Who should read this?
Q: Do you always know exactly how to balance conflicting demands from different areas of your business from external and internal customers?
Q: Does your organization have a structured and systematic way to make decisions to improve the business?
Q: Do you have a predictive and repeatable decision making process that has zero built-in subjective bias?
Q: Does your organization identify root cause of problems and never only attack symptoms just to have the problem come back again?
Q: Does your organization always make decisions about a problem and not to later realize that it was the wrong problem to solve and/or or not a problem at all?
If your answer to any of the above questions is “No”, this write-up will help you streamline your decision-making and problem-solving processes, making them more impactful.
So often we seek input and answers through a formal or informal survey process. When you plan a vacation, do you first think by destination - "Is it Hawaii, Costa Rica or Paris" or do you think "Do I want to be in the sun, see exotic grounds or shop till I drop?" Even if you were to think by destination, what is it about those destinations that rank higher in your current value/need system to allow you to pick them?
Then how come so many surveys out there asks us how we like their predefined solutions: "would you pay more to shrink class size or not pay to endure a lift in class size ceiling" for example? Why don't they ask "Why do you put your children in this school in the first place and rank the importance and current satisfaction in general from options in the marketplace regarding those values/needs?" Can you imagine what opportunities that would unlock for them if they get those answers?
If there is one thing you can change to get your business unstuck, next time someone tells you to do a survey, ask them whether their surveys are value based or reaction based. Do they help you identify opportunity and not just validate certain solutions? Value-driven planning, facilitation and coaching methods (VDP) survey clients’ emotive importance. It helps you know what clients want and put you in a predictive and proactive seat for business growth. Below are examples of how the big boys use VDP to identify the opportunities and balance the voices of all their internal and external customers with the result of uncovering and realizing huge business growth opportunities.
Case studies:
1. Johnson and Johnson. A hand hygiene gel product was sitting on the shelf at ASP, a J&J Company. They believed that the product had potential in the commercial healthcare hand hygiene market but were unsure. They thought they needed to reformulate the product which would have cost them multi-million dollars but found that through value-driven and opportunistic planning that their gel product needed no immediate re-formulation but rather better dispensing.
2. Motorola. Motorola’s Walkie Talkie division thought they were in the emergency response business which shrank. Before selling the business, they did a value-driven planning process just to find out that they were in the short range 2-way-communications business. Instead of selling the business, the rolled out “Talk Abouts” in the consumer market for recreational use was the immediate and direct result.
VDP for small business. By now I hope you understand the power of VDP as a business growth tool that big companies have been keeping away from you. For the first time and after four years of hard work, we are able to offer a small-business-centric VDP to help small business owners get more results from strategic planning. You will be able to divide your business improvement opportunities into four separate quadrants: the Blue Ocean, the Red Sea, the Deep Sea and the Dead Sea (see below for definition), and be able to prioritize objectively and predictably targeted company actions in all departments to realize those improvement opportunities.
Definitions:
Customers defined - External. Every business owner understands that the key to successful strategic planning is through understanding the customer. We all think we know who external customers are but did you realize that surveying current customers and prospects or targeted customers with an unbiased, value-based process could uncover different opportunities?
Customers defined - Internal. Do you realize you have internal customers? These are stakeholders, influencers and decision makers involved in the business. Strategically, you probably rely on your advisory board. Financially, you might rely on your CFO, your CPA, your banker. In sales and marketing, you might rely on your CMO, your sales manager, your sales people, your customer service representatives and even the front desk. These are all groups of customers. What they all have to say affect priorities of your business.
Values versus reaction-based, opportunity versus solution-based upstream strategic planning. Traditionally customer surveys are created in an attempt to measure what the customer wants. However the result is a measurement of customer reaction to a product or service, not a measurement of needs of fundamental “Value”. These “Opinion and Reaction” surveys can only statistically identify historical dissatisfactions. They do not define Value-Based areas for future company, product or service improvements.
Values. Surveying and measuring “Value” without regards to company, product or service, according to the disciplined “Voice of the Customer” scientific techniques, truly results in un-biased and statistically relevant data for defining future opportunity landscapes. In addition, “Values” are timeless and non-confrontational. Upstream Strategic Planning. Solution based logic finds the solution first and then does the validation. In order to be predictive, opportunity based logic dictates that we validate first and then have visibility to predict the success of a solution. The first focus is “What ideas will succeed and when?” with the goal of growing revenues and profits through current and new offerings. The second focus is “What does the customer truly value?” with the goal of communicating and delivering products and services more successfully.
Satisfaction. Mapping Customers’ Emotive States to Find The Holy Grail. Value-Based Opportunity Mapping is one of the many features. The maps plot Value Based survey data along two axes, Importance and Satisfaction. The graph is divided into four quadrants of emotive state. The red ocean, the dead sea, the deep sea and the blue ocean.
Red Ocean. It reveals high value and high satisfaction. The opportunities to improve are generally stressful and competitive. You need to be the cheapest and/or most efficient.
Dead Sea. It reveals low value and high satisfaction. If you find your business to be in this quadrant, you need to reinvent yourself, close the doors or sell your customer list.
Deep Sea. It reveals low value and low satisfaction. The opportunities need research and incubation and success is only attained through market timing, communication and convergence.
Blue Ocean. It reveals high value and low satisfaction. This is the best opportunity for highly profitable business success.
For more information about VDP for small business, call us at 949-488-3283.
Pandora Pang is an expert business growth strategist in finding breakthrough business strategies and breakdown in business processes, coaching business owners of small and medium sized businesses and their teams in implementing disciplined steps in business growth.
Founder and Managing Director of AllBusinessAdvisors, LLC and President of Outside the Box Strategic Solutions, LLC, certified value-driven planning practitioner by Doodlebug/GoHPO.
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