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Can SMEs expect to grow in these conditions? Is business development possible during a global downturn? The business experts at PricewaterhouseCoopers think so:
I think all of us, as we've gone through the last 12 or 18 months or so, really realize that the depth of relationship is key to actually doing business. So one of the obvious areas is essentially, how can you sell more of what you do to your existing customers? So you don't necessarily need to look out there for new customers, and capturing new customer bases and new accounts. But are you maximizing what you do with your existing customers? Both in terms of the breadth of services or products that you're selling them, but also thinking about pricing and bundling, some of the stuff that you can actually deliver, too.
I think a lot of it is corporates -- one of the big focuses, I suppose, for corporates over the last 12 months has been cost reduction. And corporates often are thinking about, how can we do what we do now more effectively, more efficiently.
And in some respects, outsourcing is that classic thing. It's always been there over the last 10, 15 years or so. But when you're actually trying to supply into that corporate, to what extent can you actually supply some of the products, some of the services, that maybe they're doing internally at the moment. They're doing on a much more lower cost basis. So effectively, almost going up the food chain, or extending the vertical range of services that you can supply into that.
And there are some classic things around some of the internet companies, in terms of where they've almost been from a more sort of web design perspective, going through to actually helping produce some of the content for those, and actually managing, actively managing those websites. Right the way through to actually running some of the fulfilment mechanisms and systems for companies as well. Because actually, it's easier for them to do for 50, 100 customers. And they've got the consultancy resource in house, which they can actually apply to, ultimately, their initial customers' requirements.
So I think there's a big piece about, can you take some of the burden and areas where you customers aren't experts, and bring back into in-house, and actually sell that back to them.
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