Pivoting into white space
A leading software provider to national and regional estate agents in the UK discovers new ways to compete.
A leading software provider was experiencing a gradual but persistent decline in growth and erosion of margin with the emergence of new competition diminishing product differentiation, and market consolidation. Competing in the same way for the same customers with the same products was no longer sustainable when market growth started to slow. Management needed to compete in a different way and so turned to Focus Solutions for assistance.
Our approach was to explore the company’s strategic degree of freedom (pivot options), review historic and future market growth drivers, establish the company’s core capabilities and how these manifest into meaningful and valued points of customer differentiation. This was supplemented with internal knowledge-holder interviews and workshops, customer and market research and a competitor gap analysis.
The solution was to stop chasing growth with large estate agent chains; Instead pivoting to focus on smaller independents, peripheral market participants and estate agents specialising in commercial property; developing an enhanced proposition that included technical and commercial training, modularised pricing for core and peripheral product features and a new DIY product; develop complementarity revenue streams derived from new data-driven analysis products – a single feature of an original product becoming the entire solution for a new proposition.
A key enabler was strategic speed (reduced time to create and deliver new value to customers) which leveraged a core competence in software development and customer intimacy.
Revenue increased by 15% and the new data analysis product achieved 60%+ margin and secured notable early subscribers.
