365QOD- Day1345

Cost vs. Value

“We have to be the cheapest.”- a leader’s admonition

Recently I worked with a company that had a distinct advantage. Unfortunately almost no one in the company understood the advantage.  Sad!

The company aggressively competed with larger competitors strictly on price.  My questioning of that was met with looks of confusion.  I did not see being the lowest priced bidder as an advantage.  A bigger company can always kill you if you solely compete on price.

The value that the company had and it did not understand was their processes for getting work done and not the cost structure.  I saw this value and contributed by adding a piece to this process in which a customer would be shown a 3D sketch of what the work consisted off.  This would not only educate the customer but make the company stand out as someone who not only understood the customer’s problem but invested in modeling the solution before it even produced it.  Talk about an advantage!

The leadership of the company thought that this was a waste of time and money.  The initial investment of a few hundred dollars on one project helped us win a million dollar contract.  The effort was not appreciated and eventually we parted ways because of the leadership wanting to wage a cost war instead of pursuing the value proposition I pushed for.

Today’s question is:

“How do you compete on value?”