Читать книгу Value Merchants - Nirmalya Kumar - Страница 12

Increasingly, to get an equitable or fair return, suppliers must be able to persuasively demonstrate and document the superior value their offerings deliver to customers. By “demonstrate,” we mean showing prospective customers convincingly beforehand what cost savings or added value they can expect from using the supplier’s offering relative to the next-best alternative. Value case histories are one tool that best-practice suppliers, such as Nijdra Groep in the Netherlands and Rockwell Automation, use to accomplish this. Value case histories are written accounts that document the cost savings or added value that reference customers have received from using a supplier’s market offering. Another way that best-practice firms, such as GE Infrastructure Water & Process Technologies and SKF, demonstrate the value of their offerings to prospective customers is through customer value assessment tools, which we term value calculators. These tools are spreadsheet software applications that salespeople or value specialists conduct on laptops as part of a consultative selling approach to demonstrate the value that customers likely would receive from their offerings.

Demonstrating superior value is necessary, but it is no longer enough to become a best-practice company in today’s business markets. Suppliers also must document the cost savings and incremental profits that offerings have delivered to customers. Thus, suppliers work with their customers to define the measures on which they will track the cost savings or incremental profit produced and then, after a suitable period of time, work with customer managers to substantiate the results.

Documenting the superior value delivered to customers provides four powerful benefits to suppliers. First, it enhances the credibility of the value demonstrations for their offerings because customer managers know that the supplier is willing to return later to document the value received. Second, documenting enables customer managers to get credit for the cost savings and incremental profit produced. Third, documenting enables suppliers to create value case histories and other materials for use in marketing communications to persuasively convey to prospective customers the value they, too, might obtain from the supplier’s offering. Finally, by comparing the value actually delivered with the value claimed in the demonstration and regressing these differences on customer descriptors, documenting enables suppliers to further refine their understanding of how their offerings deliver the greatest value. This sharpens subsequent efforts to target customers. We term the tools that suppliers use to document the value of their offerings value documenters.

For a moment, put yourself in the role of a commercial grower. Two suppliers are offering you mulch film, which is a thin plastic sheet that commercial growers place on the ground to hold in moisture, prevent weed growth, and allow vegetables and melons to be planted closer together. One supplier comes to you with this proposition: “Trust us. Our mulch film will lower your cost.” The other supplier, Sonoco, comes to you with this proposition: “Sonoco just lowered the cost of your mulch film by $16.83 per acre.” And Sonoco offers to show you exactly how it determined that figure. Which supplier’s value proposition is more persuasive?