ONE NEW REVENUE STREAM CAN PROPEL YOUR COMPANY TO NEW RECORDS YEAR AFTER YEAR

Discovering a new revenue stream is much like starting a new business. Many variables contribute to successfully finding a lucrative stream of fresh cash. A great deal of all marketing & sales consultant work revolves around the concept of helping clients make more money. Often that additional revenue is closely tied to finding new customers. We welcome all such challenges. It IS out there. Let's find it!

The biggest win for companies is finding a whole new source of buyers. Ideally, that source is loaded with an abundance of quality, RELEVANT prospects... and not just ancillary business fished from existing pools. If so, there can be MANY YEARS of opportunity to fish out of that new pond. Not only can such a find drive records THIS year... but for many years to come.

This page summarizes a bit of our highly-effective approach to discovering brand new sources of business. We don't give EVERYTHING away here... but there are many good seeds for even the DIY crowd. We would love to apply some of our experts towards helping you open a new well. With a name like BIG Innovations, we strive for gushers! Want one?

THE BEST WAY TO DISCOVER A NEW REVENUE STREAM...

...starts at the strategic level. This should involve thorough efforts to:

1. Evaluate & document WHERE you are making money now to establish an objective baseline. It's not sufficient for this to be in someone's head. WRITE IT DOWN, so that ALL stakeholders can see the same baseline and verify that the view is correct... or help clarify it. Until you have ONE clear picture, everybody is working on differing models... whatever each imagines the model to be. Why don't they know? Because they are guessing at something in someone else's head... or seeing it from only their own narrow viewpoint.
2. Develop a clear vision of where your industry is heading to begin to project where things may need to change as the industry evolves. Again, WRITE IT DOWN, so that the vision can be reviewed and verified by others. If you are not sure where your industry is headed, we can help you figure it out... or objectively weigh your best guesses.





3. Thoroughly research the competition to harvest their better ideas. Yes, those talented people hard at work for your competition do have very good ideas too! Competitors bigger than your company likely have MORE brains working on the very same problems & opportunities. More focused brains generally yields more progress.
   
   A strong competitive intelligence program can add their discoveries to your own. BONUS: you don't even have to pay those innovators. To do it right, this needs to be done NOT in internal rah-rah, "we do EVERYTHING better than our competition" mode but as OBJECTIVELY as possible.
   
   In other words, if you struggle to see your competitors as having any good ideas and/or doing anything right, you need someone else to more objectively analyze them... and then bring the best of their innovations to you. Hint: we know an ideal team for this kind of work. 😉
4. FREQUENTLY LISTEN to existing customers to collectively identify what buyers want as a group. By 'listen,' we mean HEAR them... not what you wish they would say or bending the interpretation to better fit your own proposition... but what they are actually saying. It is missing the point to twist their wishes/wants/opinions to match up with how you want to serve it to them. HEAR what they ACTUALLY want from you... even if that means evolving/correcting what had previously seemed to be good assumptions. A lesson in this...
   
   
   Welcome to Café NóSay

   

   How many restaurants do you frequent where THEY decide what you are having for dinner? Wouldn't you be aggravated- perhaps offended- if a restaurant decided FOR you, without giving you ANY say?

   "No, no... there are no menus here. We cook whatever offers us the most profit each day. At Café NóSay, it is about what we want to push much more so than what you want to buy."

   Of course you call the manager over because it can't really be this way. And the manager rattles off a classic...

   "Ahh yes, I understand that this differs from established norms... but our philosophy is simple: we know what you want better than you know yourself."

   In the restaurant business, you- as customer- completely expect a menu full of choices... from which you will pick & choose exactly WHAT you want... and exactly HOW you want it. If Café NóSay wants to force something on you today, do you even bother to let them... or walk out? How likely are you to ever try them again?

   Your customers expect to have a say in what your business serves to them too. Keep trying to make them like whatever your 'chef' has cooked up FOR them and they will eventually walk out on you... to competitors who seem better at catering to their wants & needs. Be too self-centric and perhaps they opt to never try your offerings again too.

   
   
5. Use SWOT analysis to help organize how best to leverage existing talent, resources and capabilities. Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats is business plan 'oldie but a goodie.' Done well- meaning OBJECTIVELY- you can use your own SWOT to capitalize on strengths & opportunities while working on weaknesses & threats. It is an at-a-glance, actionable dashboard to greater successes ahead.
6. Identify a relevant opportunity(s) or hole(s) that your company could fulfill. Many companies desire the so-called "low hanging fruit" but you should also look for the opportunities that require a ladder or three to harvest some richer opportunities that might be shunned by competitors also reaching for only the easy, quick & cheap.
   
   Why? While many competitors pick the low-hanging fruit bare, you can (also) gorge on the bounty just out of that crowd's reach. Yes, it may take a little more work or cost, but those very issues will screen out many other pickers... and that additional fruit tastes just as sweet.



7. Objectively evaluate your marketing & sales model to determine potential adaptations. If it's still running pretty much the same as it was a few years ago, you ARE missing opportunities.
   
   "We've always done it that way" is a poor- sometimes terminal- excuse for not keeping up with an ever-evolving world. Adapt or die.
   
   We always recommend PROACTIVE adaptations instead of waiting until the business Grim Reaper comes knocking. Proactive can keep him at bay. Reactive is dangerously iffy at best.
8. Listen to the brilliance within and not only the executives at the top, by drawing upon your own people to help imagine your next big thing.
   
   Especially listen to those CLOSEST to your customers... even if they are at the lowest tier on your organization chart. By interacting with your customers much more often than executive management, they gain insights far superior to anything you can get from the top tiers... even if those top tiers are pretty good at trying to draw out such intelligence via chain of command.
   
   Second, third, or tenth+ hand is never as good as first-hand: there's too much lost in translation and messenger massaging as it works its way up to you.
   
   Bypass the middlemen... even if they are your best-paid middlemen. They don't know the most direct insights as well as your front-line talent. The further your senior team is removed from the front lines, the less can really be known about what's going on there. You have virtually no chance in seeing lucrative, new opportunities from too far away.
9. Consider how your product or service development model could be evolved to exploit a new market. Sometimes little changes can yield big new product successes.
10. Assemble the above into a cohesive, actionable PLAN explicitly mapping out how to get from here to there. WRITE IT DOWN... because an actionable plan in someone's head is- at best- only well understood by that ONE person.
    
    Your team can't even tell if it's the best plan- or help you evolve it into the best possible plan- if they can't see it. No matter how much you pay them, we are 100% certain that you have no mind-readers on staff. Contrary to certain delusions companies sometimes embrace to cling to a plan-less past, there is NO big upside to flying by the seat of your pants.

COMPLETE OBJECTIVITY IS CRUCIAL TO RECOGNIZING TANGIBLE NEW REVENUE STREAM OPPORTUNITIES. FRESH EYES SEE YOUR BUSINESS DIFFERENTLY

A key descriptor to be associated with ALL of the above is to execute those efforts OBJECTIVELY. Sure, you can do many of these kinds of things internally, but that always yields a subjective outcome. An objective view will cut through internal biases, company spin, etc... while a subjective approach is constantly influenced by internal PR, politics, emotions and so on.

Consider the very common, narrow example of how company spin is regularly reinforcing outright lies to internal staff like "our products are far superior to everyone else's." While this is a great way to fire up your team in company meetings- and you certainly want your salespeople to believe this completely- it often yields a strategic downside.

If the internal staff charged with helping you find your new revenue stream accepts rah-rah spin as fact- or are too afraid to challenge the status quo- they may not even consider any fundamental opportunities related to product… such as quality, value, pricing, promotion, etc.

In a competitive marketplace, a rare few products can be tangibly superior to all other offerings...

If your competitors own good chunks of market share, they must be doing something right… or, more directly, something better than YOUR company to have that share. Because that market share exists, there is real opportunity for you to take it.

Status quo won't even bother to look at it. After all, "OUR products are far superior to everyone else's"... so why "waste" time looking for ways to improve them? If a head-in-the-sand mentality may be in play, your competitors send their enthusiastic THANKS! But let's fix that! There's a place for rah-rah spin AND a place for reality. The latter is at least as important to growing your business.

An objective viewpoint & approach will be distanced from the internal biases, resulting in a more realistic view of all matters related to tapping into a new revenue stream.

In this narrow example, it will see this particular opportunity much more clearly than biased, internal staff. As such, it may reveal huge revenue opportunities by simply evolving your products or by creating new variant products. This is one of the easiest- and cheapest- ways to tap into new revenue streams… a way that is (too) often overlooked because company propaganda and politics are powerful influences on- and even hinderances to- ANY internal team.

Very simply: until a problem or opportunity is clearly and objectively defined, any perceived progress against it is just luck or guessing. If the internal team can't look at the company objectively- and they can't- it is immensely helpful to also work with an external team to fill this strategic need- a core reason WHY companies use consultants.

The Big Innovations team is highly skilled at this kind of assistance. You could engage us to help your team... or have us work independent of any such influences. Either way, we utilize well-proven tactics every step of the way. For example, our collective brilliance model is THE optimal way to deliver big on #3, #4 and #8 in the above list.

THE EXPERT INNOVATION WITHIN: UNLEASHING INTERNAL BRILLIANCE ON NEW REVENUE POSSIBILITIES

When all of the objective concepts are on the table, we can help your internal brains refine observations into actionable tactics. In this phase, we collaboratively think through and work out the details to a long list of questions like:

• How can existing products or services be repackaged or repurposed for a new source of revenue?
• How much more can the Internet impact our revenue?
• How much market share do we have now and how much more can we realistically take?
• How can we realize new revenue from (much of) what we are already doing?
• What specific growth (skills, knowledge, talent, tech, resources) will be necessary to enter a new market?
• How can we test our way into the new market to verify the opportunity before committing much towards it?
• Could our offerings be packaged for the rapidly-growing mobile app market?
• Should we strategically ACQUIRE a business to add to our existing operations?
• Etc. There are many more.

In this capacity, you would be using BI objectivity to frame the possibilities... then tap internal expertise to flesh out the nitty-gritty. This will typically screen out some ideas as too much of a stretch beyond your current core competencies, while focusing in on the lucrative concepts you could actually accomplish.

This focus feeds into a simple step-by-step process towards monetization:

1. developing a solid plan of how to get there.
2. use the plan to manage progress towards opening that new revenue stream(s).
3. Objective milestones verify real progress.
4. Objective testing verifies new market validity.
5. Validity drives scaling up to harvest much greater revenue.
6. Etc.

It only takes ONE new revenue stream to make a year (or two's) numbers. The first action to a big discovery starts with one word: TRY!

Contact us for a FREE CONSULTATION. If you want or need a new revenue stream, we can provide exceptional talent & resources to help you get there.