Create Value-Added Opportunities

Increase sales with current customers.

• Talk to ten customers this week. Ask, "What value do you feel you received from your purchase?"
• Look for common denominators in the answers. Then brainstorm for other products and services that can reinforce that value.
• Ask three other people to join in the brainstorming session, particularly people from product development, marketing, and operations.
• Give credit for any new product ideas to other people.
• Volunteer to oversee a team committed to creating a new prototype product that can add increased value to current customers.

      Generate sales with new customers.

• Write a white paper for internal purposes on leveraging the lessons learned from current customers called, "Leveraging Customer Insights: How Happy Customers are the Eyes to New Customers."
• Volunteer to market our company's products to a small number of people in a new demographic.

  Reduce operating costs for current customers.

• Look at the entire flow of creating and selling a specific product to a given customer, and identify the cost to the company at each point in the process.
• Look for overlap in the process for various products.
• Identify where costs are being repeated that could be reduced by timing the overlap of the activities for different products to coincide

  Close the gap between a customer's expected time of receiving a product and the actual time of delivery.

• Ask ten customers when they expected to receive a specific product and when they actually received it.
• Let the sales department and the operations department  know about the gap from expected delivery to actual delivery.
• Ask for ways to reduce this gap. Offer the suggestion of adding 15% more time to any estimate to keep customer expectations realistic.

      Reduce the overall cost of the buying experience for the customer.

• Follow one entire sales process from the time a customer thought about buying a certain type of product to the time they actually bought and used the product. Keep track of both dollars and hours invested by the customer in this process. Do this for ten customers.
• Share your research with members of the marketing, sales, and operations teams. Facilitate a discussion on how the process could become less expensive and less time-consuming for the customer.
• Volunteer to test new ideas for a handful of customers to see what the real-life experience of the new process would be like for them.

      Have customers appreciate the marketing they receive from our organization.

• Ask ten customers what they appreciated and what they did not appreciate about the marketing they received on a specific product.
• Ask customers for specific examples of marketing they have received from other companies that they have enjoyed the most.
• Share these customer insights with members of the marketing team. Ask for their input on what could be done to improve the customer experience with the marketing they received.

"Go to the Ball"

Don't wait for your boss or another employee to show you how to add more value to your organization and your customers. Step back, clarify the measures your organization and your customers want improved, identify ways to add value, and then go after those opportunities.  "go to the ball."