Who Moved My Value Proposition?

I was astounded. Sitting with one of our long time best customers I explained how our newest generation of paper machine weight control actuator would reduce their variability by a further 30%. He said he didn’t care. It didn’t matter. That our existing measurement and controls had already reduced the variability of the manufactured paper sheet so low that further reduction was “in the noise” and did not matter.

How could this be? The holy grail of paper machine process measurement and control systems had always been variability reduction. Improved uniformity of weight, moisture, opacity, thickness, color, virtually any sheet parameter, had always meant big economics. A more uniform or flatter sheet meant that their customers’ printing presses could run faster, the print on glossy magazines would be sharper, and regardless of the type of paper, raw materials and energy would be saved in the manufacturing process. Variability reduction had been the mainstay value proposition for decades. Could it be that we had exhausted the gold mine of paper machine control value propositions?

Indeed. It took decades of continuous improvement and innovation but we were now in a position of having to express the value of our technology in new terms; lower maintenance cost, sustainable performance, system availability, etc. Fortunately, our systems did a lot more than just reduce variability but through our own success pushed by competitors, the economics of further variability reduction was no longer enough to justify the cost of our systems.

This very real personal experience is why I constantly remind clients that value propositions are living things. The market changes, their offering changes, competitors raise the bar, customer strategies change, and of course there is this chaotic thing we call the economy. All of these require that you keep testing your value proposition and tuning it up to reflect changes in the landscape. In my case, if this hadn’t been a good customer of ours we may not have known how the value of the variability reduction had changed. We could have continued for months with a tired old story while not identifying and quantifying other truly valuable areas of contribution for our solution. All the while losing orders or seeing purchases delayed for a lack of adequate justification. Don’t let that happen to you. When was the last time you validated your value proposition?

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