Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Your Value To Your Customer

Most companies have a value proposition. They have some product(s) or service(s) that they believe will benefit their customers. While this value proposition is a great thing to be able to articulate, it isn’t what your real value to your customer is or should be. The customer, on the other hand, wants to believe that they will see value from those products or services. But is that what they really want? My experience is that the value that they see comes more from how you do business with them rather than the actual product or service you’re providing.

The key is to go beyond a value proposition statement and do what you can to help the customer solve their problems. So how do you do that? To begin with, your value begins by getting to know your customer. Get to know them deeply. Know what they do, why they do it, and how they do it. Know what their strategic plan is; learn what their problems are. Many of the problems you can help solve are based in them getting from where they are to achieving their goals. Knowing those goals and why they are important is key here, and will differentiate you from the competition that doesn’t try to understand them.

To do this you have be in there talking with them. Find out what they are trying to do and why. Be an Excellent Listener. Try to get to know their problems before they become a business opportunity. Help shape the way they want the solution to look. For this to happen it will require an investment of your time so that you can understand what they are trying to solve.

The truth is that what customers really want are partners that can help them solve problems. They have plenty of vendors trying to sell them something. So what this really means is that you must move beyond the transactional sale of a product or service and become a business partner and a trusted agent. If you are able to do that then you will increase Your Value To Your Customer.



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Copyright © 2015 The Cobalt Group, LLC. All rights reserved.


Thursday, January 8, 2015

The Hot Wash

Almost every evolution that occurred in my Navy career was hot washed. That is a military term for reviewing the lessons learned. We debriefed every flight, every exercise, and almost every evolution. We looked at what we did right and what we did wrong. It never made us perfect at what we were doing but when those lessons learned were incorporated into the next event, it made for fewer and fewer mistakes. This especially helped in the planning phases.

Since joining the corporate world I have not seen that done very often. In my first job as a sales rep I went to my boss after the first win to see if she wanted a debrief. She asked me if we won and I said yes. Then she asked what there was to debrief. Being new to the corporate world, I guessed that winning meant not needing to review things. I was used to hot washing everything so I figured it was how things were done. After my first loss I went back with the same thing and the response was about the same with the exception of her asking what I would do differently the next time. That was the extent of the hot wash.

In successive jobs I have had much the same experience. Most of these were not small companies but big multi-billion dollar corporations. Even the company that had a process for what I call a hot wash did not enforce it, nor did it ever really even ask for one. I offered to do one and while they did agree to it, I would have thought that they would have been more interested to know why we lost a $30M+ opportunity. So I put the presentation together and gave it. They were grateful and said all the right things, but nothing really changed.

So why should you do a hot wash? That could be a rhetorical question, but worth addressing nonetheless. All of our lives we should learn from our mistakes. We all make them and nothing is perfect. But, if we don’t take a look at what we are doing right and what we are doing wrong we will set ourselves up to possibly repeating the same mistakes again. And in business, those mistakes make us look bad, at best, and can cost a lot of money, at the worst.

Hot washes shouldn’t be finger pointing exercises either. Establish a formal process to review every bid you make. Look at what you did right. Reinforce those actions. Give praise to those responsible for it. Next, look at what you did wrong. Don’t adopt the zero defect mentality over these errors. Figure out what you need to do to keep from doing it again the next time. No phase of any business venture goes perfectly. Some mistakes may not have had any impact this time, but it doesn’t mean that they may not hurt you the next time.

Take the time to establish a process for reviewing your business successes and losses. Be objective and be honest in your critiques. Leave your egos out of it too. That is the only way to get better. And in the long run, doing a hot wash will pay big dividends.

Happy New Year to you all and our wish is for much success for you in 2015!




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Copyright © 2015 The Cobalt Group, LLC. All rights reserved.