So this made me wonder what the total value proposition is of Terminal 5 at Heathrow.  Here’s my customer experience based on my latest trip to Sweden last week, and I’d really like to know if yours is similar or very different from mine at T5 or any other travel hub.

The Wonderful Pod

Directions and parking at T5 business parking was easy.  Once out of the car I then spotted The Pod, a marvellous looking little purple people carrier.  With much childish glee we pressed the buttons and got into our personal transport device and got whisked along the track to the terminal building.  Here’s Helen in the pod.

Little did we know that this was to be the highlight of our entire travel experience.

Security Shambles

So, into the terminal we go, still buoyed by the delight of the pod and, boarding passes in hand, we head straight for security.

Now, I know that Heathrow is the largest passenger hub in the world but having travelled to many countries with very large populations of travellers, why is the security experience at Heathrow always such an undignified shambles?  Shoes on?  Shoes off? The signage doesn’t correspond with what the staff told me to do, so the expectation setting is wrong.  Then loading my bags and laptop into a tray to watch them disappear into the scanner independently of me going through security, then waiting while about 10 people go ahead of me and craning my neck trying to watch my belongings the other side of the security control, makes for a very anxious time as I’m wondering if someone is going to steal my bag or my laptop.

Then one security woman asked me what I was looking at. When I told her I was checking my belongings were still there and hadn’t been stolen, she told me very abruptly that I should have made sure that I went through at the same time as my belongings. I explained that this was impossible because the security staff members are managing the tray flow and the people flow and that these are not linked. I could see the irritation on her face and decided not to pursue this angle as clearly this is not her fault.  It’s down to inadequate process design and staff training or, as I was always taught, proper alignment of people, process and systems.  The whole experience seems to not have any process planning behind it in terms of best way to manage people flows and processes.  The result is a very stressful experience for everyone concerned.

Retail customer experience

In the press release that went out when T5 was opened in 2008 said,

“T5 took 18 years and $8.5 billion to build, is home to 112 shops and restaurants…is revolutionary in terms of its design and the retail experience it offers… brands will jostle for supremacy within a retail and leisure complex that is at the heart of the building’s design… brands were encouraged to provide evidence of innovations in their service or store design concepts that would make traveling from the terminal a unique experience.”

All I can say to this is:

It’s :
Over heated
Over lit
Over noisy
Over smelly – (perfume, air fresheners etc. nothing bodily!)

It was a full-on sensory assault course designed, I can only imagine, with teenagers in mind, not mature adults (I class myself in the latter category).  It made me want to run out screaming and find the refuge of a sensory deprivation chamber.

Interestingly I spoke to a number of the staff and commented on what I thought, and guess what? They agreed.  They said they get too hot, and the constant noise, music and smell gives them a headache by the end of their shift.

All the tills are in front of this video wall, shown above. Can you imagine working in front of the hot, noisy video wall all day?

The gate

At last, the thought of escaping this mayhem and going to the gate was very appealing….until I got close.  It was squashed in a corner between the shops and a corridor. There was a huge advertising hoarding blocking the entrance to it. There weren’t enough seats for even one third of the plane load of people.  The whole experience felt as if I was in a human battery cage waiting to be despatched.  Again there seemed to be no process or people flow design. In a word…awful.

Value = very poor

So this was the result, all in all using our value equation of Value = Benefits – Costs² for the whole experience it was:

Benefits (the good experience) = The pod

Costs (the bad experience) = security + shopping + gate (to the power of 2 at least as the emotional and physiological effects of negative experiences stay with us much longer than those of positive experiences due to the brain’s cortisol receptors outnumbering serotonin receptors by 5: 1)

Not scientific but I think you get my point.

What experience have you had a T5?  Was I being exceptionally bad tempered that day or have you had similar experiences, not just at Heathrow but any travelling experiences?

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We are advocates of discovering and harnessing what constitutes value. And this value has to be real – in other words truly valued by your ‘customers’ – and it has to be real in that you have to be able to deliver it, so it has to be based on true core competencies and real processes.

Here’s an example of some personal honesty that may have gone a little too far. Judge for yourself and let me know what you think.

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The premise is that as sales become more complex, customers get `solutions fatigue’ with more burden being put on them. The book offers an approach, with clear guidelines, on how to alleviate that burden. The research was based on 700 sales people, followed by a global analysis of 6,000 sales professionals involved in large-scale, complex, B2B sales. They defined those who were core performers and those who were high performers. They identified 5 profiles of sales person and the one that stood out way above all the others was The Challenger. A staggering 39% of the high performers were Challengers who:

* offer a unique perspective
* use two-way communication skills
* understand the customer value drivers and can identify economic drivers
* are comfortable discussing money
* can pressure the customer
…in other words, they Teach, Tailor and Assert Control.

The book is packed with great case studies and it offers clear insights with immediate actions to be taken. There is a coaching guide, a hiring guide and whole chapter on extending the Challenger approach beyond the sales function.

From my perspective, once the strategic, organisation-wide value proposition has been created (this has to be done first), this book shows that the best person to implement it in a high-pressure, complex sale is the Challenger.

Available from Amazon and all good book shops.

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In the vanguard of this value experience ‘revolution’ we find the corporate colossus, Tesco. It would seem that Tesco has finally been forced to rethink its self-service checkout strategy and start hiring people again, with CEO Philip Clarke acknowledging that maybe they’d gone too far in cutting people costs.

We at Futurecurve believe passionately that value can only be delivered if the customer says it is. This means that company value propositions can only be created when informed by the customer and, surprise, surprise, retail customers like having a good experience when they are actually shopping – not just being dazzled by wonderful advertising and celebrity promotions. And now hard evidence is backing this up. A study by Wharton Business School in the US has found that every dollar spent on hiring customer-facing staff led to between $4 and $28 in new sales. Another study, from Starcom MediaVest, has found that shoppers engaging with a supermarket brand on social media are twice as likely to shop there. And yet another study has found that because shoppers are increasingly tailoring their choices on the web, they’re expecting to be treated like an individual in-store too; no longer susceptible to traditional, static promotional discounts and offers. They’re wanting to connect and communicate with their choice of brands in a variety of ways which means businesses are going to have to understand customers’ value motivations and how and when they are open to connecting with the brand.

In other words, it’s all about people and relationships, not just static promotional discounts and BOGOFs. Extraordinary, isn’t it? A positive customer value experience leads to increased spending and greater loyalty.

Understanding what the customer value experience truly is (and not just using buzz words like customer-centric), and marketing-with versus marketing-to customers, is shaking up the way we do business and the way we expect to do business. Having a value process is going to be critical to success from now on.

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Dan Pink, bestselling author of A Whole New Mind and Drive has been writing and collecting stories about emotionally intelligent signage from all over the world.  Signage like this that is thoughtful, emotionally intelligent and aids environmental action gets my vote.

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Alinean is the leading developer of value-based online interactive tools – helping their clients drive effectiveness by proving the value of solutions to economic-focused prospects and customers. We are delighted to announce our partnership with Alinean where we represent their interests in EMEA.

For more information and to Register for this free webinar CLICK HERE.

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The UK Association of Bid &Proposal Management Professionals are hosting an evening dedicated to the topic on 22nd March 2012 with Helen Blake from Futurecurve and Keith McMain from Sales Transformation as keynote speakers.

For more information or to to register please click here

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What’s this got to do with value propositions? Everything, and here’s why.

The reason we called our book ‘Creating and Delivering Your Value Proposition’ wasn’t just because we needed a snappy title but because we know that you absolutely must create your value proposition first before you can deliver or implement or communicate it. If you don’t create the suit first (aka value proposition) then you’re just dealing with the Emperor’s New Clothes, ie. making marketing stuff up and expecting people to believe you.  Telling people you’ve got a beautiful new suit/value proposition but really there’s nothing there.  Just because you believe something is real, often from your own internal perspective it doesn’t mean anyone else does.

First of all, you’ve got to decide what kind of material you want, what cut of suit, stitching type, etc or, in value proposition terms, what market you want to focus on (link to blog post). Then you really need a tailor – someone who can give you a third-party truthful perspective…”You’re a size 16 not a size 10”.  Someone who can make the suit, make sure it fits and has got the right material and cut and most importantly, making sure it is right for you and makes you look good…making sure everyone believes you look good in it too.  This is akin to our value experience stage where we get real insights into your customers’ experience of you from guess who…your customers.

Value propositions are not something to be made up from no substance.  They must be created from a mix of what you want to achieve combined with your values and the experiences of your customers.  Only when you’ve created your value proposition can you then think about how you need to communicate it to your different and varied audiences.  If you communicate something you haven’t created then it’ll just be seen for what it is, the Emperor’s New Clothes with no grounding substance, no longevity and no long profit tail.

And no-one wants to walk about the town with small children pointing out our nakedness.

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There isn’t an easy answer but we’ve put together the essential 6 things to help smooth your value proposition journey.

1. Create first, communicate second
We often find that there is confusion between creating your value proposition and then how you take it and communicate it during the selling process or through marketing channels.

In my experience, it’s absolutely critical to do the high-level creation part BEFORE attempting to communicate the value proposition to your customers and potential customers.  Doing it this way around makes the communication part, and therefore the selling part, so much easier. Suddenly we all become clear about the key messages.  They’re obvious, simple, clear and based on reality. One of the biggest problems we come across is good sales professionals doing their best to create value messages in the absence of any wider understanding of where the source of their company value lies.  Suddenly, the sales professional is forced to come up with a value proposition based on the latest opportunity – retrofitting their messages back into the rest of the organisation.  Hard work and almost impossible to achieve – I’ve seen many demoralised sales teams sweating this one.

2. Top down, not bottom up
It’s so much easier for sales people to have a clear, high-level, company-wide, value proposition created, and then they are free to tailor this to specific opportunities, rather than having to make them up from scratch. Also, doing it this way around (i.e. top-down) will reduce your cost of sale as you’ll know which opportunities are worth pursuing and which aren’t.

So the starting point needs to be company-wide, or division, or sector or product group, before translating the messages into major accounts or specific products or sales opportunities.

3. Involve all stakeholders
A value proposition is a promise of value to be delivered and a belief from the customer of the value that will be experienced. And you can’t create this by thinking up some clever words. You need input from many sources including people in your organisation and your customers.

4. Understand customer risk
We use the value equation where Cost must also include the risk taken by the customer in choosing to buy from you and your company.  Benefits are shown squared because the benefits you discover after going through the value proposition creation process must significantly outweigh the costs:

Value = Benefits² – Cost

5. Value is not just rational
During the value proposition creation process, it’s not just the rational dimensions of the client’s organisation that need to be taken into account but also the political and emotional/psychological.  Look at the 3 dimensions of:

• Rational (price, ROI, speed and feeds, features etc.)
• Political (e.g. how is this going to affect the buyer’s job? How will this value proposition be received by their organisation?)
• Emotional/psychological (how does the customer feel about you, your products/services and your company?)

6. Offerings deliver value
You can often achieve a huge surge in value for your customers, with very little outlay, by re-bundling or re-packaging existing offerings.

So, is a value proposition a silver bullet?  No, it isn’t, but it will significantly help with lead generation, conversion rates and overall profitability but only if you put some blood, sweat and tears into the creation process first.  Mine the silver first, hand-carve the bullet and then aim it at a precise target.

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This first Market phase answers the question, “Who is most likely to buy your product/service?”

Don’t be mad, choose your markets well

`Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?‘ said Alice.
`That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.’ said the Cheshire Cat.
`I don’t much care where…‘ said Alice.
`Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,’ said the Cheshire Cat.
`…so long as I get somewhere,’ Alice added as an explanation.
`Oh, you’re sure to do that,’ said the Cheshire Cat, `if you only walk long enough.’
Alice felt that this could not be denied, so she tried another question. `What sort of people live about here?‘
`In that direction,‘ the Cheshire Cat said, waving its right paw round, `lives a Hatter: and in that direction,’ waving the other paw, `lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they’re both mad.’
`But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ Alice remarked.
`Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the Cheshire Cat: `we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.‘
`How do you know I’m mad?‘ said Alice.
`You must be,’ said the Cheshire Cat, `or you wouldn’t have come here.’

Start by defining the specific group of customers to target, focus at this phase is crucial, look to remove sectors or customer target groups rather than add more in. You won’t lose opportunities just because you’ve dropped a few sectors. Focus will help you to hone your value more.

Questions to ask include:
• Where does your organisation figure in the marketplace, in your ‘competitive set’? Is it where you want to be? If not, where would you like to be?
• Which markets or customer types offer the best opportunities for profitable growth?
• Who are the specific group of customers you are targeting? Can you identify different buyer personas?
• What are the customer needs? What are their loves and hates?
• Are there discrete market segments?
• What risks do the customers perceive when choosing you?
• What’s going on in your target market segments, or with your personas? What’s hot? What’s not?

Narrow and deep beats broad and shallow – focus allows you to identify the difference between being totally opportunistic and having a well planned, and therefore more successful approach to creating your value proposition. Deciding that you will only proactively target 5 market segments, as a strategic decision, doesn’t have to stop you refusing the bluebird sales opportunities that just fly in the window from nowhere, in other non-target segments. As the Cheshire Cat says “If you don’t know where you’re going, any path with get you there.”

Understand how to enter those markets
When you’ve decided on your key markets, then start to think about what channels you will use to enter those markets. A cautionary note here is not to be too creative. If you are having success already with a few key clients then focus on how to get more like them, and in similar market sectors and not diversify off into other new markets or into new products.

So in summary:
• Define your markets
• Map your markets
• Understand who the decision makers in your markets are and what they purchase
• Understand why decision makers purchase (how to meet their needs)
• Form market segments that work for you by combining like-minded decision makers
• Create personas based on groups of different buying types

Critical Thinking
In this ‘Market’ stage of the Value Proposition Builder insure your analysis avoids paralysis by analysis. You need to grasp what’s actually going on out there and take a view about you available markets and suitable channels for you.
Once you have identified those areas of the market where you do or can create value for your customers, you must spend time with your typical customers who can articulate what that value actually is, in detail. In the next ‘episode’, we’ll examine precisely that step in the process.

What’s your experience of focusing on a market, a sector, a segment or a persona? Has this been better or worse for you that trying to go after everything that moves?

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