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Business is harder and more competitive than ever. No matter your industry or how established you are, you can no longer coast on past success. The modern marketplace demands the ability to react and adapt — which means periodically reviewing your service offering to ensure it continues to meet your customers’ needs.

My company, CorpNet, is a perfect example. We started as an online legal document filing service focused on business formation and compliance, but quickly found ourselves in a crowded market up against established players. We were acquiring customers, but gaining real traction was hard — that is, until the pandemic forced us to step back and reevaluate. We discovered a new direction we could pivot into: Our competitors weren’t offering tax and payroll registration services, a major pain point for small and mid-sized businesses. Once we expanded our service offering, we grew 200% in just 18 months.

Follow these proven steps to evaluate your service offering and determine whether it’s time to pivot or expand.

Evaluating your current offering

Many companies make the critical mistake of assuming that once they’ve achieved product-market fit, they’ll continue to thrive. But market erosion is usually subtle — it doesn’t happen in a month or even a year. It can creep up slowly, then suddenly, often going unnoticed until the competition has already gained the upper hand.

When you evaluate your service offering, you should always start with what is working and what isn’t. Look at the hard facts and data before making any large-scale decisions. It’s important not to let unfounded fear or anecdotal evidence prevent you from making smart business decisions. 

The first indication that you might need to make a change is that your sales are either down or not growing at your projected rate. You might think this is an obvious sign, but figuring out the root cause can be tricky. It might not be a service offering problem at all: You might not have the right salespeople, your customer service might be poor or your brand might be weak. So how do you figure out the core problem? You ask your prospective and current customers. Almost all enterprise companies do some sort of customer research, whether it’s in the form of a survey, focus group or email blasts. If you are indeed considering changing your service offering, you need to get serious about it. I would suggest you sit down and buy your top customers a meal and really find out what their pain points are. Really dig deep, ask questions and don’t let your assumptions guide you. 

Pay attention to market signals

It’s always important to keep a pulse on the market. No business operates in a vacuum; markets shift, customers’ needs evolve, competitors adapt and technology can change the rules, sometimes overnight. 

One key aspect is to watch for new players entering your industry. They may seem small and insignificant at first, but they can often reveal where the market is heading. A startup with a fresh approach, a new pricing model or a more convenient customer experience can expose a weakness that you might have overlooked. Blockbuster failed to see the significance of Netflix and it ended up causing them to go bankrupt. 

At the same time, pay attention to what the major players are doing. Are they expanding into new markets? Changing their messaging? Acquiring other companies? By watching them carefully, you can often guess their thought process and what they deem important. 

The biggest signal, of course, is technology. As I write this, technology is reshaping almost every single industry. Size used to be a major advantage, but technology is closing the gap, making smaller more nimble companies more competitive. There might be a new service offering that might not have even existed a couple of years ago. Or perhaps your current service offering is becoming obsolete due to technological advances. This is why it pays to stay up to date on technology trends.

Look for the gap in services

A critical question to ask is: What are your customers’ pain points that haven’t been addressed? When we were primarily offering legal document filing services, we saw that our customers were also struggling with payroll and were falling behind on corporate compliance. Yet very few other companies were offering an easy, cost-effective way to meet these problems. That was the gap we saw and that was the gap we moved into. 

The gap may not always be evident, but it starts by asking the right questions and being curious about what people are struggling with. Growth opportunities often reveal themselves through frustrations you are seeing in your industry, so be on the lookout for them. Customers may not always describe it as a business opportunity, but they will mention what is confusing, expensive, time-consuming or stressful.

Lastly, the best opportunities are often found in overlooked spaces. When you can solve a real problem in a way that is easier, more cost-effective and more customer-friendly than the existing options, you are not just adding another service. You are creating value where the market has left people underserved.

Validate before you fully commit

When you see an opportunity, it’s unwise to go all in without first validating your offering. You should create a pilot program using only a segment of your customers, measure the demand and refine the service before rolling it out to your entire customer base. This allows you to test the idea without risking the entire business. You can see how customers respond, what they value most, where they get confused and whether the service solves the problem as clearly as you expected.

Final thoughts

Markets are changing rapidly. This isn’t news to anyone. However, the companies that stay relevant are the ones that change with them. While you should not chase every new trend or react to every disruption, you should periodically review your service offering to determine whether it’s still a good fit for the marketplace. The key is to make informed, measured and strategic decisions that will pay off in the long term.