How will you provide value to clients throughout 2022? Will your strategy yield occasional rather than continuous value?
Some of you are always-on, hard-charging professionals. Others of you are more laid-back. However you are just as diligent and proficient about best serving client needs. Either way, value creation and delivery leverage whether you truly understand the value your clients need from you. If you occasionally focus on value creation, you can spin those high- and low-energy professional wheels of yours.
Because value creation is not about your energy level. Rather, clients value the quality and adaptability of your continuous delivery: to them.
Consider that it is difficult to provide continuous value to clients when your focus is tactical and, therefore, occasional. Yet, you cannot provide continuous value to clients when your strategic focus is fixed and static. Let’s explore.
To provide and preserve continuous value to internal and external clients, focus on these two strategic areas: daily, weekly, monthly and annually.
How do your clients define and perceive what is valuable to them?
Particularly, how is their definition of value contingent on their own professional environments? How does their definition of value impact how they, themselves, provide value to their own clients? In addition, how is their definition of continuous value impacted by changes within their industries? You will discover that in order to provide continuous value to clients, you need to develop a more fluid concept of continuous value delivery.
Can you prioritize what your clients value in terms of high-low, immediate-longer term requirements?
While you can do this exercise for each client, you may discover that client priorities vary all over the place. As a result, you have clients who disrupt and distract your efforts to provide continuous value to everyone, because they are always in a state of crisis. That is why doing this exercise is a good thing. Continuously meeting the tactical needs of disruptive clients is different from pacing yourself to continuously meet the needs of those clients with challenging projects requiring long-term focus and energy. Which clients do you prefer serving?
When you prioritize conserving your time, energy, talents, and focus on providing continuous value to clients, your own client selection process becomes more discerning.
Do you sell, design, engineer, or service? Consider that the quality of your professional output, as well as your sense of professional purpose, become more fulfilling by providing continuous value to clients. Then, let’s discover how we can work together to move the dial on the other clients who are best able to recalibrate how they define and prioritize your value.
Contact me here to discover how.
Babette Ten Haken’s One Millimeter Mindset™ speaking and coaching programs catalyze people who solve problems differently to collaborate more successfully across traditional value silos. Become more professionally visible, cross-functionally relevant, and strategically valuable as you create and implement innovative and robust business outcomes together. Babette is a business-oriented STEM professional, qualitative Voice of the Customer facilitator, PMI-certified Wicked Problem Solver, Duke Corporate Education licensed Strategic Agility practitioner, and Six Sigma Green Belt (Quality). She is a member of the SHRM, PMI, the National Speakers Association (NSA). Her playbook of cross-functional collaboration, Do YOU Mean Business? is available in soft cover and digital formats on Amazon.com. Contact Babette here. Image source: Adobe Stock.
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