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How to Develop Business Opportunities
Strategies for finding new prospects in difficult times
By Holger Hofmann
AMC Hofmann
Existing customers offer short- and mid-term potential for services, spare parts, updates and other products. Probably there are also additional plants, divisions or daughter companies you haven´t contacted yet.
Addressing new industries and regions with existing products can offer short- and mid-term potential as well. The easiest way to find these opportunities is to look for your customer´s competitors and your competitor´s customers, especially when they are active in other industries.
Opportunities with new products and new customers might be the highest risk, the biggest challenge and the longest run. Many aspects have to be considered and evaluated: market potential, customers and their budgets, competitors, investments and technical risks, time to market and how your organization can handle this future business.
HOW TO DEVELOP NEW OPPORTUNITIES
Implementing SBD by defining projects helps to stay on top of the process and keep track and direction. Project orientated work has proven valuable for many processes in automation. Any project should start with a clear definition, specifying all typical project related points, such as goal(s), timeline, milestones, budget. To make sure that there will be a positive result, more than one potential market can be selected for evaluation. To be efficient, the research can be divided into phases to get a first overview on a market fast. Especially in the automation business, offering so many opportunities, it is recommended to take a look at several markets and choose the best options for further detailed investigation. This helps to save resources or to improve output.
The steps recommended for an SBD project can be summarized as
• Project definition
• Internal market intelligence
• Research (external market intelligence)
• Evaluation
• Strategy definition
STEP BY STEP TO SUCCESS
Project definition: Let´s assume our core competencies are solutions based on robots and smart sensors. The goal of our project is to enter into a new industry or a new application, to get first projects within the first 12 months and a significant market share within three years. Necessary R&D should be minimal to meet “time to market” goals. The project ends with the definition of the market strategy.
