Value-Centric Business - How Creating Shared Value is Healthy For Your Business

An attractive title, and is usually talked about but rarely practiced for many reasons. Doing business comes usually in two formats: a vendor sells a customer a solution or service, or a company strikes a partnership with another for the former goal; selling a solution or a service. At least that is valid and comprehensive in the world of solution vendors. Whether you're selling to a customer or partnering with others for that, you need to focus on "value" and that value should be a shared one amongst all parties. This value persuasion should happen from the first time you initiate a business, and should remain throughout your execution towards that business. Most people - if not all - believe in that as a fact of doing business, but they lose that focus down the road. In my opinion, what differentiates a successful deal from failure is the hard grab on "creating shared value".

To understand the importance of a value-centric business, I will try to compare it with the other not-so-optimal approaches that I could think of, and that most of what I have seen falls under. These are: sale-centric business, metric-centric business, and compete-centric business. I will then close by show the optimum approach: value-centric business.

In a sale-centric business, a salesperson is typically assigned a quota and he usually goes after his quota with no vision and plan. He usually goes without a plan, and hunts down those deals that will make him achieve what he has been assigned. In this mode, the salesperson ignores the deals that require a lot of preparation and efforts and focuses on the quick ones. He usually puts his company and the customer under pressure to make a deal without looking at what his customer really asks for. This approach usually creates unhealthy business relationships, if any at all, and usually end up with failure due to the increasingly unsatisfied customer base it tends to create. It goes without saying; the person who operates in this mode usually lacks the vision, or at least doesn't try to focus on one, and is usually a short-term thinker. Don't get me wrong here as some people who work in this mode are smart and hard-working but sometimes get forced to work like that with the great pressure from their companies and lack of leadership in their teams. It's definitely their responsibility to make a change, and usually requires a lot of work and value thinking to make it happen.

The other approach, the metric-centric business, is a superset of the above as it focuses on getting something done when that is measurable. A sales number is at essence a metric that all organizations are after, and some organizations include more metrics to monitor and enhance their business. Metrics like productivity, readiness, satisfaction, and share are some examples that don't have revenue at their core, but influence it in an indirect way. Metrics usually are put in some sort of a company-wide scorecard for monitoring and reporting. People who are after achieving metrics could easily lose the focus and the essence of doing real business, and get trapped in how quicker they can mark there metrics green. Getting a green metric becomes - unfortunately - a check mark that simply signifies the achievement. In reality, that check mark hides a great deal of logistical efforts without a real business impact!

We live in a competitive world, where companies are competing for share and winning customers. The competitive market offers great value to end-customers, and usually highlights the uniqueness of a company or an offering that couldn't be possible otherwise. When focusing solely on getting market share (what I call compete-centric business), a salesperson may lose track of his customer needs, and usually goes head-to-head with his competitors in a way that they all complicate the original requirements in order to win the deal. You may experience this when a customer asks for a simple solution and the different companies competing start to show off their solutions and how feature-rich they can be. The original requirements get complicated without the customer noticing! Unfortunately, if you try to advice the customer how simple his requirements are, and how complicated they are becoming, you may be seen as less-competitive and hence get out of the play easily. It then becomes a hard decision to either go with the follow or stand by your position.

A value-centric business avoids the problems caused by the other approaches, and is very important to create sustainable business; a business that continues to grow with happy customers and partners. On the other hand, it is the most challenging path to go through. Creating value and focusing on how to make that balanced between all parties is not an easy task at all, and usually requires long-term thinking and a great deal of effort to create it. It is, from my perspective, worth persuading since it creates the platform that everything will stand on, and the stronger it's the healthier your business is going to be. If you are laser-focused on creating shared value, you'll end up achieving your sales, greening your metrics, and winning share from your competitors. Besides, and this is what I love the most about value-centric business, you'll end up enjoying what you do because of the deep involvement of both your mind and heart!