How to keep focus on customer value in your strategy?
Research indicates that thriving companies – able to sustain business success over longer periods of time – excel at delivering what their target customers (really) value, through a set of operating activities, effectively and efficiently. This keen eye for value creation not only provides the basis for today’s financial health, it also provides a platform for evolving, improving and shifting this value, every day, in small and big ways.
The risk in building the strategy for tomorrow, is that we start from ‘optimising today’s activities and assets’, or ‘extrapolating yesterday’s success into tomorrow’s target’. We focus on ‘retention’, ‘protection’ and ‘preservation’, and we lose sight of what customers really value and how that shifts: what was of great value yesterday, is standard today.
We slide into commodity hell, the price-competition trap, or eventually the cost reduction and restructuring game. One way streets we can only escape from, when going back to where it all starts/started: delivering ever again great value to customers.
See also ELP Network-insight: How to stay out of ‘Hell’?
Creating better, more and different value for more customers, every day, starts with building awareness, and understanding what your value proposition ‘does’ for clients, what they are willing to pay for, really. In today’s world, this requires to go beyond the technical or functional features. It is the difference between ‘selling drills’, ‘offering holes’ or actually creating ‘the capacity of hanging up a beautiful picture that will make your client’s day’ (cartoon). Or, moving from ‘pushing products’ to ‘becoming a guide and enabler for solving my target clients’ issues and problems. It calls on your ability to design, develop and deliver an offer, to the implicit – sometimes unconscious – requirements, pain or latent needs of your target audience in this changing world.
If you do not position yourself – making laser-sharp on which relevant value attributes you stand out – you will be positioned (on social media, in peer-reviews and elsewhere). Any strategy should start from this explicit articulation of how you will create and grow value to customers, and translates it into the delivery channels, core operational processes, the assets and the resources required to be world class and efficient at it.
See also ELP Network-insight: How do you do more of what you do right?