The topic for our newsletter and blogs this month is “Taking advantage of opportunities.” It’s up to company leadership to keep careful watch of potential opportunities for the company and its products and services.
In our last article, we talked about the fact that if these opportunities are going to be of benefit, the company team must be trained or cross-trained to take advantage of them.
Another aspect, though, is adding to or revising the overall structure of sales, marketing and delivery.
The Fundamental Line
As we’ve been discussing, when new opportunities arise, the wrong thing to do is to jump over to a new opportunity at the expense of your current business. Your current business is what made the company successful to begin with, and as any new opportunity is absorbed, that foundational business must be maintained.
Let’s take a real estate company as an example. This particular operation has always dealt with residential home purchases and sales, and has built up a faithful clientele of buyers and sellers who have always benefitted from buying or selling through this company. That portion of the business must continue unabated, no matter what else is taken on.
Introducing the Change
Let’s say the owner of the company, keeping a sharp eye out for new opportunities, comes across an office building that the real estate operation could represent for sale. The company has never dealt in commercial real estate, but the owner sees an opening for that part of the market, as commercial real estate has become quite active in that particular city.
Let’s begin with sales. The wrong thing to do would be to take the company’s best salespeople and add commercial buying and selling to their workload. It’s a different type of real estate, and it would interfere with and possibly slow down their successful residential sales and purchases.
The right move would be to hire an expert in commercial real estate sales. As business in that area begins to take off, new salespeople can be added in, preferably ones who already have experience in commercial real estate, so a minimum of training is required.
Next would come marketing, which should probably only be done once the company can deliver what is advertised. So, once the new commercial sales department is up and running, marketing can then begin promoting and advertising to the right prospects for this market.
Depending on the workload, it might be possible to cross-train the company’s marketing personnel into commercial real estate, and residential and commercial real estate marketing can be operated in tandem. However, just as with sales, the marketing person or personnel should be admonished to maintain successful measures that have always been taken with the foundational residential market.
Then there is delivery. When it comes to real estate, delivery is normally done as a cooperative effort between the real estate agent and outside organizations: banks for loans, escrow companies, and inspectors. Since the company would be taking on specialized agents for the commercial arm of the company, they would already be trained in dealing with particular lenders, escrow companies and inspectors in the commercial sector. These would not, of course, interfere with the residential side as they would be completely separate.
The Expanded Company
Any new opportunity will require different sales, marketing and delivery operations. Make sure these are added logically and without interfering with successful current operations.
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