You are doing this now, right?

Chances are you are not doing this now. It’s not the norm, yet buyers and users of your products and services are evolving quickly and demanding more. More utility, more features and benefits, more clarity on why to select you. And more future brand promise – all at an attractive price point.

It’s challenging to do this with internal resources. So often there are different daily priorities and perhaps obvious departmental disconnects that bleed energy. And then there’s Inertia – that quality that keeps things going even when you want to stop. Creating incremental value requires outside help and transformational approaches. This is where we come in.

CEVOH will work with you to improve the value of the products and services offering.  We follow a process – almost a checklist really – to clarify things you can easily do to improve the value of your offering.

CEVOH 15 VALUE DRIVERS

1. We help you to systematically measure the voice of the customer and use it to identify and improve the value drivers. We possess a holistic understanding of your customers’ needs, and the relative priority of those needs, across the entire purchase and use cycle. We don’t recreate research reports. It’s the pearls we are after.

2. We will help you measure value by constructing simplified equations based on customer utility, needs, discriminators and preferences. We call this the Customer Value Index. We will help you quantify value at the micro and macro levels and set goals for improvement.  

3. We will help you create specific initiatives (and a team) designed to build incremental customer value. The team will be handpicked to sweat the details about value. They will have a customer perspective. They will have the power to persuade. They will be relentless to achieve incremental improvements. We measure and trend value metrics and report on these across the organization – so that the team ‘fever’ will impact the organization. We will be on the team.

4. We will suggest specific cross-departmental accountabilities and processes that align on creating customer value. We will recommend specific processes in place to make you easy to sell for and easy to buy from.

5. We help you tier customers based on future value and differences in how customers use your offerings, and to understand the difference between customer and end-user. We will encourage your teams to embrace these differences and needs of buying teams, buying influencers and purchasing decision makers.

6. We will help you understand the critical elements of the customer experience and track operational metrics for each. We may suggest hiring a design firm to work on your product design, UI and UX.

7. We’ve will also encourage you to consider adopting a progressive organizational structure that aligns us to strengthen the value chain. We will recommend, perhaps, that you embrace organizing around customers rather than around products.

8. We will help you embrace technology and automation. We will show you how to use technology to improve the customer experience and value chain.

9. We can make the mystique of brand more easily understood. We can help you to develop a brand with a promise of future performance delivery. We will recommend ways to adjust your brand to meet your company vision and mission. We will suggest innovative ways to get attention for your brand.  

10. We will encourage you to have value measurements and margin metrics for every product or service you offer. We can show you ways to proactively optimize the portfolio – eliminating underperforming products and services.

11. Essential Advice: We will show you how to proactively migrate customers to higher value products and services when those come online. And how to do this by creating a revenue lift event.

12. We will recommend a pricing strategy so you are achieving the maximum customer value while extracting that value into revenue.  We show you how to reward discounts for specific customer behavior such as trial, growth and volume.

13. We will work with your sales teams to add customer value at point of sale. Easy to say, but not so easy to do – we have extensive experience with this. We help everyone in your organization to see each customer touch as an opportunity to build value.

14. We show you best practices to help you deliver products and services as promised. We will work with you to measure fulfilment quality metrics that integrate into the voice of the customer needs.

15. We will encourage you to view customer care functions as a way to create value and not as an expense. We will help you set up an executive appeal process, where customers can get resolution beyond the normal customer care process and executives can learn from unhappy customers.  

Here is the CEVOH Simplified Customer Driven Value Equation:

So doing all 15 of these and doing them consistently is not super easy. And just reading thru 15 of these (admittedly) is somewhat a chore. But what if these could be simplified into 5 key outputs. Chances are you are working on these now, and even organized around these 5 things:

1. Understanding customer value, quantifying this and strategy to create discriminators against competition

2. Building product and services offers to exceed customer needs and pricing these to fit a fair and expected value equation

3. Adding value during the sales function, including consultative independent advice, meeting customers where and how they expect to be interacted with

4. Delivering products and services consistently – as expected

5. Providing flawless service after sales and delivery

And, maybe you are doing pretty well with a couple or three of the 5, and you just need some extra help with the other 2.

We can do that.  But while we are doing that, better do a little digging and look at the 15, right? So, the point here is that providing great and incrementally growing value is kind of like a recipe and while there can be some substitutes, no many respected recipes only have a few ingredients. It takes combinations and all the important bits working together to build the right organization focused on value.

So often, when working on value, we find there are certain enablers in an organization that may be missing and this can make all the difference. Goals can (perhaps) not be quite aligned. Or the ability of the organization to complete transformational initiatives can be a challenge. Certainly the daily work tasks can continue to build and build until there is little time left to work on value. But the biggest reason (we find) to not embrace building great and incrementally growing value is due to historical success. A company that is having a great year will often never stop to thing about 2 years from now. Success can be an intoxicant that keeps clarity at bay. When several years of success occur, there is a belief that this will go on forever. It’s never a popular stance inside to say “but wait – some storms are coming”.

Best to get some outside help so that no one inside has to play the lonely role of weather geek. CEVOH is full of weather geeks and we can help clarify, assess and recommend some easy to implement steps to get incremental value growth.  

This may be worth a look: Eight Steps to Transformational Value Creation (The Value Mantra)

1. Establish a sense of urgency

   1. Examine customer, competitor, market and disruptive technology realities

   2. Establish current baseline metrics for value – all products and services

   3. Identify and discuss potential future opportunities, crises, contingencies and their realistic timelines

   4. Establish aggressive goals based on value metrics

2. Form a powerful coalition and governance team

   1. CEVOH or outside help recommended

   2. Members must have enough power to make transformation happen

   3. The team must work as a team and heavily influence all others

3. Create new Vision, Mission and Values Statements (VMVS using customer value as a guidepost

   1. Stay away from ‘become market leader’ and go for vision statements that have specific impact to customers e.g. ‘become the most trusted’…

   2. Use value statements in the Vision, Mission and Value Statements

4. Communicate the new Vision, Mission and Values Statements

   1. Use every available method, add some fun, involve everyone

   2. Communicate what is at stake if likely to fail

5. Empower others to act on the VMVS

   1. Help them get rid of structures, systems and obstacles

   2. Encourage and reward risk taking. Encourage quick failures

6. Create short-term wins

   1. Outline some initiatives specifically to clarify and reinforce progress

   2. Encourage and reward (again) for the short-term performance

7. Leverage and expand initiatives

   1. Use short-term wins to extend to larger more complex issues

   2. Revisit value metrics from step 1, to identify most prominent opportunities

   3. Prioritize to achieve low hanging fruit and also the more difficult and highest reward opportunities

8. Institutionalize

   1. Reference goals set forth in Step One. Transfer value initiatives to standing middle managers for continued goal achievement

   2. Ensure value mantra leadership development opportunities using succession planning, rewards and recognition

As it can easily be confused to mean low price or some other simplified approach, here is another way to holistically look at value. In the latest contemporary terms, value can be defined as:

Working thru all these terms can be a challenge, but we can help. Most of these terms are shared by many different departments within an organization. Or if you are a small firm, you may never seem to get to all of them. Some firms may argue with the need to establish a brand, as this term can sometimes be equated to expensive ad agency work – but as social media has shown us, it’s possible to use guerilla tactics to scrap together a powerful brand. And when dissecting the social media brands you like – you will likely find each of these terms being cared for.