Are You Growing Today's Business While Also Creating Tomorrow's?

Market penetration involves developing existing accounts, finding new ones, and developing complementary relationships – all related to your current suite of products and services. Market development and product development involve new markets, new applications, new products and services, new channels and new ways of creating value. Diversification, the riskiest strategy, involves simultaneously entering new markets with new products and services.

Most small and midsize companies operate within the market penetration segment of the Ansoff Growth Matrix. They mislead themselves by thinking that this strategy will consistently drive revenue growth to expected levels.

Every product or service eventually moves through a lifecycle - markets mature, competitors catch up, customer expectations change, and margins decline. Companies that remain competitive don't wait until today's market matures to start looking for tomorrow's market. They don’t wait for the existing product lifecycle curve to peak before developing the next curve. They grow today while creating tomorrow.

Companies that focus exclusively on optimizing today's revenue will eventually find themselves defending a shrinking opportunity. The revenue growth process must continually create tomorrow's opportunities while optimizing today's.

The best place to start is designing the marketing and sales processes necessary for a well-executed market penetration strategy. When this strategy is running well, business development leaders can develop a market development strategy and a product development strategy.