It does not matter whether one is managing just a single division or an entire company, if they don’t understand the group’s VFP, sooner or later, they will fail. In about 50 % of my consulting projects, I found that even the founder of the company did not have a clear understanding of the product the client was paying him for. If you’re an expert skier, are knowledgeable in the subject, and have been selling ski gear for more than 10 years, then your understanding of what is valuable may differ significantly from the viewpoint of the majority of customers in your store. This is because most of your buyers are beginners who are just taking their first steps. Beginners are the ones who tend to buy most of the equipment and gear, not those who have been skiing for years. Experienced skiers already have their “tried and true” gear that they keep throughout the seasons.
Finding out what holds value for your customers is simple through the use of surveys. A customer survey asks them what is valuable, important and what is missing for them in your product. This survey is not for promotion purposes, but its results are necessary to understand the client’s point of view. When conducting the survey, ask about the product’s shortcomings, because shortcomings and values are two sides of the same coin. If the responses say that they do not like slow service, that means that fast service is valuable. If they say that pricing isn’t clear and that annoys them, then a simple pricing system would be valuable. Think of The Dollar Store or The Dollar Tree – they can be found in any city because their VFP is in demand and have their own clientele.
It is not always easy to objectively look at the results of these surveys. It took me a couple of years to agree with the survey results from our own clients. When I took my first steps in consulting as a business lecturer and owner of a training company, we were conducting great seminars where we taught management tools to business owners and managers. The seminars were attended by thousands of people every year. We had great reviews where they talked about how they wanted to change something in the way their business was organized or how much they liked the ideas we taught them.
But when I analyzed statistical data, it turned out that the average client attended two to four seminars and then stopped attending. Some customers had even booked one or more corporate seminars, but after some time they stopped working with us. Those great reviews they initially gave us after the seminars did not allow us to see the actual situation. Naturally, we waited until we were not doing so well, the number of seminar attendees declined, and it became increasingly more difficult to fill events. Only then did we conduct surveys about the VFP of our company.
It turned out that the clients who wanted to organize the workflow in their businesses and could pay for our services, were not getting what they had expected. We didn’t meet their expectations of implementing management tools. When they came to our seminars, they had hoped to implement the management tools in their organization and, consequently, improve its performance. However, in most cases that wasn't the way it turned out.
We conducted customer surveys regarding the value of our product and it was particularly valuable and important to interview two categories of clients:
• Those who continued to pay us. They were asked about the value they acquired from receiving our services;
• Those who had been paying us for some time and then stopped. They were asked about what they expected to receive, but did not receive, or about what we needed to improve in our products.
Once I analyzed the survey results, I came to the conclusion that the only real value for our clients was in implementing management tools in their enterprises. That study was the impetus that led to the founding of "Visotsky Consulting”.
Such a survey can be done in any business. Of course, you will need to customize the questions for the particular business. For example, in a store, I would ask the buyers why they chose this store for their purchases, and in what circumstances and why would they choose to buy at other stores. It makes sense to ask these questions for businesses where competitors have similar products. If the service is unique, such as a singing coach, one would ask what the clients liked and disliked the most about your services. You will find that people, especially those with positive attitudes, do not like to talk about the negative aspects of things. In order to ferret out this information, you have to resort to various tricks. In such cases, I say that my job is to improve the company’s performance, and that they would be helping me out if they were to tell me what we should improve in our product.
It requires a certain amount of courage to conduct these kinds of surveys. An executive who loves his job is unlikely to be pleased when he discovers some of the shortcomings in his product. Does anyone enjoy it when somebody bursts their bubble? But if we don't understand what is valuable about our product, how can we effectively reproduce it? Just look at it this way, every shortcoming detected by the survey is a new opportunity to improve the company. If your company is already successfully providing the valuable product to its customers, any increase in the value of this product can bring you a considerable increase in income.
If your company or division has several completely different types of customers or products, you will have to conduct multiple surveys. For example, you sell electric tools both wholesale and through your own retail stores. Essentially, you have two different products. In this case, these two different VFPs will provide two different types of clients, one type for each product. The easiest way to survey the retail customers is in a store. As far as the wholesalers, you will most likely have to survey them by phone.
Here’s one of the secrets to successfully conducting surveys on the product’s value – do not give clients a survey to fill out. In this case, a written survey will not yield usable responses and is a waste of time and money. For a survey with usable answers, you need personal contact. And since this survey regards the company’s product that you are personally responsible for, I recommend that you do it yourself. This may sound strange, but my experience shows that when such a survey is done by employees, they miss very important details and the survey loses some of its value. The good news is that you do not need to survey hundreds of clients. From experience, it is sufficient to survey just a dozen or two. If you ask the correct questions and elicit honest answers, you will find that the responses are very similar. Another advantage of doing the survey yourself, is that the clients respond much more readily and openly to the head of the company, which greatly speeds up the process.
So, write the questions for your survey. Then head to the sales department and get a list of customers who: have recently bought something and those who stopped buying. Or you can simply go down to the retail sales space or office to take action. You are in for an adventure! Most likely, you will learn something new about your own VFP, and you will get a much clearer and precise picture of it. Then you will be able to tell the staff about the results of your study. When you convey to them exactly what the company or division’s VFP is, you will find that that one action improves performance.
Chapter 4
Product and types of exchange
I often see phrases such as, “a satisfied customer", "high-quality service", or "a customer who comes again and brings friends” in the wording of a company product. However, this phrasing doesn’t convey the product’s value, they only declare the intention to do a job well. When customers order services or buy products, they expect a specific thing. Ask yourself, when you go to the dentist, what do you want to get for your money? In any business, we strive to satisfy our customer. The value of that is obvious – customer satisfaction strengthens the company's image and helps ease our work. But the customer doesn’t pay for happiness, he pays for a specific value. The dentist gives us beautiful and healthy teeth, plus a comfortable treatment with long-lasting results. We don't pay him simply because we are “satisfied and will come back to him."
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