What do the following have in common…?

March 23, 2009 by Cindy Barnes

Customer experience, voice of the customer, market selection, client selection, client benefits, ROI measurement, no price erosion, not discounting, reducing risk of purchase, case studies, substitutes, alternatives, Total Cost of Ownership, benefits realisation, product or service management, solution development…

Answer: They all link and work together to create your value proposition.

The chances are that you have probably looked at each one of these things in isolation, but again, let’s apply some strategy here (see posting titled: Strategy and the Fat Smoker). Let’s plan a bit further forward, outside the immediate horizon of, “s**t, I’ve got to do something”. If you pull all of these areas together and use a framework and process such as Futurecurve’s Value Proposition Builder™, you can create a value proposition that stops price erosion and aligns your value with what your client needs and will pay for.

To stay in business and not only survive but thrive during this recession, you only have one sensible option: focus and hone your value. If clients complain that you are too expensive, then you are simply not demonstrating your superior value to them. You can, of course, keep offering the same product or service and cut your prices, if you want to go down the discounting route. But doing this means you are losing value during the sale – value that you won’t be able to regain in the future. So don’t do it! Building and developing your value proposition means proving to clients your superior value in bottom line terms, not making unsupported marketing claims about your value.

Our new book “Creating and Delivering your Value Proposition: Managing Customer Experience for Profit” (published by Kogan Page and available from September 2009), answers many of the ‘so what’ questions. “OK, I’ve done my customer satisfaction surveys, I’ve got my benefits worked out, I’ve even got my ROI or TCO calculated, but how do I pull all of that together to demonstrate superior value and make money?” Our new book shows you how.

Immediate Actions

1. To get a flavour: download our new Value Propositions white paper.

2. Attend our 1 day workshop: learn how to stop price erosion now and sell on value Link to workshop details

Written by Cindy Barnes

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Tags: client benefit, customer experience, not discounting, price erosion, pricing, Solutions, value proposition