Unmet, unaddressed, and unrecognised needs are business opportunities
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:
- unsatisfied – no satisfactory service has been availed
- unaddressed – no solution has yet been sought
- 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:
- small business services
- start-up ventures
- outsourced general counsel for SMEs
- independent probity advice
- human resources law
- human rights law
- estate planning
- elder law.
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?
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Feature article
Tender readability – tips to improve your tender presentation and some tender presentation no-nos
Tender readability remains a problem for some in the 21st century. I still see submission documents that cling to a handful of really old hat tender presentation and formatting techniques. I suspect this is because some of these ‘rules’ are viewed as being more appropriate to a ‘formal’ style of document such as a tender. […]
