Editor’s Note: Today’s post is Part 2 of Geoffrey Cooling’s take on the Business of Hearing Healthcare.
Geoffrey Cooling
Products & Services
List all the products and services your value proposition is built around. Which products and services do you offer that help your customer get either a functional, social, or emotional job done, or help him/her satisfy basic needs?
- Which ancillary products and services help your customer perform?
- Rank all products and services according to their importance to your customer.
- Are they crucial or trivial to your customer?
Pain Relievers
Does it help your customers sleep better at night? (e.g. by helping with big issues, diminishing concerns, or eliminating worries …). Does it limit or eradicate common mistakes customers make? (e.g. usage mistakes …). Does it eliminate barriers that are keeping your customer from adopting solutions? (e.g. lower or no upfront investment costs, flatter learning curve, less resistance to change …)
Rank each pain your products and services according to their intensity for your customer. Is it very intense or very light?
For each pain indicate how often it occurs.
Risks your customer experiences or could experience before, during, and after getting the job done?
Describe how your products and services alleviate customer pains. How do they eliminate or reduce negative emotions, undesired costs and situations, and risks your customer experiences–or could experience–before, during, and after getting the job done?
Do they:
- Produce savings? (e.g. in terms of time, money, or efforts, …)
- Make your customers feel better? (e.g. kills frustrations, annoyances, things that give them
- a headache, …)
- Fix under-performing solutions? (e.g. new features, better performance, better quality, …)
- Put an end to difficulties and challenges your customers encounter? (e.g. make things easier, helping them get done, eliminate resistance, …)
- Wipe out negative social consequences your customers encounter or fear? (e.g. loss of face, power, trust, or status, …)
- Eliminate risks your customers fear? (e.g. financial, social, technical risks, or what could go awfully wrong, …)
Gain Creators
Describe how your products and services create customer gains. How do they create benefits your customer expects, desires or would be surprised by, including functional utility, social gains, positive emotions, and cost savings?
Do they:
- Create savings that make your customer happy? (e.g. in terms of time, money and effort, …)
- Produce outcomes your customer expects or that go beyond their expectations? (e.g. better quality level, more of something, less of something, …)
- Copy or outperform current solutions that delight your customer? (e.g. regarding specific features, performance, quality, …)
- Make your customer’s job or life easier? (e.g. flatter learning curve, usability, accessibility, more services, lower cost of ownership, …)
- Create positive social consequences that your
- Customer desires? (e.g. makes them look good, produces an increase in power, status, …)
- Do something customers are looking for? (e.g. good design, guarantees, specific or more features, …)
- Fulfill something customers are dreaming about?(e.g. help big achievements, produce big reliefs, …)
- Produce positive outcomes matching your customer’s success and failure criteria? (e.g. better performance, lower cost, …)
- Help make adoption easier? (e.g. lower cost, less investments, lower risk, better quality, performance, design, …)
Rank each gain your products and services create according to its relevance to your customer. Is it substantial or insignificant? For each gain indicate how often it occurs.
I Need You!!!
I would like you to become involved with this process, because the more people involved, the better the conceptual ideation. If we knock this about in an in depth manner, we can delve deeper into our prospects, as they are right now. Normally, the canvas would be segmented, so we could have several documents that delve deep into each segment of prospect that we come across.
I think we should start at the beginning, let’s look at people who have hearing loss generally. So these are the rules and objectives of the canvas: the canvas will be stored on a Trello board. That means that everyone can have access to it. There are six lists that cover the six areas of the canvas.
You can add anything under those lists in cards, those cards can also be dragged from one list to another. The card you add can be just a title, but I also implore you to add a description.
Trello is AWESOME! You can add videos, images or documents to any card you add. This is perhaps the coolest project ideation tool available–I love it. Get to know it and to dive in with me to really explore and understand our prospects. This understanding will help secure our future.
You can join Trello at: https://trello.com/geoffreycooling/recommend. Then you can view the canvas board at https://trello.com/b/0OcCZwQs/hearing-industry-value-proposition-canvas
*Featured image courtesy KSU
Geoffrey Cooling is the co-founder of Audiology Engine, a company offering web services to hearing healthcare. He is a qualified hearing aid dispenser in Ireland and worked in private practice. Following private practice he began work for a major hearing instrument manufacturer. Geoffrey has written about online strategies and business development for hearing healthcare on the Just Audiology Stuff blog since 2009. He has a passion for futurism, technology, online marketing and business development.
