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Do you target the value your clients really want from you?

 

 

I watched a TED talk today by Matthias Mullenbeck and it made me think about the impact that a target has on delivering customer value.

He asks, ‘what if we paid doctors to keep people healthy?’ It’s an interesting premise – to pay healthcare insurers and providers for every healthy patient, not for the treatments they deliver. Would that change the behaviour of an industry? Would everyone then focus on the real value the consumer is looking for – health?

 

There are many implications of what he’s saying and as a brand marketer, I’m no medical expert. But this resonated with my work to build and launch value propositions. Because aligning targets can make or break your success.

 

One of the key stages of building a value proposition is to understand the real problem your customers want you to solve. And sometimes that’s not what you thought it was. Finding that focus helps you position your brand more clearly, along with an understanding of how you solve their problem differently from other companies.

 

When you’re rolling out a new value proposition it’s really important to connect the dots behind it. Part of that is to look at what your targets incentivise people to do. A new value proposition usually requires an organisation to unlearn some of its current habits. This is harder to achieve than asking people to adopt new ones, so it’s vital that the value you want to deliver for clients is what you’re incentivising employees to deliver.

 

They say you get what you measure. In my experience, especially in sales-led B2B organisations – you get what you target. Seems like customer value is a great place to start.