How to Win Customers Without Being the Cheapest

Many businesses compete on one thing: the price. Some win another way. They know exactly whom they serve, and they offer an experience those people value more than a slightly lower price.

A business cannot decide what people want. It can only choose whom it serves and how it meets them. That choice is strategy, and it is only as precise as your picture of the people in it.

In this video, a fictitious bank called Flint, a made-up first-time home buyer called Sam and a mortgage adviser called Ravi show how to see the people a strategy serves. You will learn:

• the persona: who someone is, whatever the situation
• the goal: the feeling a person reaches for, which does not change with the situation
• the operating context: a part of the business where it meets people
• the stakeholder: a persona in a context, and the one who holds expectations
• why expectations are the only thing you can measure, and why a metric is still a proxy
• how strategy chooses which promises to keep, and declines others on purpose
• how each feature of the offering ties back to a promise the customer holds
• why the people and partners who supply are stakeholders too, seen through the same lenses
• how a value stick estimates the value created when both sides are served
• why an experience can win against a competitor that sells a commodity on price
• why some customers are a better fit for someone else, and letting them go is part of the strategy

Cisely helps you see both sides of your business in the same terms. The Cisely agent interviews you, reads what you already have, and drafts your personas and their goals. It places each persona in its contexts, as a stakeholder, and notes whom each one acts for. Each expectation shows how well you understand it, metrics measure it over time, and each feature you plan is a user story tied to the expectation it serves. The agent proposes. You make the choices.

Further reading: "Better, Simpler Strategy: A Value-Based Guide to Exceptional Performance" by Felix Oberholzer-Gee. The value stick in this video comes from this book.