This month meet Chris Cooper of the CFO Centre WA, a member of our Industry Expert panel, and discover how differentiating your value
offering can help you unstick potential customers from their current supplier.
CFO stands for Chief Financial Officer and is often the key role in partnering the CEO or business owner. Key areas that CFO focuses on including driving business growth, securing funding and working capital, business systems development and delivering on the financial side of strategy.
I became a CFO after several years of being an auditor, a Finance Manager and a Financial Controller for medium to large businesses. A
CFO typical has 10-15 years financial experience in addition to an accounting qualification.
In my experience with SME’s and larger businesses I see more of a focus on the technical or functional aspects of a product and service
and whilst these aspects can qualify you in or out, they rarely language the problem that the customer is trying to solve or the
emotional value that customers are looking for such as reducing anxiety, personal reward and positive engagement. In other words the
emotional hooks are typically subsidiary to selling functional value.
Functional values such as saving time, making money, quality, reducing effort and cost are important but from a customer’s perspective
they don’t easily unhook a customer from their existing supplier or other resource allocation choices. A value proposition needs to be
framed from the customers perspective, be empathic (without being patronising) to engage, attract and unstick customers from their
current choice of supplier.
Its always beneficial to have a capability that affords your business the ability to claim that it provides a product or service
differently however what is more important is to have a capability that addresses needs that are unmet by your industry and / or that are
sought after by your target customers. This is an even more important strategic cornerstone for SME businesses that aspire to scale and
grow.
A local hose and fittings supplier was tendering against much larger competition for work with Rio Tinto. Their products and
services were of the highest quality however their thinking was somewhat constrained by focusing on their relatively high price
point; meaning they felt they could not win the tender without significant margin erosion. I identified an opportunity to
differentiate their value by quantifying downtime reductions ahead of price. Rio then used their approach to evaluate the
competition and they won them the tender. The outcome was achieved through shifting how they conceived of their value offering and
point of difference.
The workshops are visually orientated and are about having owners, MDs and their teams to work on their business throughout their
duration so that they overcome positioning concerns and emerge with confidence and clarity about their value proposition.
Two outcomes that SME’s recognise is that
An SME can spend many years and wasted effort competing on factors that don’t matter that much to their target customers.
The CFO Centre provides part time Chief Financial Officers to SME’s, which provides owners the opportunity to leverage the benefit
of an experienced business growth expert to help manage finances and drive financial performance and growth.
The value proposition and differentiation design concepts I deliver are a very different offering to that of a CFO and allow me to
really get under the bonnet of a business model and advise SME owners on their product and service strategy whilst my financial
skills ensure that there is an equally strong focus on revenue, profit and cashflow growth.
To receive more information on Chris' value offering presentation, please contact jodie@waleaders.com.au
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