A signed contract signals the start of the final step in the Value Lifecycle: Deliver and Measure Value. This step not only strengthens your relationship with your customer, but enhances your capacity to develop new offerings and improve existing ones. Here are the top three objectives in making it work.
Objective 1:
Make Sure the Customer Actually Gets the Value You Promised
What does it mean to actually deliver value? For example, let’s say you buy a gym membership to try to lose weight. If you never actually go to the gym and work out, you won’t get the value you were promised when you purchased the membership. As the gym, you need to ensure that your members show up and actually use the facilities or else they won’t receive value (and won’t retain their membership).
For B2B companies, delivering value might mean a great customer-service team, implementation experts that can help get customers up and running on your software, or partnerships with professional-services consultants or other vendors.
Objective 2:
Measure value and performance
Again, if you buy a gym membership and actually start working out there, you’d measure the value of your investment by certain metrics. If your goal was to lose weight, then you would use a scale to measure your level of success.
Measuring the impact of value is not always easy, because many variables can impact the same metric. For example, if you’re working out at the gym and also changing your diet, it might be difficult to measure exactly how much weight loss could be attributed to your workouts as opposed to your new eating regimen.
In our business, we help our B2B clients increase revenue, so that’s usually our value metric. However, many of our clients also do a number of other things to increase revenue — anything from hiring more salespeople to launching marketing campaigns could also be responsible for an uptick in revenue in addition to the tools they’ve purchased from us.
Despite the fact that measuring value is difficult, it’s still a worthwhile exercise. For one thing, it’s part of your due diligence to make sure you have a happy customer. For another, when you perform value and performance audits among a variety of customers, you might start to see certain patterns emerge that could contribute to your understanding of the value you provide.
Objective 3:
Identify where you could deliver more value to continually improve your offering
Part of the purpose of measuring value is to figure out where you can expand on the existing value that you’ve delivered. A proper feedback loop can tell your product development team where and how to improve your offering.
Again, a gym member who successfully loses weight could have gotten better results by participating in spinning classes than by using weight equipment. Thus you might want to consider adding more spinning classes so you can maximize value for more customers.
As a B2B company, you need to evaluate the value that customers are receiving against your product offering and continually improve your offering to deliver more value.
[Image via Flickr / Anne]
