Keeping Your Products and Services Relevant in a Highly Competitive Landscape

Your company already has fantastic products, excellent customer retention, and outstanding customer service, enabling you to surpass your sales objectives. Perhaps you are wondering what is the next course of action.

What should you do next?

Keeping the status quo won't maintain a competitive edge for long, regardless of your current success. Someone once said, "Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over by the train if you just sit there."

OK, so you know you need to make the next move, but the question remains: What should it be?

Constructing the foundation was the hardest part, and you’ve already accomplished it. There is no sense in reinventing the wheel to foster further growth based on the achievements you've already accomplished. Sustaining client engagement doesn't necessitate a continuous stream of new product or service launches. Develop what you already have: Incorporating new features into your current services or products is an excellent approach to retaining your valuable customers, creating positive word-of-mouth referrals and deterring them from exploring alternatives among your competitors. When you empower clients to personalize products or services according to their specific requirements, it is more likely they will keep selecting your brand over all the others.

Additionally, it aids in capturing the interest of potential new clients who seek added value and convenience, and unlocks the potential of growing your revenue per customer.

How about some examples?

Imagine you operate a bookkeeping firm. While managing receivables, payables, reconciliations, and tax reporting is a great foundation, incorporating payroll processing or document management services can further strengthen your relationship with existing clients and attract new ones, broadening your customer base.

Or maybe you own a lawncare company. Your expertise is in maintaining pristine lawns, but you can offer additional services such as landscape design, gutter cleaning, and snow removal. This one-stop-shopping approach will strengthen your bond with existing clients, making your business the primary destination for all their property maintenance requirements.

Another illustration is accounting software providers. Integrating new technologies into your software can attract tech-savvy customers and even position your software among the leaders. Adding features like generating automatic reminders to send past-due notices or enabling your users to send mail or email directly from your software distinguishes you from your competitors.

Effortlessly printing and mailing invoices and other business communications from your desktop is possible through DocuSend’s cloud-based mailroom, whose history serves as a good example of how constantly improving a product or service brings significant benefits: When we initially launched in 2015, our capabilities were limited to printing only black-and-white documents, and mailing addresses had to be perfectly aligned to fit within the window envelope. While it sufficed for simple invoices and was enough for our customers at the time, the question arose: Was it truly enough to meet their evolving needs and expectations?

We responded to our users’ ongoing needs.

Similar to all services, we found it necessary to incorporate new features to stay in step with our customers' ever-increasing needs. After all, that’s who we rely on. Listening to our customers helps position our products and services for continuous growth in the right direction. So, in response to customer feedback, we've added color printing, two-sided printing, Certified Mail, the ability to add a flyer or insert to each envelope in a batch, mail tracking, and even NCOA-update service.

All these we have accomplished. The great thing is, not only did these additions improve the efficiency of our users' business mailing, they also led to an increase in DocuSend’s revenue spent per customer. We firmly believe that our comprehensive list of services is among the best offered by any print-to-mail provider available. Companies can now have their own mailroom in the cloud and effortlessly mail any 8 ½ x 11 PDF document created by their software, no matter where the mailing address location is on the document. This includes legal documents, government forms, and tax documents.

Additionally, we broadened our enterprise solution services by creating an API that makes the integration process as easy as possible. Our API is an ideal solution for billing, invoicing, or CRM software providers looking for a recurring revenue stream. It provides an intuitive, time-saving, and cost-effective print-to-mail service for their users that gives them an advantage over their competition. We not only handle the mail distribution of our direct customers, but we also fulfill the mail distribution requirements of our software-developer partners.

Embrace the same principle.

How can developing new features unlock revenue-boosting opportunities? Here are five ways:

1.  Customer Acquisition – Attract new customers by unlocking an enhanced product.
• Potential customers often compare features and pricing among competitors, and you can win by providing a comprehensive suite of features that add value to your product or service.
2. Customer Retention– Give current clients fewer reasons to consider the competitors, as they find everything they need within your offerings and have all the features they need to make operating their businesses smoother.
3. Upsell – Always be looking for new options you can offer. By choosing the optional features you've introduced, customers might utilize your products and services for more purposes than they initially were going to.
• It’s amazing that many of our customers initially used DocuSend only to get their invoices printed and into the USPS mail, but have now expanded its usage to distributing their past-due notices, renewal notices, welcome letters, marketing materials, and more. One of the great benefits of the mailroom is that there are no minimum volume requirements, so you can just upload as many documents as you have and still get bulk mail prices. Our users take advantage of color printing as well as adding generic flyers as very cost-effective marketing tools that help their companies grow. What makes it even better is the fact that we also provide NCOA-update services at no additional charge, helping to keep the accuracy of our clients’ mailing lists and decreasing the chances of undelivered mail.
4. Remarket– Reach out to former customers to introduce them to the new features. It’s an excellent way to get them to give you another look.
• Adding a cool new feature is a great opportunity to get in touch with past customers and win them back. What if they are currently not satisfied with their provider or that provider lacks the new features you offer? Effective messaging can prompt them to start considering your company again. Sometimes the right timing is everything!
5.  New Markets– Use each new feature to explore business prospects in untapped markets, expanding your reach and potential customer base.
• Increasing the variety of offerings helps make your product more appealing to markets that may not have previously considered your service, thereby empowering your sales team to venture into diverse vertical markets and seize new opportunities.

No matter what niche you’re in, by evolving your products and services, you consistently leave competitors struggling to keep up, establishing your business as one of the best. Stay proactive, embrace constant progress, and keep your customers satisfied. Satisfied customers equal a healthy bottom line.

The exchange of knowledge contributes to the collective success of the business community, so don’t hesitate to share how you keep your customers happy and your business growing in the comments section below. You can provide valuable help to other small and medium-sized businesses.