My previous post on Customer Engagement covered the concept of the customer knowing that you are serious about their business and are ready to invest in their future growth. In that regard, an engaged customer knows:
- How your offerings are different than other alternatives and how that is going to help them make money
- That you understand their business challenges
- How you are willing to help them with those challenges and commit to execute with speed
I also described how these tenets are not wired together very well into any kind of system, where you can push the throttle and help create true Customer Engagement. So we built RENDER to put the Value Proposition—the link in the dynamic between customer and supplier—at the core of the above three tenets.
This post is about engaging a customer so that they know how your offerings are different than the competitive alternatives and how that is going to help them make money.
The Challenge: Defining Differentiated Value Propositions
Today's Creative Economy requires successful companies to clearly articulate value propositions that are compelling, rigorous and increasingly personalized. Everyone in the organization should be able to clearly state how your offerings are different than the competitive alternatives and how they deliver value and benefit to customers.
Unfortunately, many organizations still fail to deliver on this premise. A number of organizations struggle simply to define and communicate their value proposition. Others may be able to define, but lack a standard approach, leaving teams with ad hoc and inefficient methods. And fewer still document value propositions that properly position their solutions and offerings against customer needs and challenges in a way that helps sales attract and retain customers.
Historically, value propositions have been documented as part of 'one-time' activities recorded in PowerPoint or glossy brochures, not data that can be managed. In today's rapidly-changing, technology driven world, your value proposition must grow and evolve at an ever increasing pace. So treating your it as a static asset just won't do. Companies must transform the value proposition into a dynamic asset that can keep pace with today's environment
Despite all this, a compelling value proposition is meaningless if it isn't easily accessible by your selling organization. As professionals our expectations are increasingly high that the systems and processes in B2B meet or exceed what the technology and connectedness we experience as consumers. Many companies are still living in an analog world when it comes to value proposition. Sales teams need to have real-time access to your best thinking at all times.
Structure for Documenting and Sharing Value Propositions
Given the importance of accessing the right value proposition at the right time, we built RENDER around our patented method to easily define consistent rigorous value propositions, taking what is typically a vague, convoluted object and providing a logical structure to help transform it into a concrete growth asset for business. It helps everyone in your organization — from marketing to sales to back-office operations — understand how exactly your offerings deliver value and are differentiated relative to the competition. RENDER's Value Proposition module consists of an easy-to-use interface that helps users to build a structured value story that describes a company's offerings or investments on behalf of customers and how that creates specific financial benefits for customers.
While RENDER makes it easy for people to work with value propositions, as a SaaS platform it is designed to transition this important company asset to the digital age. RENDER becomes the source of record for a catalog of digitized value propositions in one easy-to-access platform. And you can quickly make it available in other systems such as data warehouses, business intelligence, or internal reporting dashboards.
More importantly, as a digital asset, value propositions are accessible ubiquitously across the organization via the RENDER platform in one of two ways. First, teams without existing sales platforms can have direct access to value proposition and customer data needed for selling. Alternatively, sales organizations can have that data integrated in the systems they typically use on a daily basis. RENDER can deliver critical value proposition and customer data to CRM, content management, sales enablement and other sales support systems. Seamless integration ensures the right data is available to sales professionals around the globe anytime, anywhere, on any device, to share with customers.
B2B companies need value propositions that are not only compelling and rigorous, but also available to sales professionals around the globe anytime, anywhere, on any device, in order to stay ahead of competition. With RENDER, companies now have a place to store, collaborate, and access value propositions across the organization to win deals and grow margin faster with customers.
Comments