How to Pivot into a New Business Segment

In recent months, my firm pivoted from a wholesale services and white label software provider into a fast-growing retail cloud-based SaaS software provider. Along the way, we attracted some of the largest law firms and corporations in the country as clients, and it’s already clear that this transition has been a success.

CloudNine began life as a wholesaler of legal discovery services, providing the backend processing and support to several litigation support and consulting firms around the country. But there has been considerable consolidation in the industry over the last 12-18 months, and this created fewer opportunities to service the smaller, regional litigation support firms we have long served.

In addition, just as is the case across numerous industries, we faced increasing commoditization of our industry’s pricing models. It was clear we needed to make a change. In our case, that meant shifting our focus from the reseller market to selling software directly to end users and making the internal adjustments required to do so.

To pivot, we focused on three stages:

• Leverage our strengths
• Identify a competitive advantage
• Experiment without fear

Let’s go through each stage...

Leverage your strengths

We pivoted around our strength of operational efficiencies. As a wholesale provider, we learned to create automated processes that are far more efficient than those found across the retail market. It’s in our culture to do more with less, and now we pass those efficiencies on to the retail market, in the form of cost savings.

To accomplish this, we bundled our self-service software with hands-on services into a managed service offering to help corporations and law firms effectively manage and reduce costs through outsourcing. 

Identify a competitive advantage

Our advantage is simplicity.

We refashioned two elements: how we offer services to our clients, and how our software delivers the end product to our clients.

To simplify our clients’ work lives, we revitalized our software platform. We made it easier for them to process and review their documents. Along the way, we hit upon two areas of previously untapped client angst: their inability to do more themselves without the need for costly assistance, and the need to have a processing and review platform that is as intuitive as iTunes or Google.

By leveraging cloud computing, we developed a model that gives our clients access to a completely automated “self-service” ediscovery option. For us, the side benefit of leveraging the cloud is lower user acquisition and support costs.

Experiment without fear

To accomplish this pivot, we tried changing many different elements of our business.

On the marketing front, we have changed how we position ourselves and how we interact on social media. While continuing to support our existing channel business, we retooled our sales staff to focus more on direct sales, shortening sales cycles and enhancing our brand recognition with the direct clients that use our software and services. To make sure our new website and our software products were intuitive and easy to use, we involved both customers and employees in usability testing. 

On the sales process front, we stopped using a dedicated appointment setter, but we kept some of our proven practices such as holding the vast majority of initial meetings online rather than in person.

We introduced no-risk free trials for 30 days, to allow customers to test our software before making a commitment to buy.

We established metrics to track all our changes, to figure out quickly what was working and what was not.

Change is the only constant… of all the changes we made, arguably the one that will serve us best in the years to come is the ability to change. We’ve proven that our team has the ability to recognize shifting market conditions, create a plan, and execute it.

No matter your industry, your business or profession will take you through numerous twists and turns in the years ahead. The sooner you learn to pivot in a responsible manner, the more likely you are to succeed.

Brad Jenkins is President and CEO of CloudNine Discovery, an eDiscovery software company.