That was the situation I encountered at ASUS. The existing business had developed well, but continued growth could not come indefinitely from pushing the same products into the same buying pattern. Looking only at the current portfolio would have made the market appear more constrained than it really was. The broader opportunity became visible by paying attention to what customers were already purchasing elsewhere and asking whether some of that spend sat close enough to our existing strengths to be served credibly.
That shift in perspective changes the growth question quite substantially. Instead of asking how much more can be sold from the current portfolio, the organisation starts examining the wider buying environment around the customer. The issue becomes whether there are adjacent needs connected to the same buyer, the same use case, the same procurement process or the same commercial relationship. In many cases, the customer is already revealing the next growth opportunity through existing behaviour.
Companies often miss this because their internal structures create boundaries that customers do not necessarily recognise. Product teams, business units and vendor relationships tend to organise the company around categories, while customers are usually trying to solve broader operational or commercial problems. One supplier may define itself narrowly around a product class even though the buyer sees that product as only one part of a larger requirement. The result is that attractive adjacency can remain hidden in plain sight.
There is an important difference between expanding because a new category looks attractive and expanding because existing customers already demonstrate demand. The first route begins with internal ambition and then looks for a market. The second begins with observed buying behaviour and works backwards into the organisation. That does not remove risk, but it gives the business a much stronger starting point because demand is not hypothetical.
Existing customer access can also reduce the cost of learning. The organisation already understands something about the buyer, the decision process and the commercial context, which makes it easier to test whether an adjacent offer genuinely fits. Conversations can move beyond abstract market research because the company can ask why customers currently buy elsewhere, what they value in those suppliers and what would have to be true for them to consolidate more of that spend. Those answers are often more useful than internal debates about which categories appear attractive on paper.
The ASUS experience was valuable precisely because the opportunity emerged from that kind of market observation rather than from a portfolio exercise detached from customers. The question was not simply which additional products could be added. It was where the existing relationship provided a credible route into a wider share of customer spend. That distinction kept the growth logic anchored in reality rather than in product enthusiasm.
Adjacency becomes especially relevant when a core category begins to mature. Management can easily interpret slower growth as evidence that the market is becoming exhausted, but the constraint may sit in the definition of the offer rather than in the customer relationship itself. The current product line may have reached a natural ceiling while the customer still has related needs that the organisation is well placed to address. Treating those two things as the same problem can lead to unnecessary pressure on the existing category.
That pressure often shows up as more promotions, more sales activity or increasingly aggressive pricing. Those tactics may produce incremental gains, but they do not change the structural ceiling of the offer. A broader view of the customer can reveal whether the next phase of growth depends on deeper penetration of the existing category or on increasing relevance across adjacent areas. The commercial response should be different in each case.
The strongest adjacency opportunities usually share some form of continuity with what the company already does well. The same customer may use the new product in the same environment, rely on the same technical standards or involve the same decision-makers. The organisation may already possess distribution access, market knowledge or credibility that transfers into the adjacent space. Those links matter because they lower some of the friction that comes with entering a completely unfamiliar market.
Trust, however, does not transfer automatically. A customer may be willing to discuss an adjacent need because the relationship already exists, but that does not mean the supplier is automatically credible in the new category. The buying criteria may be different, competitors may be stronger and the operational demands may be unfamiliar. Customer proximity is therefore an advantage in discovery, not a guarantee of success.
Leadership has to be disciplined about the difference between a natural extension and opportunistic portfolio expansion. The fact that customers buy something elsewhere is not enough on its own to justify entering the category. The organisation still needs to understand whether it can create meaningful value, whether the economics are attractive and whether the new offer strengthens the broader relationship. Without those conditions, adjacency can become another source of complexity rather than a source of growth.
This becomes particularly important in businesses that already carry broad portfolios. Adding one more product line can look harmless, but each additional category brings new positioning, enablement, operational requirements and competing priorities. If the adjacency does not have a clear role in the customer relationship, Sales ends up with more choice but less clarity. Portfolio expansion then increases internal complexity faster than it increases customer value.
The better opportunities tend to make the relationship easier for the customer as well as more valuable for the supplier. They may reduce the number of vendors the customer needs to manage, create a more integrated solution or bring together products that already belong naturally in the same buying journey. The commercial logic is stronger when the organisation can explain why the broader offer improves the customer's situation, rather than simply why it increases the supplier's revenue.
Looking at what customers buy elsewhere also creates a useful form of market intelligence. Repeated patterns across accounts can reveal that traditional category boundaries are changing or that customers increasingly expect suppliers to solve a broader problem. Individual purchasing decisions can therefore become early signals of a larger market shift. A company that pays attention to those signals can sometimes move before the opportunity is obvious in conventional market data.
The implication for account management is significant. A good account plan should not only document what the customer currently buys and which opportunities are already in the pipeline. It should also build a view of where relevant spend still sits outside the relationship and why. That information can expose growth potential, competitive vulnerability and gaps in the current proposition at the same time.
There is also a useful discipline in asking why the customer has not already bought the adjacent category from you. The answer may point to missing capability, weak credibility, inadequate positioning or simply the fact that nobody has ever made the connection. Each explanation leads to a different decision. The value lies in understanding the barrier before assuming that adjacency equals opportunity.
For senior leaders, this perspective can be more useful than another internal review of the existing portfolio. It reconnects growth strategy with customer behaviour and forces the organisation to test whether its own category definitions still reflect how the market buys. The exercise is particularly valuable when growth has started to flatten despite reasonable execution, because it helps distinguish between a weak market and a narrow view of the opportunity.
The ASUS case showed me that a ceiling in one part of the portfolio does not automatically mean the customer relationship has reached its ceiling as well. Growth became easier to see once the question moved beyond how much more of the current offer could be sold. The more revealing question was what the same customers were still buying from someone else and whether there was a credible reason that should remain the case.
That is often where the next opportunity starts to become visible.
