Value Mapping Consortium

Bob Schmonsees is the inventor of the Value Mapping process, and the founder of the Value Mapping Consortium. The Value Mapping Consortium is a community of market and thought leaders who are committed to helping companies of all sizes institutionalize the principles of solutions selling, through the implementation of systematic and customer centric positioning, messaging, and knowledge sharing processes.

Visit the Value Mapping Consortium Web Site to learn more.

Value Mapping

By far, the primary cause of the marketing and sales disconnect is the inability of companies to systematically institutionalize the knowledge of all the ways their solutions deliver value. Holden Corporation, one of the leading B-to-B sales training companies, recently completed a five-year study with more than 1187 participants (460 from sales and 727 from marketing). They concluded that the primary disconnect between marketing and sales organizations is the ineffective creation, validation, and delivery of the value proposition messages

There are four common mistakes that almost every company makes when it comes to their Value Proposition Messages.

• The first mistake is to view a business solution as having a single over all value proposition. The reality is that today’s products and services deliver lots of value in lots of different ways to lots of different people. While some companies have created superficial message maps, few have a rigorous process to collect and document all these different value propositions in one place. As a result this critical knowledge is scattered through out the enterprise.
• The second mistake is approaching the value proposition from the inside-out or feature function perspective instead of the customer’s perspective, which is outside in. Approaching value from the outside in forces marketing and sales professionals to develop a clear understanding of the customer need before they discuss the features and functions of their solutions.
• The third mistake is developing what I call incomplete value propositions. B-to-B companies need a rigorous message development process to help them develop more complete value propositions that not only state the value received, but formally define and document three additional pieces of knowledge.
  • How the customer actually uses the solution to derive that value.
  • How do sales people prove and validate that value
  • And, finally, how the solution’s differentiation increases that value
• The fourth mistake is failing to realize is that messages have shelf lives and that these shelf lives are getting shorter all the time. As a result they need systematic processes that help them continually review, refine and harden the value messages especially at the beginning and at the end of a product’s life cycle.

Value Mapping is a simple technique I developed and ultimately patented that helps marketing and sales organizations avoid these four mistakes. It is based on a collaborative process where the best marketing and sales minds in a company collaborate to answer a dozen or so questions for each of the many value propositions delivered by their solutions. These "best answers" are then fed into a web based knowledge model that provides four things.

• A raw materials inventory for marketing that insures that the collateral and sales tools they develop reflect the best thinking in the company about value.
• Just-in-time sales coaching cheat sheets listing the best sales practices for the specific selling situation, stage of opportunity, and person the sales person is dealing with.
• Smart links to the best sales tools and marketing collateral for that specific sales situation and person.
• A visual Value Map that allows marketing organizations to actually map their company’s Value DNA so they can better manage different knowledge, content, and sales tools for each value proposition and selling situation.

Mapping the human genome helped geneticists improve their knowledge and understanding of the complexities of the human body. This same thinking and strategy can be applied to the concept of complete value propositions. If companies were able to systematically catalogue all the different ways their solutions delivered value, they could use visualization software to map that Value DNA.

For the first time, these maps would provide marketing and sales organizations with a visual view of the actual value their products and services deliver to different stakeholders. This would make the value propositions come alive and it would help institutionalize a clearer understanding of that value through out the organization. The example below is just one of the many different views of value that could be generated from this simple database. As you can see from the following graphic, this Value Map breaks down value from the two perspectives that cause customers to buy something:

• The need to reduce something like costs, time, effort, or risk
• The need to increase something like revenue, quality, productivity, or competitive advantage.

As the example above shows, a Value Map would link together various icons to represent the logical relationships between different elements of a complete value proposition, including:

• The targeted market or job function that has the problems and needs.
• The business problems that are of concern to that target market or job function.
• The different capabilities, including strengths and weaknesses of a company’s solutions.
• Techniques on how to differentiate those capabilities.
• The actual value proposition that also describes how value is actually created by the capability.
• Proof and validation of the value proposition.
• Return on investment scenarios.
• Specific competitive differentiators that apply to this situation.

Clicking on an icon would display the underlying knowledge from the database base that succinctly and objectively describes that specific element of the value proposition.

Value Mapping may well end up becoming the Holy Grail for marketing and sales alignment and effectiveness because:

• It’s the only way for companies to visualize the value they provide.
• Value Maps will also help marketing professionals more clearly identify what kind of marketing collateral and selling tools are really needed and provide a fact-based framework for the product-planning process.
• The Value Mapping process is universal and supports all solutions-centric selling methodologies. The input forms are generic, so they are much simpler than most of the forms from sales training companies who are trying to reinforce their specific questioning and communication model. Value Mapping will encourage the adoption of solution-centric selling principles by both the sales and marketing organizations, making the content that supports the branding, lead generation, and selling process more customer- and solution-centric.
• Value Mapping forces marketing and sales professionals to focus more attention on their customers’ business issues and needs, and to develop their messages from the outside in. The Smart Taxonomy reinforces a customer- and value-centric culture every time someone accesses a piece of Sanctioned Content. This process helps institutionalize a more detailed understanding of each customer’s pains and stakeholder’s issues throughout the enterprise.
• Value Maps get everybody from the CEO to the salesperson on the same page, as they are the raw materials that drive all marketing and sales content and communication initiatives. As Tim Riesterer of The CMM Group puts it, "A Value Map is the enterprise compass that always points True North. They bring increased customer focus to the marketing organization and make solution-centric selling come alive for salespeople."
• Value Mapping makes the channels more confident in the value of their products and services. This will empower them to be more aggressive and proactive in calling on the executives in their prospects and customers. This increased confidence alone can have a dramatic effect on the number of calls made and the overall revenue performance.
• Value Mapping helps marketing professionals create better content and manage that content more effectively. It reduces the overall amount of content that’s ultimately created by forcing content developers to ask a very important question: "Do I really need a new piece of content, or can I just add another element to the Value Map?"

Finally, Value Mapping is a simple, scalable process built around a continuous improvement workflow. Product managers can create a basic Value Map in a matter of hours, which they can then enhance and extend over time. In a way, this process is very similar to the way physical maps have developed over the centuries. The first maps created by early explorers were often crude, but as more people used them, the better they became. And the same is true for Value Maps. The continuous improvement workflow built into the process insures that the value propositions will get harder and more complete as more people use the Value Map.