Beyond the Checklist: Rethinking How Organizations Deliver Value

Today’s issue of The Great Realization is guest-authored by MBO Partners Chief Operating Officer Audra Nichols

The definition of value seems straightforward. It’s how much a product or service is worth to a client. Companies measure it every day.

In reality, it’s subjective. It will cost each client the same amount to buy your service, but the value will differ for each buyer. This is because value is perceived - it is the opinions, feelings, and beliefs generated from the clients’ interactions with every person in your organization as you deliver.

Traditional methods of delivering value often rely on checklists and standard procedures. While these ensure consistency, they can also limit creativity and slow down response times to market changes. You might miss out on innovation and improvement opportunities by sticking to old ways. You might get stale. You might overlook the opportunity to deliver real value. You know, the kind your buyers talk about.

Rethinking What Value Means

Rethinking value starts with putting the client at the heart of everything. Understand their needs, preferences, and pain points, and tailor your offerings accordingly. This doesn’t mean your service becomes non-standard, which admittedly can create more cost for you. It means you’re willing to go the distance with them, innovating and co-creating, while listening, understanding, and acting on new ideas.

Too often, service-based organizations fall for the trap of looking at how they successfully service a client as part of a static and pre-agreed plan, where “delivery” can easily devolve into checking boxes and moving to the next step. It’s efficient but can be perceived as rote. It’s repeatable but misses the importance of the relationship.

This often requires big changes in your culture, processes, and structures. Managing this change can be tough, involving overcoming resistance, aligning stakeholders, and ensuring effective communication. Leaders play a key role in guiding the organization through this type of transformation, all with a commitment to the client.

The Result: Organizations that “do” a lot while delivering little real value to clients; and cultures that don’t champion genuine value delivery.

The inescapable reality is that client needs evolve and become more apparent through authentic relationships.

Service providers who reduce complex requirements and key results to a linear sequence of tasks that are accomplished based on a checklist lose sight of that evolution.

In a client engagement where true value is delivered, completing project tasks cannot and should not take precedence over assessing the impact of the work provided.

For example, a staffing firm might fulfill its contractual obligations by filling a quota of positions within a set timeframe. But without ongoing pulse checks and asking questions like “Are these hires truly meeting our client’s needs?” or “Did accomplishing this operational task help us address our client’s strategic goals?” The importance of real value can be lost because impact isn’t being measured in the first place.

Delivering Value

Delivering services in today’s staffing and services landscape has become commoditized because “rendering services” has become synonymous with printing invoices and growing revenue.?

While revenue growth is certainly of value to a service provider, delivering pre-packaged solutions that are blind to a client’s real needs is a fast track to a purely transactional relationship that, more often than not, won’t end well.

Instead, value creation begins with a shift from a box-checking mindset to a relationship-based approach that prioritizes achieving a client’s business goals, not once, but over and over again.

This involves developing a true partnership with clients. Service providers must work to understand what their clients need, tailoring solutions for problems, advising them when they ask for services they might not necessarily need and helping them understand what truly works for their business, whether it’s a “standard service offering” or not.

In other words, to truly bring value, you must engage clients as collaborators in achieving strategic goals and not treat your working relationship as purely transactional.

In a market where earning the trust of clients and keeping them for life is a consistent challenge, success hinges on your ability to generate value with every interaction and create client relationships that transcend simply saying “I delivered what I said I would.”

In the last few years, we’ve seen the concept of “services” become commoditized beyond worthiness of the word. As client acquisition becomes more challenging, I believe organizations that re-evaluate how they truly deliver value will rise above this growing commoditization, forging stronger and more meaningful business relationships as they do.?

It’s time that organizations rethink how they genuinely provide value to their clients.