There are many good reasons to diversify and less not to.
When I hear the word diversification, I think finance, portfolio, spreading money across a variety of investment opportunities to make, well, more money. If diversification works for money, why not make it work for something like the office imaging industry? Spread your offerings across a variety of solutions and services to, well, make more money.
The office imaging industry talks about itself in its own language. The digital printing industry, as in high-speed laser or inkjet, also has its very own language. At least, that’s what I thought until I stumbled upon a couple of articles about secure printing.
A quick look in the dictionary confirms that diversification is an increase in the variety or diversity of something. Unfortunately, this Merriam-Webster explanation doesn’t include a dimension like breadth or depth—the dimensions needed for our simplified contemplations of diversification.
Getting Started
When starting the diversification discussion with your team, there are two ways to go about it:
1) Go broader, add more but different boxes: printers, MFPs, copiers, coffee makers, chairs, tables, filing cabinets, dishwashers, etc.
2) Go deeper, add solutions and services: document management, security management, workflow management, device services, network services, office services, etc.
Before you make any such decision, think about your overall strategic business goals:
1) Let’s keep a low profile and not invest a lot of time and money, as we only want to keep the business going for as long as it keeps going.
2) Let’s make this business future-proof, invest in education, build strategic partnerships, and stay relevant for as long as possible.
Lastly, take a look at your customer base and prospects. Who are they, what challenges are they facing, how can you become their long-lasting technology partner? In other words, their customer journey and your diversification strategy should inspire each other.
An Ongoing Journey
Diversification can be like a jungle, like an ocean, with no end in sight, no bottom to reach, and the sky obscured by too many leaves and branches. It is understandable that some businesses feel overwhelmed and question the return on investment of diversifying. In particular, when they are not planning or willing to consider selling their business or are already excited about a long-anticipated retirement.
But what if you are open to selling or merging, or are nowhere near retirement? And how about feeling highly responsible for your team, their families, and their futures? Would you still surrender? Of course, you wouldn’t. You would work hard to protect and increase your business value and work on your portfolio diversification.
Technology & Culture
Diversification means transformation through and through. That encompasses what you sell, how you sell, how your team interacts with your customers, how you listen, how you see, how you suggest what is required, how you implement anything you sell, and how you service what you sold.
Review your hardware and software portfolio, compare it against actual demand, and consider strategic partnerships to address hot solutions and services topics that are outside your field of expertise. For the “back-office,” consider upgrading your sales strategy and supporting software tools. Any tool should include personalized account management, forecasting, reviewing, analytics, and of course, a dashboard offering clear visualization of all customer-centric activities to better review and plan sales activities, team resources, support and services, supplies, and more.
But above all, upskill yourself and your team, and learn about new solutions, new strategies, new methodologies, and new ways of doing better business.
You may also want to take a closer look at your OEM partners and software vendors. They all offer education programs to broaden your horizons.
Food for Thought
Let me share an anecdote for your amusement, this time from the U.K. Hopefully, this experience will stimulate your thoughts on how you can do better (actually, I’m sure you are already doing better).
A representative of a software vendor paid a visit to an SMB-sized distributor to educate them about the business benefits of using their managed print services solutions. The company owner, somewhere in his mid-70s, politely showed them the door after a few minutes, telling them that his manual pen and paper system for assessments to collect information, meter reads, and more worked just fine. The owner added that neither they nor their customers needed any of this modern software stuff, that neither network nor security was a topic of interest, and that all was in jolly good shape. The small team surrounding the patriarch seemed equally complacent because their jobs are safe for now.
I hope you value your future more than this company does.
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