Читать книгу Value Merchants - Nirmalya Kumar - Страница 26

The all-benefits customer value proposition is the meaning that supplier managers most frequently attach to the term. Why? It requires the least detailed knowledge about customers and competitors and, thus, is the easiest for supplier managers to construct and deliver. They simply list all the potential benefits they believe that their offering might deliver to targeted customers. The more they can think of, the better.

Yet simply listing all the benefits has the potential pitfall of benefit assertion: claiming distinctions for the offering that actually have no benefit to target customers. Consider the following example: a value-added reseller of gas chromatographs was accustomed to selling high-performance instruments to R&D laboratories in large companies, universities, and government agencies in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. One feature of a particular chromatograph, a patented injection system, enabled R&D lab customers to maintain sample integrity by avoiding high-temperature vaporization, eliminating the risk of thermal degradation, enhancing test discrimination, and permitting the use of volatile solvents. Seeking growth, the firm began to market the most basic model of this chromatograph to a new market (application) segment for the firm: contract laboratories.

In initial meetings with prospective contract lab customers, the firm’s salespeople touted the injection system feature and its benefit of maintaining sample integrity. The prospects scoffed at this, stating that they were doing routine testing of soil and water samples for environmental regulation compliance, for which maintaining sample integrity was not a concern, and that room-temperature sample injection served their requirements adequately. The supplier was taken aback and forced to rethink its value proposition.

Another pitfall of the all-benefits proposition is that many, if not most, of the benefits may be points of parity with the next-best alternative, diminishing the effect of the few actual points of difference. An international engineering consulting firm was bidding for a light-rail project, and on the last chart of its presentation to the prospective municipal client, it listed the ten reasons why the municipality should award it the project. The other two finalist firms, though, could make most of the same claims because they were points of parity. Put yourself, for a moment, in the place of the prospective client. Suppose each firm, at the end of its presentation, gives ten reasons why you ought to award it the project. The lists are almost the same. How do you resolve the impasse? By asking each of the firms to “sharpen their pencils” and give a final best price. You then award the project to the firm that gives the largest price concession. Any distinctiveness that does exist between firms has been overshadowed by the greater overlapping sameness.