Jun 25 2013
Customers offer clues to new revenue opportunities
How do you get what you need when it doesn’t exist? If you have the expertise, ingenuity and resources, you build it. I know, easier said than done. Here’s another question: how do you help your customers get what they need when it doesn’t exist? And how do you figure out what “it” is in the first place?
Hopefully you know your customers well enough to figure out where the gaps are in order to fill them. If not, start asking questions.
Between customers and suppliers lies a whole lot of opportunity to fill these gaps if you know where to look, what to look for and to ask the right questions. This is just the process that EBV Elektronik took. EBV, an Avnet company, is a semiconductor distributor in the EMEA region. By “reading between the lines,” EBV has helps to discover how customer feedback and market position offer clues to new revenue opportunities.
By uncovering clues, EBV was able to work with customers to form feasible ideas for custom products that would support those customers’ needs. Then, EBV depended on suppliers to create the custom products needed by these customers. That’s oversimplifying it because this bold step strengthened relationships with suppliers by way of opening new opportunities and markets to them. As an added bonus, customers who questioned whether their unique need could be filled now had their answers in the form of specialized products—not to mention a competitive advantage!
In a newly published Avnet Insights article, Reading Between the Lines to Find New Business Ventures, Slobodan Puljarevic, president and CEO of EBV, goes in depth about the relationship between their suppliers and customers, how EVB did their research to discover new profitable opportunities, and how they subsequently created a product solution where suppliers serve customers in a new, innovative way. Their “EBVchips venture” took a collective demand and turned it into a portion of business that would interest suppliers and meet customers’ unique needs. His article gives the play by play of listening for clues in conversations and questions asked, building trust to take in proprietary information and taking calculated steps outside the box to build success in a new venture.
The long and short of it? When it comes right down to finding new revenue streams, the solutions and services your customers need and what your suppliers can offer are just a conversation away. And it’s up to the savvy business person (you) to link the two.
