Insights — Channel Creation & New Revenue Streams — 3 min read
Who Else Could Buy My Existing Service?
Finding new buyers for an existing service requires you to stop thinking about who you sell to now, and start thinking about the problem you actually solve for them.
In short
To find who else could buy your existing service, you must abstract your offer from its current industry context and define it by the problem it solves or the outcome it delivers. If you solve a 'compliance and data integrity' problem for lawyers, you can solve it for any regulated sector. If you solve a 'last-mile urgency' problem for fashion, you can solve it for medical supplies. The new buyer is the one who shares the pain, regardless of whether they share the job title of your current clients.
Most service businesses define themselves by the industry they serve. A firm might describe itself as 'IT for Law Firms' or 'Logistics for Fashion Brands'. While this focus is excellent for efficiency and authority within that niche, it often blinds the leadership to the fact that the underlying capability — the thing they are actually doing — has value in entirely different rooms.
Asking 'who else could buy this?' is the first step in creating a new customer segment channel. It is not about changing what you do; it is about finding new people who have the same problem, but who live in a different industry, operate at a different scale, or have a different commercial structure.
The trap of industry-specific thinking
Industry verticalisation is a powerful sales tool, but a poor strategic lens. When you spend years speaking the language of a single sector, you begin to believe that your service is only relevant to that sector. You adopt their terminology, their buying cycles, and their specific anxieties. The risk is that you ignore the vast majority of the potential market because they don't use the same words as your current customers.
To break this trap, you need to strip away the industry-specific 'wrapper' of your service. If you provide security services to high-end retail, you aren't just 'retail security'. You are 'loss prevention for high-value physical assets'. Once you rephrase it like that, museums, galleries, and private estates suddenly become visible as potential customers.
Identifying the core capability
The search for new segments starts with a capability audit. You must look past the output and look at the engine. What are you actually good at? Is it speed? Is it accuracy? Is it managing complex supply chains? Is it handling large volumes of sensitive data? Is it providing highly trained personnel in difficult environments?
| Current Segment | Core Capability | Potential New Segment |
|---|---|---|
| Legal IT Support | High-uptime, high-security data management | Financial services or medical clinics |
| Events Catering | Mass-scale, time-critical logistics | Corporate site canteens or disaster relief |
| HVAC Maintenance | Scheduled technical work in large buildings | Data centres or pharmaceutical labs |
| Commercial Cleaning | Standardised quality at scale | Education or aged care facilities |
Matching the problem, not the industry
Instead of looking for similar companies, look for similar problems. A company that sells specialist recruitment services to the oil and gas industry might find that the 'problem' they solve isn't just 'finding oil workers'. It is 'managing high-risk, high-rotation personnel in remote locations'. That same problem exists in offshore wind, mining, and large-scale infrastructure projects.
The risks of segment expansion
While the capability may transfer, the credibility might not. A new segment will often ask, 'Who else in our industry do you work with?' If the answer is 'no one, but we work with a lot of people in this other industry,' you have a trust gap to bridge. You must also consider whether the new segment has different payment terms, different regulatory requirements, or a different sales cycle that your business isn't currently equipped to handle.
Evans Sales Consultancy uses the Opportunity Engine to help businesses look beyond their current horizons. By identifying the underlying triggers that lead to a purchase, we can find segments that have been overlooked simply because they weren't on the list.
Could your business support another route to revenue?
Evans Channel Creation identifies, validates and builds additional revenue channels from capabilities a business already has — B2B to D2C, D2C to B2B, product to service, recurring revenue or partners — and says so plainly when a channel should not be built. Programme from £1,995 + VAT per month over six months.
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