How to Add Value to Your Customers and Make Money Doing It
To take advantage of this marketing strategy, look at how you can bundle your service or products together to create a package deal. This can be a great way to move more products and services and add value to your customers. Customers feel they are getting a great deal, as they are paying less than if they bought each item separately, and you get the benefit of a higher dollar sale per transaction. Bundling can also help you move slow-moving products and give you an upsell to offer to customers that may have been looking at purchasing an individual item.
For example, if you own a travel agency, offer a package deal where accommodation, flights, several meals, and an attraction are all included. For another example, if you own a beauty salon, offer a pampering package, where hairstyling, manicure, and massage are offered together. While a customer may have been considering purchasing one or two of these items, if you offer a great deal, they might be persuaded to purchase the whole package.
So think about how you can bundle several of your services or products together to create a package deal. This creates another offering for your customers, with great perceived value, and gives you the opportunity to upsell, move slow-moving products and increase your dollar value per sale.
For other ways to offer, upsells and value-adding offers to your clients check out this tool that helps you maximize your sales funnels: BizFire’s Free Funnel Maker & Analyzer
My Definition of a Boombastic Jazz Style Value Proposition
By: Simon Kelly
After 2 years of sporadic blogging, I've decided that bouncing off of other folks articles and blogs is the way I roll. For rousing me from my latest slumber, I’d like to thank Jonathan Earle (Commercial Marketing Director at Dixons Carphone) for his recent post A product is not a proposition. So why do people mix the two up?
I like Jonathan's pint of Guinness model, not least because it puts an image of my favourite Dublin bar in my mind. The model adds products, service, communications, participation, distribution and price onto product to draw out how a proposition differs from a product.
Of course if the elements you add onto a product are things that the customer values and you offer them together then the sum of the parts should outweigh the individual elements. If this is the case then mutual value is delivered, customers are happy and revenue and profits grow. A Flexible working solution that includes all the piece parts a busy traveling executive needs to do her job, including the service wrap, should provide much more value than the individual product elements bought separately. Jonathan cites his time at O2 as a time where 'every commercial metric was smashed' through this type of approach.
I can identify strongly with this view as I have seen this uptick of results in organisations I have worked for or with by developing a more customer value based approach, which I’ve written about here. This kind of success dates back 15 years to my time at BT where we experienced stellar performance by focusing on developing propositions, akin to Jonathan's pints of Guinness, that solved customer problems.
Although Jonathan's blog was about the confusion between products and propositions what it brought home to me most was about the loose meaning of words commonly used in business parlance today. Way back in 1997 McKinsey consultants Ralf Leszinski and Mike Marn said that: ‘Value may be one of the most overused and misused terms in marketing and pricing’. The other two terms I would add to this are Marketing and Value Proposition.
The discussion about Marketing I will leave for another time. In our upcoming book Value-ology: Aligning sales and marketing to shape and deliver profitable customer value propositions, my co-authors Dr Paul Johnston, Stacey Danheiser and I spend the first two chapters emphasizing that organisations have got to try and get to a base level definition of what a value and value propositions means for them.
You've only got to have worked in a firm that's merged or acquired another company to observe lots of people talking past each other (there are some great anecdotes in "Value-ology") using the same words but meaning completely different things. If you take the 'typical' attrition rate in B2b sales forces to be around 20% as Aberdeen Group surveys suggest, you are hiring in 1 in 5 guys who might well have a completely different perspective to you - and communicate this to your customers!
If you're interested in more depth on definitions of value then take a look at Paul Johnston's blog 10 essentials for creating effective value propositions.
In 'value-ology' we provide our own view on what a value proposition is, and what it should include. We take the view that a strong value propositions should be MUSICAL.
From our perspective a value proposition is a promise of expected future value illustrating future relevant and distinct benefits will outweigh total cost of ownership
Note the word future; a value proposition can only be a promise of value which will be experienced in the future. Too many organisations don't follow up with the customer to review if the value promised was actually delivered. The gap between what was originally promised versus what was experienced is often at the root of why customers ditch services and move to more user friendly alternatives, as was the case with CRM systems.
To hit all the right notes and resonate with your customer a value proposition should be MUSICAL:
Monetary calculation - of financial benefits minus costs
Unique - things that sets you apart from competitors
Spend (costs) - how much the customer is prepared to pay
Impact - how it will positively impact the customer organisation
Capability - what it is that you can do for the customer to make this impact
ALigned - to the key needs of the customer
For what it's worth an individual product can deliver a value proposition and so can a more all-encompassing solution (proposition). Accepting that if you've crafted a solution you know customers want then it's more likely to be unique and will deliver more mutual value that a single product.
So, next time you use words like value, value proposition, solution, proposition blah, blah….. check that there is a shared understanding in the room. It happened to me just yesterday when I was talking to an accountant about sustainability (he started it!). Better still, make it clear what your organisation means by value proposition so that when the C-level folk say it they are on the same page as the sales guys when they develop value propositions for customers.
Feel free to drink a Guinness and go create some MUSICAL value propositions!
Read more in our upcoming book Value-ology
For specific help on value propositions you can download our free ebook at http://www.shakemktg.com/resources.html
What Volkswagen Can Teach You About Values-Based Marketing
What Volkswagen Can Teach You About Values-Based Marketing
Some of this year’s Super Bowl commercials focused on tugging at viewers’ heartstrings, challenging stereotypes and trying to make the world a better place — and for good reason. Some companies know that to build an enduring business, they should stand by core values.
Few companies are quite as adept at maintaining and communicating their values as Volkswagen. Beginning in the 1930s, Volkswagen…
What’s crafted willfully on your emails today, to create moments of customer delight? How far can one go to make consumers love them for the little things we do with great care to keep them HAPPY.
An affluent consumer decides to buy a Lexus worth $45,000. Though a Mercedes, a Jaguar, a Cadillac was well within reach, but somehow decides to settle for a Lexus. This customer was now worth
6 figures & high for this automobile center.
On road, after taking delivery of this elegantly built, new Lexus with luxuriating smell of the leather interiors; now starts to play the radio by one push of a button. Surprisingly it was a favorite station of the customer. Push of another button played yet another favorite station. It wasn’t a co-incidence but a deliberate action taken towards creating customer delight.
All favorite radio stations were migrated from the previous
car’s radio which was brought-in exchange to the newer one.
This was not part of the company’s policy and nor were there any standing guidelines provided to the mechanics. But it was the mechanic’s idea to go that extra mile to create customer delight.
How do you delight your customers?
- excerpts from the book Tested Secrets For Direct Marketing Success by Denny Hatch
