Once you have defined all of the elements of the customer’s solution, now you can go to step two: defining all of the various options for how the customer might choose to buy the solution. Remember this is not what you are offering (yet) it is simply considering the various ways that customers buy. It…
How many times have you bought an item from a store, only to bring it home and discover that "batteries are not included" or "some assembly required?" I was working with a client last week when the topic of "solutions" came up. The issue was how to move from selling hardware, software, and services as…
I recently became aware of study by the Corporate Executive Board that analyzed 300 drivers of employee engagement and productivity. Guess what the one factor is that had the highest correlation to employee performance, productivity, and retention is "the connection between their work and the organizational strategy". Number 2 is understanding the "importance of their…
When you think about strategy, are you assuming a continuous or discontinuous environment? In a fascinating book, Creative Destruction, Richard Foster and Sarah Kaplah note some remarkable trends. Most intriguing is how the turnover of S&P 500 companies is accelerating as companies are born and die. (The flipside is that the average tenure is declining…
I've had two recent customer experiences that completely baffle me. First, I had to go jump through hoops to get a tiny service fee refunded from my bank for my personal account. Their service rep quoted policy after policy about why they couldn't refund the fee. Yet when I indicated that I would move my…
