EMERGEOUT Conclave 2008: Defining your Value Proposition
Loading ...The session started with everyone sharing about the challenges they are facing while creating an organization. Some of the key challenges that people mentioned include defining value proposition, creating a differentiation, retaining employees, scaling up the operations and exploring market opportunities. The hall was fully packed with around 30% of participants standing. Good Participation :-)
Ankur Lal – CEO & Founder, Infozech Software, started the session and highlighting something interested from Harward Business Review article. He said that the value proposition could be looked at from the following 3 aspects:
- All Benefits the customer receives
- Favorable point of difference: Differentiation
- Resonating Focus: One or 2 things that are more important to the customer
He said that we need to look at our value proposition from all the 3 aspects. He shared a case study, which emphasizes that normally we try to sell what we have rather than what customer requires and the value customer perceives.
Sanjeev Aggarwal, Managing Director – Investment Advisor, Helion Venture Capital shared his experience in his previous venture. He mentioned about an issue with the value proposition that they were offering. The issue was that their value propositions were same as the value propositions of the industry and those were Scalability, Quality of Resources and Cost. Connecting his thoughts to what Ankur has earlier mentioned, he said that probably Differentiation and Resonating Focus were the aspects they were missing out.
Another critical aspect that came across during the discussion was the criticality of generating trust in the mind of your customers. “How can we actually generate trust in the customer mind?”
One possible solution someone suggested is to let someone who is involved in the implementation to communicate the value proposition to the customer. He mentioned that this really helps in generating trust in the customer mind.
Sanjeev also mentioned that by focusing on customer issues rather than disrupting the existing customer systems has helped him in generating that trust. What had made him succeed in the past vis-à-vis his customer is the fact that his competitors were trying to disrupt the existing system while he tried to understand their issues and build upon their existing systems. Which made a big difference!
Sudha Kumar – CEO, Prayag Consulting bring in another critical aspect. She said that most of the time we try to negotiate price with the customer. But price is only one aspect to satisfy a customer. We need to understand that by decreasing the price, are we might not be helping the customers? We can do number of other things to increase the value to that customer. But we usually do not focus on them.
Inside of the discussion on generating trust, one guy shared one case study, in which the CEO of a vendor company came forward and introduce himself as the account manager for the account they were pitching for and able to get the account from big competitor giants who’s sales team was not able offer equal level of service.
Sudha also shared that in her experience most of us do injustice to pricing. Indian companies spend lot of time in defining the offering but very less time in defining the pricing policy.
Someone from the audience raised the concern about “How can we attract employees?” and the whole discussion shifted in that direction.
Sanjeev mentioned that your ability to empower is the key to hire and retain key management talent. At senior level people can even be willing to work at half the salaries.
Someone from the audience supported that and shared that he has build a team of 39 strong people with no problem in hiring. The team even includes people with 18 years of experience. The key to his success in hiring and retaining talent is the fact that he was able to show them the dream and a track record that give them the confidence that it can be turned into reality. In the same aspect Sudha mentioned that People know that startup jobs are risky. We just need to be transparent with our employees. We need to have focus on clearly communicating the same to the employees. Sudha said that recently her company has tried campus interviews with “0” hype and it was very well received by the student and professors community.
One of the critical aspects in retaining talent is to clearly communicate the value proposition to the potential candidates. But the long chain of communication that happen from CEO to the Director HR to Recruitment Manager to Agencies, attenuate the value proposition before it finally reaches out to employees and potential candidates. So a clearly defined value proposition is must for an organization.
Sanjeev concluded the session by saying that he primary reason for attrition is “Managers”. There is a saying “ People join the company but they leave the team leaders”. That is something we all need to watch out for.
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