and expand their customer base, as they are better positioned to meet the needs of a specific target market. Additionally, by focusing on a specific product or service, dealerships can develop a deeper understanding of their customers’ needs and preferences, which can help them to provide more customized and tailored solutions and improve customer satisfaction.

The best approach for your dealership will depend on a variety of factors, including your goals, your market, and your customers. If you’re looking to expand your customer base and meet the needs of a wide range of customers, diverse offerings may be the best choice. On the other hand, if you’re looking to build your expertise and focus on a specific target audience, a concentrated offering may be the way to go.

Ultimately, the key to success is understanding the benefits of both approaches and making the best decision for your dealership. Whether you choose to offer a diverse range of products and services or concentrate your offerings in a specific area, it’s important to remain flexible and open to change. As the market evolves and customer needs change, you may need to modify your approach in order to stay ahead of the competition and continue to grow your business.

No matter if your business offers a diverse or concentrated range of products and services, SalesChain is the complete business automation solution for your office technology dealership.

The SalesChain platform provides automation for each step of your process, from quote and order pricing and document generation to delivery workflow tools. SalesChain puts your team in a position to communicate and collaborate efficiently, removes the need to hassle with redundant data sets, and empowers your people to close more deals.

Click here to learn more about SalesChain

Sync the Team or Sink the Team

A team is defined as a group of people who perform interdependent tasks to work toward accomplishing a common mission or specific objective. In the corporate world, many hours and dollars are spent to create highly functioning, revenue-generating, synchronized teams of employees.

The key word here is “interdependent”. Each individual employee’s effort is needed to generate a successful result. Employee contributions are synergistic rather than additive. In other words, optimizing every part of the work results in a sum equal to more than the individual parts. If each individual or team is siloed with no connection between efforts, then optimization isn’t possible. The ideal hierarchy is one where employees are synchronized. No matter where they are on the corporate ladder, they should be familiar with the ongoing group efforts and how their contributions integrate into the whole. Businesses need to sync their teams!

“A high-performance team is a cross-functional group of people with complementary skills. Effective work practices are crucial to building high-performing teams.” – Leadership Garden

In any team, communication is key. Information must be in a format that is easily accessible and can be easily shared by employees. Managers need to know what actions their sales representatives have taken on a daily basis to secure an account. Sales representatives must be able to access information regarding the delivery personnel and the fulfillment process in order to keep their clients informed and happy. Upper management wants to keep tabs on KPIs to inform ongoing business decisions.

All these components are, by nature, interconnected. When information is communicated effectively, responsibilities can be clearly outlined, and performance can be measured and trackable. The same should be true for any software platform your team uses to stay synchronized. To be their most successful, many teams utilize a central platform for critical processes such as storing and sharing data and information, activity tracking and planning, lead and deal creation and management, and more. If your team uses multiple platforms, it is critical that they can integrate with one another to cut down on redundant data entries, miscommunications, and mistakes.

Synchronizing your team often facilitates a uniform process for:

Creating sales leads  
Booking meetings and sharing information 
Assigning and tracking tasks and performance
Consolidating and concentrating important data
Creating and closing deals  
Billing/documenting orders 
Distributing delivery/back-end documentation
Creating commissions packages

When processes are put in place to facilitate syncing your team, team interactions can be optimized. Syncing your team with intelligent software and automation can lead to:

Higher efficiency. When each working part is operating at its best, the whole system works most effectively.
Less time wasted. Every communication task that is automated and standardized frees up employee time to invest in brainstorming, creating, and accomplishing tasks.
A lower margin for error. Systematizing protocols makes it easier to spot and correct issues quickly.  
Team members are more easily rewarded for achieving specific goals. Employees are incentivized by being able to document and present accomplishments to their managers.

And of course: The Bottom Line!

More Sales: More efficient use of time ultimately creates more sales leads, more deals closed, and more commissions!

Syncing your team requires a commitment to developing effective improvement strategies. While some may think it is not worthwhile to invest the time and money, failing to consider synchronization strategies may lead to:

Lower efficiency
Wasted Time
Miscommunication
And Missed Opportunities

When you fail to have a synchronized process, you may increase the margin for error within your team. Simply put, you sync the team, or you sink the team. It’s important to remember that all kinds of businesses are employing digital strategies in order to improve their team’s synchronization. If your competitors are doing this, you risk falling behind. Consider the digital platforms your team use: are they integrated, efficient, accessible, and comprehensive? Do your software platforms sync your team, or sink your team?

From interoffice memos to old-fashioned Rolodexes and paper filing systems, business teams have utilized multiple tools designed to optimize efficiency and communication. With the advent of the digital age, multiple software tools have become available to organize office functions. Many in the office technology industry have taken advantage of these products, introducing more than one digital tool in an effort to streamline operations.

However, there is an inherent problem with this approach. Cobbling together multiple pieces of software to handle different organizational needs can result in employee confusion, data overlap or loss, software incompatibility issues, and cumbersome maintenance and upgrade schedules.

“Effective teamwork practices include good software platforms! High-performing teams are nimble and focused — which requires clear, timely, and streamlined communication.” – Leadership Garden

No doubt, syncing your team can be a complex and multifaceted challenge. Business teams today use a wide variety of digital platforms to synchronize their processes and boost their efficiency. Software platforms like Slack, Salesforce, Monday, Jira, ConnectWise, e-Automate, and more provide business teams with an unprecedented range of options and solutions to their needs. But not all platforms are built the same. With so many options available, how do office technology and IT product dealers know what is right for them?

SalesChain is the only solution in the office technology and IT product industry to offer a comprehensive solution to the problem of successful synchronization. Our platform serves as a complete business automation software, connecting the front and back-office staff and boosting your team’s efficiency.

Project success engenders team trust, cooperation, and the motivation for continued collaboration – sharing skills, ideas, and data to produce the best result. SalesChain is the project management software platform needed to do this. Remember – a TEAM means “Together Everyone Achieves More”. Sync your team today with SalesChain!

How Are Copier Dealerships Managing Sales Territories?

Many factors are contributing to increased challenges for copier dealerships as they try to align their sales territories, but let’s focus on two of the most egregious: Turnover in the sales force and the changing landscape for print sales in 2022 and 2023. These challenges mean that managers must exploit new strategies to create functional and successful territories for their sales representatives. The goal is to define territories that optimize sales rep performance and drive revenue growth while also giving them a practical number of existing accounts to manage.

So, what are imaging industry sales managers doing to rise to these challenges and provide their teams with the best subset of accounts possible?

A sales territory is simply a geographical area assigned to a sales rep. It is their job to identify and approach potential customers within that region. To be profitable, companies keep track of current clients and continuously search for new business. Leads (opportunities for new sales) can come from many sources, but a critical component of recruiting new business is targeting sales territories.

“Sales territory mapping is the process of building a visual action plan for outside sales. With a focus on getting ahead of competitors, reps are assigned target prospects without overlapping with each other.” – ZoomInfo

The lines which create and define the boundaries of sales territories have been traditionally set using only one factor: geography. Maps were consulted and sales reps were assigned non-overlapping regions of an area (sometimes by zip code or home base for the rep), often without consideration of what existed within those boundaries. These territory maps are certainly important. Sales managers utilize them to configure their sales reps’ traveling routes and evaluate their sales performance.

The goal of drawing effective sales territories is to optimize revenue while making efficient use of reps as the most important sales resource. Challenges that dealers face include:

Upgrading technology infrastructure to take advantage of electronic mapping and database demographics.
Creating balanced workloads for sales representatives with territories.
Matching sales representatives to clients who speak to their strengths and experience.
Putting in place an effective business management system to correctly track progress and evaluate the effectiveness of territory boundaries.

Additionally, the post-pandemic landscape for the office technology channel reflects a major change in print sales. With the expansion of work-from-home situations for many dealerships’ clients, residential solutions have become more profitable, and client offices are not all doing the same print volume they once were. Dealerships are having to re-draw a lot of territories because of this to balance the playing field for their sales reps.  

Copier dealerships today can take advantage of sophisticated sales territory mapping technology. Available software tools go far beyond simple geographic mapping for distribution. Sales managers may segment territories using many other criteria, such as:

Industry type – Using SIC codes, DNB numbers or more generic industry segments, businesses can sort companies by their industry and identify higher volume opportunities like school districts, law firms and hospitals.
Customer type – How many customers are in each area? How many Prospect accounts? Having a good balance can serve to give salespeople a balanced workload between easy repeat sales and profitable net-new sales.
Business size – a territory with fewer large companies may indeed be more profitable than one with many small companies, or vice versa. A balance of business sizes within territories, or a balance of geographic sizes based on the scale of businesses within them is certainly critical.
Deal potential – Does a certain geographical region have more known opportunities than others? If so, a re-balance may be in order.

Many businesses today are employing the use of digital sales territory management tools. Like other automated tools, they bring multiple advantages including:

Eliminating the need for error-prone manual data entry using spreadsheets.
Freeing up sales managers’ time to make them more efficient.
Producing an effective workflow for sales reps, saving time and travel expenditures.
Helping managers to capitalize on their sales teams’ strengths.
Focusing on targeted regions.
Setting goals, tracking progress, and analyzing sales strategies.
Ensuring equitable and balanced sales territories between reps.
Ensuring that all potential customers are covered by sales reps.

SalesChain’s software goes beyond just partitioning territories by zip code rules. It can help dealers fine-tune their sales opportunities and balance sales reps’ customer base in an area by providing population averages, business density, customer density, and the number of leases with corresponding information. Sales managers and leadership teams may run scenarios to help make calculated decisions to effectively distribute territory customer bases and accounts. Lease data gives them important information on the “size of opportunity” in a given territory. Revenue analytics allow for a spot-in-time analysis of sales data and help managers keep balanced territories in a dynamic sales environment.

Ready to assess your prospect and account quality more accurately and improve your sales plan? SalesChain can help!

Should My Business Diversify or Concentrate Its Offerings?

Exploring The Benefits of Dealers With Diverse Versus Concentrated Offerings

The Two Approaches To Meeting Customers’ Needs

Benefits of Diverse Offerings:

Benefits of Specific/Concentrated Offerings:

One System for Dealers in Imaging and IT

Watch this brief video to learn a bit about where our offering is heading in 2023!

Which Is Best For My Business?

SalesChain Provides the Flexibility You Need

Ready to Streamline Your Business?

Use the link below to schedule a discovery call for a demonstration of the SalesChain system. One of our representatives would be happy to assist you, answer your questions and see if SalesChain is the right partner to help you grow your business.

Sync the Team or Sink the Team

Navigating The Waters of An Organized Process

Row the Boat

Interdependency is the Key

What does it mean to be Synchronized in a Business/Sales Team Environment?

One System for Dealers in Imaging and IT

Watch this brief video to learn a bit about where our offering is heading in 2023!

Benefits of ‘Syncing the Team’

Syncing the Team Without Sinking the Team

How have Teams/Companies Tried to Synchronize in the Past?

How are Teams Syncing Now?

Ready to Streamline Your Business?

Use the link below to schedule a discovery call for a demonstration of the SalesChain system. One of our representatives would be happy to assist you, answer your questions and see if SalesChain is the right partner to help you grow your business.

How Are Copier Dealerships Managing Sales Territories?

Balancing Your Team’s Bandwidth and Workload

Defining The Challenges

What is a Sales Territory?

What are the Challenges of Drawing Territories for Dealerships?

One System for Dealers in Imaging and IT

Watch this brief video to learn a bit about where our offering is heading in 2023!

What are Copier Dealerships Doing Today?

Dealerships Using SalesChain Have Just Received A New Territory Analytics Tool

Ready to Streamline Your Business?

Use the link below to schedule a discovery call for a demonstration of the SalesChain system. One of our representatives would be happy to assist you, answer your questions and see if SalesChain is the right partner to help you grow your business.