There are four different types of product diversification methods that businesses may wish to consider:

1. Horizontal Diversification – Horizontal diversification is the addition of a product or service not available in the company’s current market. These new products or services complement the existing product line and are designed to attract your present customers.
2. Concentric Diversification – Concentric diversification is when a company adds additional products or services to the existing business, similar to what the business already has.
3. Conglomerate Diversification – Conglomerate diversification is the introduction of a new product or service that is completely unrelated to the businesses’ current line.
4. Vertical Diversification – Vertical diversification, also called vertical integration, is when a company moves up or down the supply chain by adding new stages related to production and distribution. – Mantec

Product diversification can be viewed as both a risk-reduction strategy and a market growth strategy. “Product diversification can help expand the current market of a product and help companies grow the presence of their brands.” -Indeed It also provides alternative revenue sources to hedge against a downturn in a particular market sector and allows businesses to exploit new technologies which make newer, more efficient, and effective products and services available.  This can protect profitability and increase a return on investment.

Product diversification may not be the best strategy for all businesses to bolster growth and ROI. The following may be reasons to forego diversification in the short term:

• Your business is strong in one area only
• You have partners to fulfil other offerings
• You own other businesses which can offer supplementary offerings
• You’re a content hedgehog 

SalesChain’s business automation software solution provides the help dealers need to sell any combination of print, service, IT products, managed services, telephony, and mailing systems, using a single, cohesive platform.  As dealerships expand into these diverse offerings, sales teams need more product and service-specific details.  SalesChain’s order breakdown CPQ tool allows different sales teams within dealerships to tailor-make blended solutions packages for their clients and allows managers to better track progress and trends.

Building or acquiring an MSP is expensive – Expanding into other offerings, through acquisition or through expanding your own business, is expensive. Costs that factor into building an MSP from the ground up can be staggering. MSPs have extremely high costs for employees, as IT staff are in higher demand than ever. In addition, MSPs that make a help desk available after hours, or even 24/7, come with the inherently high operating cost that comes with keeping people on call.

IT equipment costs have been volatile and are especially subject to vulnerabilities from global supply chain issues, chip shortages, and rising costs due to inflation. Equipment maintenance costs are ongoing, and if MSPs choose to outsource their compute to the cloud via AWS, Azure, or others, this ongoing expense is inherent.

Many dealerships with capital at hand have opted to buy an existing MSP, acquire its clients and staff, and keep it running smoothly rather than taking on the challenge of building one from scratch. This is a valid and keen strategy that avoids the several years of investment it takes to start fresh.

It is a very competitive market – Aside from the expense, the MSP market in general is much more saturated with small, passionate startup companies than the print market, which is currently experiencing increased M&A. This poses both tangible and intangible challenges.

From a tangible perspective, having more competition in the market makes it harder to stand out initially. Building trust in a fresh brand image in a completely new field in a saturated market… well, we won’t take too much time to dive into why this is a challenge.

From an intangible point of view, you’re competing from a business perspective but also on a personal level. Peer recommendations are one of the most powerful sources of business growth, and the amiability of ownership, technicians and other employees plays a big role. In simple terms, making a good impression in a saturated market is even more essential.

Industry-specific software has the advantage of directed functionality without the added costs of a custom-built platform.  It fits the sales niche of the business better than an out-of-the-box product. It may even include features that the business was unaware of that could optimize operations.  You can mold the software to fit your business, rather than the other way around.

When it comes to implementing an industry-focused CPQ tool, attention should be paid to advanced features which streamline the quoting process.  SalesChain’s specific industry-focused features include a comprehensive, built-in product catalog, a customizable proposal wizard, fully integrated e-signature functionality, integrated service pricing and IT service pricing tools, and a document management and scanning utility.

It is a proven fact that recognizable brand imaging leads to greater revenue.  Potential clients will gravitate toward products they recognize and have heard positive things about.  The more consistently a business can brand every step of a sale, the more well know their market image will become. CPQ platforms automate presentation consistency in the quoting process, allowing all team members to generate compelling, easily understood documents in a timely manner.  An enhanced perception of brand image can even lead to a justification of higher prices with buyers. – Xait

CPQ software applications are powerful tools that automate and streamline the process of generating product pricing configurations and customer quotes. They are especially useful in situations where sales representatives need complicated product configurations, including potential discounts, customizations, optional features, and multiple product combinations. They are often run in tandem with CRM and ERP platforms and use a pre-programmed rule set, which greatly increases accuracy as well as the speed of proposal generation. CPQ software is seen as the newest wave in sales optimization tools.

The three components of CPQ platforms include the features that are part of the configuration (C), pricing (P), and quote generation (Q) workflow. Users may create, modify, send, and track documents accessing data from integrated CRM and/or ERP software

The first step in brokering a sale is designing the customized solutions that clients have come to expect. The configure function of a CPQ system provides the flexibility to create unique combinations of products and services, using stored business rules such as pricing and product compatibility. Some systems even allow project-centric solutions to be built.

Multi-product, complex solutions require complicated pricing structures. Sales reps want to offer the customer options, but without CPQ software they must go digging through spreadsheets for the right pricing rules to create the quote. Customizable products must be configured with a unique price for each quote. Using the programmed business rules, CPQ software facilitates electronic pricing from simple catalog price book quantities through more sophisticated models such as value-based, outcome-based, or tiered pricing. These systems can also streamline the approval process where business rules are exceeded.

The most powerful iterations of CPQ software include integrations to CRM and ERP platforms. This expands CPQ functionality beyond the sales department, and provides consistent pricing, marketing, and client communication across operations. Every step in the sales process, from quoting, purchase, manufacture and delivery to new deal trends and product design can be monitored quickly and accurately. The result is a company working as a team to make better, data-driven decisions.

Wouldn’t it be great to generate quotes with the click of a button? (Bonus points for saving time by tying basic information into the quotes with integration into your CRM.) Collating and including information such as product/service descriptions and pricing, automated pricing updates and special deals from an updated database, and automatically formatting and emailing the proposal can all save substantial amounts of salespeople’s time. Because of this expediency, they can spend more time personally following up with clients, building valuable relationships, suffering fewer communication breakdowns caused by manual errors, and spending way less time on paperwork.

Consistency is the key to professional branding. Both the content of your quote and how you present it are important. A professional look reflects well on your company brand and overall image. Visually pleasing, and easy-to-read templates as well as personalized business logos are programmed into a quoting tool and can be used to help maintain consistency. Quoting tools also help to standardize content, giving the salespeople the ability to pre-program useful values like taxes, post-processing costs, delivery fees etc. while having the flexibility to manipulate the monetary terms of a sale as needed for individual cases.

When considering a change to the way your company generates proposals, the key factors to optimize are speed, consistency, and accuracy. If you are missing out on business for any of these reasons, an electronic quoting tool can expedite the process and be the deciding factor in winning a sale with a time-conscious buyer. Automating workflow reduces time spent manually entering data and improves communication between departments and clients. Cloud-based software means documents can be accessed easily, are free from manual entry errors, make the presentation of multiple custom quotes simpler, and have the option of being electronically signed and mailed to all parties.

Sellers are continuously challenged to come up with novel ways to interact with a more sophisticated and independent clientele. Buyers are much more likely to check internet resources and conduct their own product research online before consulting with a sales representative.

Sales enablement can help businesses keep up with ever-evolving buyer expectations. In a digital economy, sales enablement can streamline the time spent by sales and marketing reps adapting new materials that are specific to buyer needs, ultimately helping them convert more leads into customers.

Quality sales enablement technology can also elucidate trends in customer content engagement and link them to sales performance. Sales representatives can better gauge the results of their efforts and become more valuable advisors to management. Sales enablement can give your whole business team a much better view of the big picture!

Sales enablement is not synonymous with content marketing, marketing enablement, or sales operations. Rather, an effective sales enablement strategy meshes the efforts of both sales and marketing professionals. “Content creation is a huge element of successful sales enablement. This is where marketing and sales can really put their heads together for the greater good of the company.” – Salesforce

For content creation efforts to be effective, professionals need to take into consideration content organization, type, and distribution. Content should be cataloged and cross-referenced, so it is easily accessible to all stakeholders. It should be directed to buyers’ specific needs and easily personalized. Content needs to be available in digital formats, such as recurring blog posts, white papers, and updated webinars. Finally, marketing content needs to be trackable, allowing for ongoing evaluation of its effectiveness in the sales cycle.

“A good CRM implementation is a disruptive one” – Salesforce

A successful CRM is not simply an electronic version of the old-fashioned spreadsheet format for recording data. Today’s CRM systems are sophisticated software packages designed to collate and integrate many, if not all, of the existing workflows and processes for a business.

Because of this, stakeholders in modern CRM projects often include management, admins, and operations teams and not just the sales representatives. For the implementation to be successful, all these employees must understand that “business as usual” will not look the same anymore. Users have to be well trained and shown the advantages of integrating their jobs with other departments, using the best practices within the new software.

Once the new CRM is fully implemented, change management will be required to encourage adoption and ongoing use. It’s up to management and in some cases a quality onboarding team from the CRM supplier to convince stakeholders of the ultimate advantages of the inevitable learning curve and frustrations of learning a new system.

“While your sales and marketing departments may be able to easily grasp the value of a CRM, the advantages might not be as obvious to other departments. This can even apply to executives” – FayeDigital.

Your company is in business to make money. That is, of course, a primary focus of the executive team. They may be focused on the financial implications of implementing a new CRM system, but the financial benefits are not always tangible. Factors like time saved on projects and the reduction of lost opportunities can be challenging to quantify. Business leaders need to grasp all the strategic aspects of a comprehensive CRM tool because they often have tremendous influence to inspire buy-in by the rest of the employees.

According to Harvard Business Review, Sales management executives must understand their role in using a CRM tool. Powerful data collection and analysis tools are attractive to managers for their ability to track sales representatives’ activity and generate comprehensive reports. However, a secondary, and equally important managerial role is to provide coaching. A quality CRM system provides them with the data they need to help sales representatives strategically use the system to maximize sales opportunities.

A successful CRM system implementation will simply take time. In a profit-oriented business environment, where time is money, this is sometimes a hard message to hear.

However, a company cannot purchase a new system, go live with minimal training, and expect immediate success. Accept that change management requires an input of quality stakeholder buy-in to ongoing training, data entry, software integrations, and troubleshooting workflows.

Good CRM providers will help break up an implementation project into manageable stages and be sure to integrate user training, testing, and feedback into the process, all within a reasonable (not rushed!) timeline. They should be flexible enough to work with your company on workflow design revision and should be available after you have gone live for service and support.

We’ve all heard the old computer science adage “garbage in, garbage out.” When it comes to CRM data, this couldn’t be truer. If employees and/or clients do not trust the data produced for any reason (dated information, inaccuracies, duplicate records) it is meaningless.

Again, full stakeholder buy-in is essential since all are responsible for timely and accurate data input. Old systems can contribute corrupt, outdated, or incorrect data sets to your new software system during implementation. Look for a product that can provide database cleansing and de-duplication.

“A shocking 46% of qualified leads end up as missed opportunities.”

Not only can a CRM system perform as an electronic Rolodex, recording the contact information for new leads, but it can also keep track of prospect interactions, automatically schedule meetings, follow-ups, and reminders, and help sales representatives prioritize customer leads and gather more complete personalized information to drive workflow. This opportunity management eliminates the need for handwritten spreadsheets and notes and increases efficiency.

Using a cloud-based CRM means that members of your team from all departments have access to the entire history of client/lead interactions, regardless of who inputs the data. Team members can update information in real-time, even if they are working remotely, eliminating miscommunications caused by overlooked messages and streamlining interdepartmental collaboration all the way through the sales process.

If you are considering a CRM tool, chances are you are a B2B (business to business) company, and your contacts belong to accounts that represent the companies you do business with. This is the model that CRM products are designed to accommodate. If you are a B2C (business to consumer) company, a simple contact management system may be the more economically wise choice.

Depending on the products you sell, the length and complexity of your sales pipeline could make it difficult to keep manual track of the history of a particular deal. A CRM system documents each step in the process and makes it accessible to all involved employees, ensuring that no information is lost, overlooked, or repeated as the deal passes from sales to fulfillment to billing to delivery to support.

In today’s digital business world, companies are exploiting numerous marketing avenues. Sales representatives must be familiar with how marketing strategies have engaged with leads and customers before they interact with them. CRM tools can consolidate all this data, as well as helping the marketing department automate web marketing, personalize communications, generate content, optimize search engine results, and create online content. “Seventy two percent of customers will not engage with messaging that is not personalized. Showing customers what they want to see and where they want to see it will increase your chances of making a sale.”

• You already have a viable plan to manage the potential scale-up of your business successfully.
• You are a very small company, without a large sales staff to manage.
• You have only a small number of new leads or routinely handle just a few larger customers.
• It is the nature of your business to have a short sales cycle with little or no repeat business, and you do not need to record customer histories.
• You are selling B2C, especially via e-commerce. Here you might be better off with a dedicated B2C marketing system that captures sales history instead of adopting a CRM system.