(Time to read this article is about 90 seconds)
Ultimately, customer ownership is all about creating, delivering and communicating compelling value. Value that ‘grabs’ your target customers, clearly differentiates you from your competitors, makes you ‘famous’ and grows your bottom line. Customers demand value and every business promises it. But there’s a huge lack of clarity about to what ‘value’ really is.
Let’s keep it simple; there are only 3 kinds of Value…functional, emotional and financial Value. That’s it!
- We deliver Functional Value when we…
– sell products and services that actually work for our target customers.
– are open or available when they need us.
– provide the information, coaching and encouragement that they need to wisely choose and effectively use what we sell.
– create policies & processes that make us easy, efficient and consistent to do business with.
– do what we say we will…when we said we’d do it.
…that’s Functional Value!
- Next is Emotional Value. Most business people struggle with this one. They think it’s some airy-fairy thing that can’t be defined…and they’re dead wrong!
Quite simply, we deliver Emotional Value when our customers feel better about themselves and the world every time they do business with us, and every time they use what they bought from us. That’s it! If we’re not delivering Emotional Value, we’re not really “connecting” with our customers. People will always remember how you made them feel.
- Financial Value is #3. Most businesses put it as #1, but it has to be #3, because it’s a function of the previous two.
We deliver financial value when our customers believe that they paid a fair and competitive price for all of the functional and emotional value that they got from us. If we don’t deliver functional and emotional value, there can be no Financial Value.
So, the question is, are you delivering the compelling combination of functional, emotional and financial value required to make you the ‘wise choice’ for your target customers? If not, what needs fixing, doing or not doing to make that happen? Specifically, what action will be taken, by whom, by when, at what cost, measured how and rewarded how to deliver more functional, emotional and financial value in 2019?
