History

Bob Schmonsees first conceived of the Value Mapping process in the mid 1990’s after he had spent over twenty years running the sales, marketing, product management, and customer service organizations for several enterprise software companies.  Bob’s current company was competing in a rapidly maturing market space, and he became convinced that the best way to differentiate themselves and their products and services was to institutionalize the core principles of solutions centric selling through out his marketing and sales organization. 

The Challenges

He quickly came to realize that the three biggest challenges in doing this were:

1. Getting his product managers to position and communicate the value and differentiation of their products and services from the customer’s perspective (outside-in) and in the context of specific customer needs and issues.
2. Getting his sales channels to better understand those customer needs and issues so they could have more substantive business and solutions centric conversations with their prospects and customers.
3. Getting his marketing communications organization to create more sales ready collateral and tools to support those selling conversations.

The Breakthrough

As Bob and his staff grappled with these problems, it became obvious that the first step in solving these problems would require two things.

1. Improved collaboration systems between marketing & sales
2. A relational knowledge and value definition model that enabled the systematic deconstruction of a high level business needs into the multiple underlying issues that drove those needs.  This creation of a two level hierarchy to describe a customer’s need aligned perfectly with the product / feature hierarchy, thereby allowing the mapping of products to needs, and features to underlying issues.

In 1996 Bob applied for a US Patent (which was subsequently granted in 2000) on the broad value and collaboration model that form the foundation of the Value Mapping process. 

Between 1996 and 2002 various iterations of the Value Mapping process were implemented in some of the early sales productivity and enablement systems.  While the process was universally hailed by marketing and sales organizations alike, these early sales effectiveness systems were not successful because they required more discipline than most companies were willing to commit to in a market place where almost everybody made their numbers in spite of themselves.   

Rethinking the Process

In  2004, as Bob was doing the research for his book “Escaping The Black Hole”, he began to re-think the underlying automation strategy for Value Mapping with the objective of simplifying the process so that so that it could be quickly and easily implemented by any marketing and sales organization.

During the next two years, Bob collaborated with Tim Riesterer and Diane Emo authors of “Customer Message Management” and co-founders of The CMM Forum®. Tim and Diane had helped hundreds of companies manually map their solutions to customer problems and needs to create more customer relevant and sales ready marketing. The insights that Bob gained from these discussions were invaluable, and by early 2006, he had made a couple of breakthroughs in:

1. The design of a self-guided map building process that would help a product manager/marketer create a basic Value Map for a complex product or service in less than two hours, and permit company with many products and services to implement an enterprise Value Mapping initiative in a matter of a few days
2. A new map visualization process that would, for the first time, allow a company to portray and represent its value from a visual perspective. 

An Idea Who’s Time Has Come

The implications of these breakthroughs are significant and in early 2006, Bob began discussing them with several companies in the marketing and sales effectiveness space.  After a few months, he chose to license his patents and partner with Avitage and Pragmatech to develop the Value Mapper ™ service.  He chose these two companies as partners because they shared his over all vision on the business problem, the need for a simple, and easy to implement solution, and they agreed to three conditions:

1. That they would fund the formation of this Consortium to bring the preeminent thought leaders together to help educate the market place on the business problem and the Value Mapping process
2. That a basic version of Value Mapper would always be available at no-cost to product management and marketing professionals to enable them to create basic value maps for their own solutions.
3. That the enterprise version of Value Mapper would be a low cost and quick to implement solution for companies of all sizes.  This plug–in strategy makes ValueMapper the ideal first step for any sales improvement program, as well as an simple add-on to any existing sales enablement, solutions centric selling, or customer centric messaging initiative.