I have an admission to make; you see it seems that I have screwed up. The greatest irony is that the trap I have fallen into is the same one I put so much effort into teaching others to avoid.
One of the things I have learned is that universally, as service professionals and businesses, we consistently seem to undervalue the component parts of what we do.
To compensate for our own misunderstanding of how much value each piece brings to our clients, we try to package more and more of our services together. Eventually, we create this “giant value beast”’ we call our “service offering”.
This beast is so monumentally huge in value that we know any rational client would be crazy not to jump on board, right? And because of that we feel most comfortable asking them to pay us a small price for something which we know is worth so much more.
Then the challenge becomes how to convince people to, 1) understand the huge value of this giant complicated beast, 2) commit to embracing the “whole monster”, and 3) stick to the plan even if the monster is so big that most of the time they can’t see more than a toe or at best a foot.
By doing this we end up making life harder for ourselves and actually delivering less value to less people for less reward, and ultimately that is what value beasts always do.
The irony is that I have spent my life avoiding this trap and now spend my time protecting other professionals from making the same mistakes.
Yet I have come to realise that I, and the team at The Social Adviser, have been guilty of building the biggest value beast of all time. Then figuring out how to charge almost nothing for it and how to wave it in front of so many people that we became super successful without realising that we were all the while creating a monster of our own.
I took my entire lifetime of obsession with innovation in service and created this beast called The Market Leaders Program. We then built an online platform, workshops, coaching programs, created case studies, documentaries, how to guides, check lists… literally everything a services firm could need for a decade of innovation and growth!
The truth is my real desire is to simply help more professionals give more value to more people, and creating a value beast that’s too darn big for most people to deal with is not going to help me do that.
So I’m going to follow my own advice and I hope you listen and learn from it…
Value the parts of what you you do, see it from a client’s experience not yours, figure out how to divide the value into pieces and in doing so you will make those pieces more valuable to both you and your clients.
With this newfound perspective, we have realised that our Market Leaders Program is comprised of more than 40 separate components! How could we ever expect most professionals to understand 40 different innovation projects let alone the value they hold?
If you are a service business and you think my lesson does not apply to you, perhaps you should think again and dig a little deeper. In order to improve, every services business needs to constantly revisit and rethink these value concepts, and it makes me chuckle to realise we are no exception to that.
The truth is that not everyone is going to be able to see the big picture opportunity that your value brings when it is all packaged together.