Chapter 2 Resources

Where Value Lives • Chapter 2 Companion

Truth, Context and Best Value

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.

Welcome to the Chapter 2 Companion Page

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.

Fred’s Comments

The Truth May Be Universal. The Meaning Is Not.

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

“The truth is universal. The expression of the truth is contextual.” — Fred Mills, Where Value Lives

Key Takeaways

  • Customers may share the same broad objective while defining best value very differently.
  • Technical quality and customer-recognised quality are not always the same thing.
  • A supplier’s value story is only useful when it connects to the customer’s actual priorities, pressures and consequences.
  • Context determines how concepts such as quality, reliability, speed, risk reduction and flexibility are interpreted.
  • Generic value claims become strategically useful only when translated into customer-specific meaning.
  • The question is not simply “Is this true?” but “What does this truth mean to this customer, in this context, at this moment?”

Chapter 2 Download

Contextual Value Workbook

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

Download the Contextual Value Workbook

PDF companion resource • Chapter 2 of Where Value Lives

Questions to Take Back to Your Account Team

  1. What does “best value” appear to mean to this customer right now?
  2. Which of our standard value statements are genuinely relevant to this account?
  3. Which words do we use — such as quality, innovation or reliability — without knowing how the customer defines them?
  4. How might different stakeholders interpret the same proposition differently?
  5. Where are we relying on technical excellence without proving customer recognition?
  6. What would make our current offer more valuable in the customer’s present context?
  7. What important contextual change could make today’s value story irrelevant tomorrow?

Try This With AI

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.

Act as a Strategic Account Management thinking partner. I want to test whether our current value proposition is genuinely contextualised to one customer’s situation. Customer: [Describe the customer] Current priorities: [Insert] Current pressures and constraints: [Insert] Relevant stakeholders: [Insert] Our current value proposition: [Insert] The qualities/capabilities we emphasise: [Insert] Using the principle that “the truth is universal, but the expression of the truth is contextual”: 1. Identify the broad claims in our value proposition. 2. For each claim, explain how its meaning could change depending on the customer’s context. 3. Suggest how different stakeholders might interpret concepts such as quality, reliability, speed, innovation, risk reduction and flexibility. 4. Identify where our current proposition is supplier-centred rather than customer-centred. 5. Separate what we know from what we are merely assuming. 6. Suggest 10 questions we should ask the customer to understand what “best value” actually means to them. 7. Rewrite our value proposition in a more customer-contextual form, but clearly label the rewrite as a hypothesis until validated. 8. Finish with the three most important contextual factors we need to understand before making a strategic recommendation. Do not invent customer facts. Clearly distinguish evidence, inference and hypothesis.

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.

Keep Exploring Where Value Lives

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.

← Back to Chapter 1 Continue to Chapter 3 →