Stage One: Map Building

Map Building typically takes 1-2 hours per Solution (including planning)

Building the underlying Knowledge Framework for an enterprise Value Map is a simple two step process that identifies the logical relationships between the four Topics (Customer Needs, Underlying Issues, Solution Value Scenarios, and Capability Value Scenarios) and aligns each Topic with specific Markets, Stakeholders, and Competitors.

First Step: The first step in the Map Building stage is to create a set of lists for each Solution.  These lists include:

• The Market Segments that you sell the Solution to
• The key Stakeholders you deal with through out the buying process
• The major Competitors for that Solution
• The high level Customer Need (usually 1) that is that Solution’s reason for being
• The Underlying Issues (usually 3 to 5 )  that must be addressed in order to solve the Customer Need
• The Key Capabilities of the Solution (usually 3 to 5) that solve those Underlying Issues

The key challenge in creating these lists is thinking through the needs, issues, and the capabilities in a parallel fashion to make sure that you are focusing on the most important aspects of your Solution’s value and differentiation.  This often requires some discussion and brainstorming especially if you are working as a team to build an enterprise Value Map for multiple Solutions.

If your company has already created explicit problem statements and solution centric positioning strategies for your products and services, most of the information for ValueMapper’s lists can be taken from these existing documents with some minor formatting edits. Once you have identified these lists, the process of entering them in ValueMapper usually takes less than 15 minutes.

If, however, the concept of selling solutions is foreign to your organization, ValueMapper includes expert streaming media help through the Value Mapping Advisor that provides expert advice on customer and solution centric messaging and will help your product managers / marketers build better Value Maps.

Second Step: The second step in the Map Building stage is to link these lists together using ValueMapper’s simple check box linking process. This linking process, which takes only a few minutes per solution, establishes the database relationships between the four Topics (see below) that make up the Knowledge Framework for your Value Map, and it aligns each of those four Topics to the specific Market Segments and Stakeholders who have those Customer Needs and Underlying issues and the Competition that also solves those needs and issues. 

This two step Map Building process results in a complete Knowledge Framework database which contains all the linkages (see simple Value Map linkages example below) between the four topics that reflect your specific market and positioning strategy.  As was mentioned above, the entire Map Building process for your initial Value Map should take no more than an hour  per Solution once you have assembled the all the information for the Lists.

At the end of Stage One, product managers / marketers will have created the complete Knowledge Framework for their Solution or company as the case may be. They can then begin to assemble Value Maps containing the Topics that reflect specific marketing and sales situations.

For example, the ValueMapper screen shot below shows a Tree Map™ for an imaginary company that was dynamically generated created by selecting a Market Segment and Stakeholder.   This Tree Map contains links to all the relevant Topics in the Knowledge Framework that were created during the Map Building stage.  The imaginary company that’s reflected in this Tree Map has several Solutions that serve multiple Customer Needs, and, because there was very little strategic planning or brainstorming involved, he entire Map Building (Stage One) process took less than 25 minutes.

Alternatively, you can choose to view this same information as a Visual Value Map™ which displays the linkages between all the same four Topics in a spatial or graphical fashion as follows:

This ability to quickly (in 1-2 hours) portray and visualize the concept of value from the customer’s perspective, even before you have added any knowledge to any Topic, has significant strategic implications for a company’s Marketing and Sales organization as well as the whole enterprise.
  

• It creates the first visual representation of a company’s positioning and messaging strategy.  This will stimulate lots of great discussions.
• It becomes a visual compass that gets everybody in marketing and sales on the same page.
• It provides one of the only tangible aspects of a company’s commitment to be customer focused.  Value Maps go way beyond slogans and that’s why CEO’s will view them as a strategic imperative if they want to instill a more customer centric culture.