by Cindy Barnes
I would say that the Value Proposition Builder™ confirmed our understanding of who our client is and how we deliver our messaging; it has helped us to really hone that. This was one of the things we were struggling with, because we have developed very advanced technology and when you are working so close to it, delivering an appropriate and targeted message so that people really understand what you’re doing – and trying to get the language appropriate for the customer – really challenged me. I am now crisper in my messaging and I have more confidence now when I’m reaching out to a new professor.
Results
We found that the process provided a language and structure to use when presenting our business. When building a new business one is very close to it and it can be hard to step back and put key elements into a framework that others, potential clients and/or investors, can understand in a succinct and clear manner.
The success that we have achieved is with the actual language in our presentations and in our discussions with potential clients. Framing the context of our product to our market is more clear and succinct. As a start-up, our market messaging is an ongoing process of improvement and enhancement.
Learning
One of our key learnings using the Value Pyramid™ has been how to price the product or service. Our product is very, very sophisticated and it should be priced in a certain way, but because we are at the early stages of our business development we are pricing it transactionally, so we know there is a slight disconnect between our value and price. Right now we are dealing with individual professors because this is how we are growing our business and we price at a per-student payment; I am actually very comfortable with that model but I do know that eventually the buyer will shift to the university (and not the individual professor) and they will buy/pay for the service. We have had a breakthrough at one of the universities in Canada where one of the professors received funding from the dean of the college and we are now getting a lump sum from them. We will see how that evolves as we anticipate two pricing models, two options in our proposals. One thing that we really learnt from the course and are now aware of is that our positioning, the sophistication of our product and its value must be aligned.
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CASE STUDY Abcon
Context
Abcon Industrial Products Ltd is an engineering manufacturing company specializing in abrasives and it is the only Irish manufacturer of abrasive belts and quick-change discs. Serving a wide range of industries, including automotive, stainless steel fabricators, aircraft maintenance, oil and gas exploration and mining and aggregate producers, the product range spans cutting, sanding, painting and finishing products, which are supplied to domestic and international markets. The company has achieved sales growth continuously over the last five years.
Director Barry Smith told us:
The Value Proposition Builder™ process forced us to make a deep-dive analysis and helped us to formulate and then articulate the Abcon value in a way that could be communicated to and from all levels within the company. The value proposition approach was the basis of our strategic growth plan and our growth targets are being achieved year on year since its implementation.
Challenge
Sales and Marketing Director, Lyn Sharkey continued:
We have a really wide range of products and when we carried out the Value Pyramid™ exercise and looked at what our core products are, it definitely helped us to focus and we did a lot of work around that. The ongoing challenge is to maintain the focus while carrying out basic everyday functions. You need to be conscious that it is something that you need to do continuously, not just on a one-off basis, but transform it into a behaviour that you are living with every day, even when things get busy, and obviously it is not the most urgent thing on your list!
Action
Instead of spending time trying to compose a sales message that fit the company as a whole, we realized that actually we have different customer segments, and the sales proposition is different for each of those, so I think that was definitely learning for us.
Results
We used the Value Proposition Builder™ as the basis for developing our strategic growth plan, but I think it has been even more useful than that. I believe that it can actually help you during decision-making processes. If you are considering a new product, for example, or making decisions regarding the direction your growth might take, you know that you are maintaining your core values if you go back to the value proposition work and check if your decision is in line with that. That alignment – to have that framework and to be able to go back to and refer to it – is great because things move on so quickly and you get pulled in all sorts of directions. Our nature as a business is not to let opportunities go by, but maybe we shouldn’t take every opportunity that comes along either, we need to have some base to go back to, to decide if that opportunity is for us or not.
Learning
Every company needs some guidance and help on ‘How do we get to the core of what we do?’ Your core value is likely to be common across your business, even if your range is diverse. We were originally thinking about our sales tag lines, but I think that the Value Proposition Builder™ approach has helped enable us really to understand what is of value for our customers and has given us structure and a framework that we can use to understand what our value is and how it can help us.
Everyone should consider how to apply it to the day-to-day business because it can help you with your decision making. The learning we gained from that, having done the work, is that it can help you to make your business decisions more clearly.
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CASE STUDY Geoscience Ireland
Context
Geoscience Ireland is a membership organization representing a network of companies delivering design, consultancy and contracting services through their geological expertise. Members work in a range of extractive and infrastructure industries, including water services, minerals exploration and mining, environmental and geotechnical engineering and infrastructure development. With clients in over 50 countries, the network is supported by Irish government bodies: the Geological Survey Ireland and Enterprise Ireland.
Over a four-year period the network has grown to more than 28 members, who collaborate with each other and with related academic and research institutions, to win and deliver significant international geoscience projects.
Sean Finlay, Director, and Andrew Gaynor, Business Development Executive, told us:
Our growing members are all in the geoscience sector; we have skills ranging from civil engineers to environmental consultants, so there are probably three or four different groupings. At the moment we are made up of largely SMEs, the largest of which would be about 250 people. In addition to having consultants we also have contractors. Consultants and contractors operate in the same sectors but do business differently.
Challenge
We are not a legal entity because we are a government-supported programme so our role is to assist members to collaborate, identify and submit proposals for geoscience project and contracts. As part of our service to them we examine a number of tendering portals every week to identify and circulate opportunities. We try to matchmake members, encouraging them to pursue appropriate tender opportunities.
Action
When we first adopted the Value Proposition Builder™ process I think we had five members; now we have 28. The process helped us with our vision, our value proposition and the physical outputs of that. It is a thought-provoking process that has provided direction for us and it has also been useful for ongoing engagement with stakeholders.
We agreed on our value proposition and have refined it on two occasions, as we have repeated the Value Proposition Builder™ process. We find that having this conversation with the members at a workshop is a great way to get them talking and collaborating and interacting with one another. We discuss with each other the vision and outlook for the next
six or twelve months in order to check that it loosely aligns with the new value proposition we have. It is a useful benchmark for the future.
Results
Not being a private company we don’t have sales and cost-reduction targets or anything like that; our metrics are around how the companies are doing, how many members we have, how many net new jobs they create. What we are interested in is job creation and economic growth. Our members are interested in developing themselves as companies and winning more contracts – that is the value-add we are looking to provide. We get great feedback from them – so that is a metric in itself.
Learning
Our learning advances through the willingness to keep looking at our value proposition and to challenge it, and to keep asking one another the relevant questions and to come to it with an open mind, to try to widen the consultee field, get as many network members as possible involved in the process. The underlying message is there, members share that and are working together towards the long-term vision – and the fact that most of the members were involved in the value proposition consultation process gives us stakeholder buy-in. It actually does improve communication and collaboration between people; it is a great tool in that regard.
Future
We are at a bit of a crossroads in that we are likely to try to attract the larger companies to become members. Typically there will be three prongs to a business cluster: you will have tier-one multinationals, you will have SMEs and you will have a very strong research and development – an innovation element as well. We have good strong links to academic research and with SMEs but we don’t have the first part, the larger indigenous consultants and contractors – but that is our ambition.
To achieve this I think we will need to augment our value proposition strategy because the larger companies will probably take the view that as they are large, why would they bother joining. What’s in it for them?
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CASE STUDY Biocel
Context
Biocel Ltd is an industrial chemicals company, manufacturing and supplying high-quality, specialist chemical formulations to a variety of markets, including food and drink, laundry and water treatment in both private and public sectors. The company was not realizing its potential as fast as the senior management team would like.
Technical Sales Manager Dr Karl McCarthy told us:
We are an industrial market company and, from experience with our buyers, it is very much a case of, ‘Well show me that it does what it says on the tin!’ It is about performance, targeted performance.
What made a fundamental difference to our value proposition journey was to realize that if we are to export to either large national or multinational companies, we will only be successful in a foreign market if we can deliver on something that no one else could. We would have to identify a very high value product or a very high value service that we could deliver on, and using the Value Pyramid™ was very insightful and helped us to realize that. We needed more clarity on that, we should have realized that earlier on – it seems obvious, but it was very insightful, so we put a lot of focus and energy into trying to identify those elements. It’s clarity you need and I suppose the clarity comes with the data, but in this day and age there is so much data, there are so many experts – to get that crystallization really helped us to define the route ahead.
Challenge
We want to get to a situation where we can design and deliver product. We are good at the service aspect of it but that’s very difficult to export. In our industry, here in Ireland, you do have to send a person out, as that personal level of service is expected by customers and then you gain their trust and can partner with them: to generate trust and generate business – it is very hands-on.
Action
We put a focus on R&D and reimagined our company as a bespoke industrial performance chemical company. Our clients are primarily in the food and beverage industry. They have particular problems and they come to us for help and advice. We spend a lot of time designing targeted solutions, bespoke products. We realize that while that is very good on the ground, in a national sense, if we are to identify an exportable product we would have to do some fundamental R&D and design a product using our particular skill set that is exportable, marketable and scalable. Our customers expect that personal bespoke service, so the question is how do we blend a product and consultancy service?
I’m going out to Asia this weekend doing that very job; one of our large customers contacted us via their Irish headquarters, and I spoke to their technical guy out there and he said, ‘Look, we have problems here, can you come out and help us?’ I’m going to spend a week helping and advising them, so there is that consultancy aspect. We’ve got a consulting service, so it is really taking that Value Pyramid™ and looking at the ‘co-created’ element, and then all our products will trickle down from that.
Results
We were on a client site the other day where we did some very quick calculations and made some very simple adjustments that could save them a six-figure sum per year. So it is that kind of stuff; we said, ‘If you do this, this and this, you will save so much.’ Having that knowledge is absolutely what we are about and it plays directly into improving performance. It’s great that we have identified the core of what our value is. I always tell people that my job description is turning ideas into invoices!
Learnings
Our experience has been that once you have identified the route to market, you have to go and do it. From experience you can get distracted from the core task of identifying and meeting customer needs. The Value Pyramid™ has really helped me with that. You have got to be confident about what you are going for but don’t get bogged down in the process.
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ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Our core beliefs
We are led by an unshakeable belief: that if we understand our rational, emotional and social interactions in business better, we know our companies, ourselves, our employees, our customers and our suppliers better. This builds stronger relationships and better performance.
We believe that business is a force for good and that our approach can help business address the most important challenges of our time.
Cindy Barnes
As the founder and Chief Innovation Officer of Futurecurve, Cindy’s passion for genuine customer-centricity in business is transforming the operations and perspective of major companies around the world.
Beginning her career in engineering, she transitioned to running large-scale unionized factories for Smiths Industries. Later, leading R&D for part of Panavision, she developed a cutting-edge technical product range (still their most profitable to date). Cindy led service development, sales and marketing for Capgemini, where she initiated their first service offering and established a business unit that generated £100m in sales during its first year.
Cindy holds an MBA and has qualifications in engineering, physics, operations management and psychology. Her studies in psychology inform the work of Futurecurve, and she is a member of the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy and the British Psychological Society.
She is co-author of the best-selling business book Creating and Delivering Your Value Proposition.
Helen Blake
During her 25-year career as an experienced sales and marketing professional, Helen held senior positions in prominent businesses around the world, including Accenture, KPMG and Capgemini. In these roles, Helen’s passionate advocacy for including the customer as a central participant in business identity has been pivotal in catalysing growth, efficiency and success.
For the last 10 years, Helen has been the Chief Executive of Futurecurve, the leading value proposition and customer-centricity consultancy, where she demonstrates the power and profitability of integrity in business. Helen’s success in implementing growth strategies for Fortune 500 companies, start-ups, governmental organizations and not-for-profits continues to validate the b
enefits of integrity in all aspects of operation.
She speaks extensively on the subject of value propositions and is co-author of the business best-seller Creating and Delivering Your Value Proposition.
In addition to being a leading business professional, Helen is trained in organizational psychology and is a member of the International Transactional Analysis Association. She also holds various marketing qualifications, is an alumna of Stanford GSB, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
Tamara Howard
Tamara is the co-founder of Verve Consulting, providing strategic business development expertise to technology and life science sectors. She earned her AB at Harvard, a PhD from Sackler School of Biomedical Sciences, Tufts University, and is a trustee and director of the Harvard Club of the UK.
During her 35 years of experience in multinational sales and marketing positions at Bethesda Research Labs, IBM, PA Consulting, Digital, and as a divisional director for Capgemini, Tamara developed and implemented highly effective methods to help international teams deliver on business goals.
Tamara is the author of Who’s Paying for Lunch? – A practical manual for maximizing sales in small and medium enterprises, Putting the Soul Back into Business – A roadmap of social change, and 100+ Top Tips for Effective Sales Management.