By gleaning as much as you can from your reading and research, you can start to build a ‘skeleton’ of the value model for your case study account. We fill in the gaps as we meet and interview the various people within the company. We can learn about the strategies that our customer is using, or plans to use, to reach their goals by asking, ‘How will you achieve your revenue growth objective?’ or ‘How do you plan to control or cut your costs and expenses?’
Here again, we shouldn’t be too assumptive. There are many different strategies that your client might use to pursue their major goals. Through our discovery process we want to learn which strategies they are already using or what they think would be the best way to achieve their goals. We could very well have several ideas or approaches that they have not yet considered or tried. There will be plenty of time to suggest or recommend these later. For now, try to learn what they have already done, are doing now, or are already planning to do.
Shows an example of several strategies (in gray) that could be employed to achieve the goals of increasing revenue, reducing costs, and better utilizing assets. Two of the causes of increased costs, for example, could be a rise in either materials costs or direct labor costs. Therefore, one strategy for reducing costs would be to concentrate on lowering materials costs; another would be to focus on better managing and controlling direct labor costs.
We can add to what we already know about our customer’s business by using questions like, ‘I read in your Annual Report that you anticipate doubling your revenue in the next five years. How do you plan to accomplish that exactly?’ If we haven’t been able to learn very much from our research, we might try using a question like, ‘Several of our clients in your industry have been actively seeking cost containment and cost avoidance opportunities in order to maintain profit margins in this highly competitive market. How has your company reacted to these kinds of pressures?’
Through a combination of research and questioning, you can begin to construct an understanding of your customer’s business that will ultimately become a road map of exactly how to position your products and services, to whom within the company, and in the context of which goals and objectives. This BVH model will become a detailed depiction of how your client does business today, as well as the goals and objectives they are trying to accomplish going forward. In essence, it is a composite vision of what point ‘C’ looks like for the various people, units, and departments within the company, as well as the enterprise as a whole.
I want to point out that the way these various elements link or tie together is not an exact science. They could fit together in dozens of different ways. We use our diagnostic process to discover how our customer thinks they link together.
This model shows reducing time to market as a strategy that supports the goal of increasing revenue, the idea being that the quicker we can get new products developed and on the shelves the more revenue opportunities we will capture. A different customer, or a different individual within your customer’s business, may look at time to market not as a direct cause of increased revenue, but more as a cause of increased market share, which in turn causes an increase in revenue. So, what matters here is how your particular client sees these strategies, goals, and initiatives fitting together. Not everyone within a given company will see their business the same way. Your thorough understanding of your customer’s business will actually be based on a composite of things you learn from, and about, all the different people you meet.