What To Do When Stakeholders Don’t Buy Your Value Offering
there are better angles to take than insisting on it
Hi There – Brian Here
My recent article ‘Want to Know Why Your Stakeholders Don’t Buy the Value You Offer?’ attracted the highest reader engagement since I started writing the weekly Innovation Reframed in 2019.
Businesses don’t buy if they don’t perceive they have an immediate problem.
Let’s look deeper into how your industry body or similar intermediary organisation can act to turn that around.
It begins with hitting the pause button. Don’t double down with ‘pushing’ more and better evidence, communication, and arguments.
Trying to convince a business that they are wrong might feel right, but they won’t be receptive.
Anyway, most people don’t like to be proven wrong.
A better approach is to show that you understand their issues and can offer solutions.
Start by looking externally for an emergent trend that is gathering pace and generating real commercial opportunities and/or pain for the businesses in your industry and then show how you can offer distinctive value.
Pay particular attention to strategic imperatives on the upswing.
Is the pain intense and spreading? Are increasing numbers of businesses in your industry losing money because of this problem? Is reputation risk looming?
Could services from a skilled and competent intermediary organisation like yours provide the right analgesic to ameliorate the pain? Is there scope for you to change the system, rather than just treating the symptoms case by case?
The trends are visible if you’re watching.
An obvious one is that most governments have set ambitious targets for the clean energy transition. However, the system is not that easy to change.
Take the experience of Sunzia in the US, which is investing USD10 billion to build 900 wind turbines in New Mexico and supply electricity to 3 million homes in California.
It has taken 17 years from proposal in 2006 through to development approval last month.
It was not labour or materials or access to capital that were the hold up. It was government permits.
The permitting process reportedly took almost six times longer than it will take to do the construction!
It’s not an anomaly, with some 10,000 energy projects waiting approval in the US.
It is a story replicated in countries all around the world. Australia appears unlikely to hit its climate targets for similar reasons.
In response to the need, consulting firms are pitching their services so they can add to the many reports that describe the problem in ever more detail. Meanwhile, think tanks, academics and media commentators are adding their opinions and criticism.
All those voices, reports and information sit happily under the umbrella of being interesting but useless from a business perspective.
What businesses want are solutions.
They want confidence that a pathway can be charted through the complexity. They want services that will light the way forward.
By the way, governments fundamentally want the same thing here.
Does your organisation have a strategy to find workable solutions for the most pressing issues facing businesses in your industry? Are you engaging with businesses about how these issues are impacting on them? And how you can assist?
Do you have a plan that goes beyond joining the cacophony of voices and turning up the volume of criticism and complaints about a known problem?
Blaming governments in a louder voice is not a solution. Like businesses, they won’t see much value in those seeking to amplify problems they know about.
Organisations prepared to offer a demand-led and collaborative approach to find and implement solutions is a fundamentally different value proposition.
There is a big decision for industry bodies to make here. Collaborating to find and implement lasting solutions is much, much harder than it is describe problems in reports or be a critical voice on the side.
If your services are demand led and focused on finding and implementing solutions, you will automatically stand out from the herd.
It is the basis of a compelling value proposition that industry businesses will want to buy.
Until next week.
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Insights From Others
“Whatever the problem, be part of the solution. Don’t just sit around raising questions and pointing out obstacles.” Tina Fey
“If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.” African Proverb
“If you define the problem correctly, you almost have the solution.” Steve Jobs