Unmet, unaddressed, and unrecognised needs are business opportunities

By Linda Julian

Clients have needs:  some recognised, others unrecognised.  Among the needs they recognise, some clients may have unmet needs  -  needs for which they have not yet found a professional service solution.  Unmet needs present business development opportunities for an expert professional.

By implication, unmet needs can be classed as:

• those which are unsatisfied  -  no satisfactory service has been availed
• those which are unaddressed  -  no solution has yet been sought
• those which are unrecognised  -  they don’t yet know they have a need.

Unsatisfied needs are great business opportunities since the client understands what they need and is likely to be open to a well-conceived solution.

Unaddressed needs yield the myriad benefits of greenfield opportunities for an imaginative and persuasive professional.

Unrecognised needs only become worthwhile opportunities for professionals prepared to do the groundwork to create need recognition with an action-oriented client.

In the legal services sphere, our research reveals several clusters of unmet needs.  These include:

• intellectual property
• commercial dispute resolution, without recourse to litigation
• information technology services
• communication and entertainment technology services
• compliance awareness and training for front-line client personnel
• streamlining multi-handled processes involving internal and external resources and expertise
• workforce risk reduction and legal support for best practice in human resources
• financial risk reduction
• small business structuring and risk management
• family financial arrangements, estate planning, and intergenerational wealth transfer
• part-time outsourced general counsel.

Rather than battling for market share among clients whose widely understood needs are already being satisfied by others  -  and possibly with a long queue of aspirants jockeying to competitively displace the incumbent  -  why not create business development leverage by pursuing unsatisfied, unmet, or even unrecognised needs ?