I’ve been asked at times to describe the I3 Principles (innovation, indispensability, and inspiration) for the value propositions for companies that have been in the lead for a long time. That is to say, how can they still be innovative after all these years? How are companies like Southwest or Nordstroms still innovative today? How are some of these other companies innovative in the context of – or in consideration of – the fact that their value proposition has been around for so long?
I3 value proposition means not just clever words spinning a tale, but meaningful words describing a true-truth about your product or service. In increasingly crowded, hyper competitive, and fast-moving markets, you have to think in terms of how your target customer will process your offering in a sea of similar (or similar enough) offerings. Your consumer is probably not as much a student of your market as you are (or should be).
Knowing who is your ideal target customer focuses all your energies on higher probability prospects and also has the added benefit of optimizing your messaging to that audience.
Your understanding of your target customer will influence your marketing and the direct sales communication you have with them and the way you interact and serve them.
Access challenges run both ways: smaller companies face challenges selling to bigger ones, but oftentimes, bigger players can’t get small enough to sell to smaller companies or individual buyers.
Whether you developed your product with a specific customer need in mind, or happened upon a product and want to sell it to someone, you have to start by knowing your customer. Before the Internet boom, I assembled a group of friends and raised angel capital to start a company to develop a commodity chemical trading system, based on the notion that a hundred pounds of a specific chemical powder was the same as any other hundred pounds of the same chemical powder. It would be a trading system for chemicals – a brilliant idea – or so it seemed.
My son posted the link to the video below on his Facebook page.
It’s worth taking 2 minutes to check out:
40 Inspirational Speeches in 2 Minutes @ Yahoo! Video
(the folks who compiled it are www.overthinkingit.com)
It brought a smile to my face as it brought memories to the surface of some great (and some not-so-great) movie moments.
And… [...]
So often, especially with smaller businesses, companies don’t really understand that their prospects look at the world of opportunities, the world of options very differently than they think they do. They often think that prospects are looking at the universe of options that look like them, i.e., a new type of printing service, or a new type of contact management software, (or some other kind of category that their wares most closely fits in to) and that their prospects are only looking at other companies that are just like them.
