A principle can be universally true and still mean something very different to different customers. This chapter companion helps you translate broad claims about value into the customer’s actual context.
Chapter 2 develops one of the central ideas in Where Value Lives: customers may be pursuing the same broad objective — best value — while recognising and expressing that value in very different ways.
The truth may be universal. The expression of that truth is contextual.
The exercises on this page are designed to help you move beyond generic statements such as quality, reliability, innovation or best value and ask what those ideas actually mean inside one customer’s world.
One of the easiest traps in business is to assume that because an idea is true, its meaning must also be obvious.
Take quality.
Most organisations will tell you that quality matters. Of course it does. But that statement alone tells us almost nothing about what the customer will actually recognise as quality.
One customer may experience quality as reliability. Another may experience it as speed. A third may value predictability. Somebody else may simply want fewer internal complaints.
The supplier can be technically excellent and still fail to create recognised value if that excellence is expressed in a way the customer doesn’t care about.
That is why I return so often to the distinction between the truth and the expression of the truth.
The underlying principle may remain intact.
The context changes what the principle means in practice.
This is also why generic value propositions so often disappoint me. They may be perfectly accurate. They may even be beautifully written. But accuracy is not the same as relevance.
If the customer cannot connect the proposition to their own priorities, risks, pressures and consequences, then the supplier is still doing most of the recognising.
A useful discipline is therefore to take any broad statement your organisation makes about value and ask:
What would this mean to this customer? How would they recognise it? What evidence would prove that it mattered?
That is where the interesting work begins.
— Fred
Use this workbook to examine how value changes when broad principles are placed inside one customer’s specific world.
The workbook includes:
The Best Value Lens The Blue Tablet Test Universal Truth, Contextual Expression The Quality Recognition Test This Customer, This Context, This Moment
PDF companion resource • Chapter 2 of Where Value Lives
Use AI here as a translation and challenge tool, not as a substitute for customer discovery.
Copy the prompt below into ChatGPT or your preferred AI assistant and replace the bracketed sections with information about one real account.
Tip: The objective is not to let AI define value for the customer. It is to help expose where your current value story is too generic.
Chapter 2 asks you to move beyond broad value language and examine what those ideas actually mean to one customer.
What does best value mean to this customer, in this context, at this moment?
Chapter 3 moves the argument forward again by examining why Strategic Account Management should not simply be treated as a more sophisticated form of selling.