Advanced PMO Project: Compelling Marketing Offer

I’ve mentioned an on-going marketing project for advanced PMOs in my “Vision Beyond the Vision” post in the “Choosing the Right PMO Vision” series; this project is developing, and continuously improving, a compelling marketing offer. The way to view this is to ask your customers what they hate about dealing with the industry you are in- NOT what they hate about dealing with you, because that is a different issue.

The idea is to understand, and eliminate, those things that a customer hates about the industry so that you can provide a clear differentiated product offering. One example from Eli Goldratt’s excellent book It’s Not Luck is a boiler company that figured out that their customers had a hard time with maintenance, spare parts, and simply managing the purchase and servicing of the equipment. That company figured out that what they were really providing their customers was a constant flow of power through steam; and then sought out how to do that while eliminating all the problems their customers had to deal with. The result was writing service contracts that provided steam cheaper and more efficiently than ever before- the company provided maintenance that they were better at doing, spare parts that they managed more efficiently, and all the other servicing/replacement requirements on a service type payment schedule. All the things that their customers hated about this industry went away and they were able to drastically decrease the costs of providing steam.

I recently applied the concept to a consulting company that is enhancing it’s PMO creation service offerings. For more on that see my next post. Please share your attempts to develop a compelling marketing offer in your companies. More importantly, what was the process, who did it, and why did it work or not work?