What the Technology Cannot Do

Last Thursday Rich and I stood up at Cubs Privé, at the IET on Savoy Place, and did something I have been nervous about for a while. We showed a room full of business owners a tool that takes a one-sentence problem statement, searches the whole library of value, and draws a customer value proposition in about the time it takes to pour a coffee. Then it writes the case, with numbers, evidence and measures, ready for a board.

Thirty years ago that was a month’s work. Now it is an afternoon. And I could see the question forming on faces around the room before anyone asked it: so what is left for me?

The slide the room came back to

The answer was one slide, and it was the one people wanted to talk about afterwards. Two columns. On the left, what the machine does. On the right, what you do.

The machine reads the customer at speed. It searches every source of value, from the bottom line to the customer’s own customer. It drafts the wheel and the words. It pressure-tests the numbers. All of that is true, all of it is getting cheaper by the month, and within a couple of years every one of your competitors will have it too.

You decide the outcomes. You choose the value. You make a promise to your customer. And you walk in and give your word.

The technology is becoming free and universal. Judgement, trust and relationships are not, and they are what the customer is actually buying.

Why this is not a consolation prize

It would be easy to read that right-hand column as the bit we were allowed to keep, like being given the crusts. It is the opposite. Everything on the left is search. Everything on the right is a decision, and decisions are where value is created or lost.

Take the five sources of value. The tool can find twenty ways you might help a customer’s bottom line, top line, reputation, strategy or end consumer, and it will find them faster and more completely than any account manager alive. What it cannot do is know which three of those twenty this particular customer, with this particular board, in this particular year, would pay more for. That is judgement, and judgement is built from years of sitting across tables, not from a training set.

Or take the promise. A customer value proposition is not a document. It is a commitment: we will do this, it will be worth that to you, and here is how we will both know. Software can draft the sentence. It cannot mean it. Only a person can make a promise, because only a person can be held to one, and the customer knows that better than we do.

What changes in the job

If the search is now free, the job of the key account manager moves. Less time reconstructing what the customer said in the spring, more time deciding what to do about it. Less time drafting, more time choosing. Less time proving you did the homework, more time being the one who walks in.

That is a better job. It is also a harder one to hide in. When the machine has done the reading, “I need to go away and think about it” is no longer a reason. The proposition is on the table by lunchtime; the question is whether you have the judgement to pick the right one and the relationship to land it.

Which is why the training we do has not got shorter as the tools have got better. It has moved. We spend less time on how to build a wheel and more on how to choose what goes on it, how to sell it inside your own company before you sell it outside, and how to prove afterwards that the value arrived. The tools do the search. The method is about the decisions.

The three words

At the top of the slide were three words: judgement, trust, relationship. If I had to compress the whole evening into one line it would be this. The technology will soon be everywhere. Those three things cannot be downloaded, and they are the only reason a customer will pay you more than the cheapest alternative.

The full deck from the evening is free to download. The tool we demonstrated is on the ladder on our homepage. And if you want the two-hour session on one of your own customers that we offered the room, the offer stands.

References

Davies, M. (2016) Infinite Value: Accelerating Profitable Growth Through Value-Based Selling. London: Bloomsbury.

Davies, M., Brooks, R. and Holt, S. (2027) Creating Customer Value Propositions with AI. London: Kogan Page. Forthcoming.