Chapter 1 Companion Page
Where Value Lives
The product may not have changed at all. What changed was the customer’s world. This companion page helps you apply that deceptively simple idea to a real strategic account.
Welcome to the Chapter 1 Companion Page
Chapter 1 introduces the central argument of Where Value Lives: value is not something a supplier can simply manufacture, attach to an offer and declare to the customer.
The customer ultimately decides whether value exists.
This page takes the ideas from the chapter a little further. You’ll find some additional comments from Fred, practical reflection questions, an AI prompt and a downloadable diagnostic that you can apply to a real customer relationship.
For the exercises on this page, choose one genuine account — preferably an important and slightly awkward one. Real accounts expose assumptions far more effectively than hypothetical ones.
Fred’s Comments
The Product Didn’t Change. The Customer’s World Did.
The bottle-of-water example at the beginning of this chapter is deliberately simple. In fact, that is probably why I like it.
We spend a remarkable amount of time in business trying to explain why our products and services are valuable. We produce value propositions, benefit statements, sales presentations and increasingly elaborate marketing material.
Yet the bottle of water hasn’t become more sophisticated because somebody is thirsty.
The product hasn’t changed at all. The customer’s circumstances have.
I think that distinction is enormously important in Strategic Account Management.
When an account team tells me that its solution offers “significant value”, my instinct is to ask three questions:
To whom?
In what circumstances?
How do you know?
Those three questions can make an account meeting considerably less comfortable. They can also make it considerably more useful.
A technical director may value something because it reduces implementation risk. Finance may value the same solution because it improves predictability. An operational manager may simply value the fact that it makes Tuesday afternoons less painful.
And somebody else in the same customer organisation may not value it very much at all.
That doesn’t necessarily mean the product is poor. It means that value isn’t sitting inside the product waiting to be discovered.
It is being judged.
One practical habit I would encourage after reading this chapter is to listen to the language your own organisation uses. Count how often you hear phrases such as our value proposition, our differentiators, our unique capabilities and the value we provide.
Then ask the uncomfortable question:
Would the customer describe our value in the same way?
If we don’t know, that is probably a more useful discovery than another slide explaining why we are wonderful.
That is where I would start.
— Fred
Key Takeaways
- Value is defined by the customer, not declared by the supplier.
- A product or service does not possess a fixed amount of value.
- Context changes value. Need, timing, pressure, risk, expectation and consequences all influence the customer’s judgement.
- Supplier effort is not evidence of customer value.
- Different people inside the same customer organisation can recognise very different forms of value.
- The essential SAM question is not simply “What value do we provide?” It is “What does this customer value — and how do we know?”
Chapter 1 Download
Value Recognition Diagnostic
Use this practical diagnostic with one real strategic account to separate what your organisation says creates value from the evidence that the customer actually recognises it.
The diagnostic includes:
Supplier Claims vs Customer Evidence
The Context Test
The Five-Inches Test
The One-Account Challenge
PDF companion resource • Chapter 1 of Where Value Lives
Questions to Take Back to Your Account Team
- What do we currently claim this customer values?
- Which of those claims are supported by actual customer evidence?
- Who inside the customer organisation recognises that value?
- Would different stakeholders describe our value differently?
- What has recently changed in the customer’s context that could increase or decrease our relevance?
- What do we currently call “value” that may actually be a feature, capability or supplier assumption?
- If we disappeared tomorrow, what would the customer genuinely miss?
Try This With AI
AI is particularly useful here as a thinking partner — provided you don’t allow it to invent customer insight that you don’t actually possess.
Copy the prompt below into ChatGPT or your preferred AI assistant and replace the bracketed sections with information about one real account.
Tip: Don’t ask AI to tell you what the customer thinks. Use it to help identify what you still need to discover from the customer.
Watch the Chapter 1 Recap
Keep Exploring Where Value Lives
The companion resources are designed to help you move from reading the ideas to applying them. As you work through the book, keep returning to one question:
What does this customer actually recognise as valuable — and what evidence do we have?
Chapter 2 takes the argument further by examining why even apparently universal truths about value become meaningful only when they are placed in the customer’s context.