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SPANNING THREE DECADES OF VALUE MANAGEMENT LEADERSHIP

DECEMBER 13, 2002

Are You Dancing With Your Customers?

“ Successful VM Projects Require You To Learn How To Dance.”

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Robert T. Yokl - President - The HCP Group, Ltd.

Remember when we first learned how to dance, we spent a lot of time making mistakes and stepping on our partner’s toes.  But once we learned what makes our partner tick we found that there is nothing like dancing, because we were in perfect harmony with our partner.  This is because we found (through trial and error) what moves to make to suit our partner’s specific needs and wants and how to address them suitably. When you can anticipate our partner’s every move and understand why our partner wants to move this way or that way, we can only then understand their “mindset”. 

Understanding Our Customer’s “Mindset”

Just like dancing, conducting successful value studies requires us to understand the ‘mindset” of our customers. This will enable us to know what moves to make, so that we can guide our customers to identify their true needs and wants (or functions), not what we think they need or want. Webster tells us that the meaning of “mindset” is a state of mind or a way of thinking about things, which by definition makes it apparent to me that we can’t ever really know our customers “mindset” until we discern what they are thinking about the products, services and technologies they are buying. 

I can’t tell you how many times healthcare executives have told me that they believe their Doc’s “mindset” is always, “negative when it comes to changing their practices, products or technologies, so there is no way they can save money if it involves their Doc’s”.  In fact, our experience has demonstrated just the opposite, that Docs will change their practices, products or technologies if you truly understand their “mindset”. This can be done by either dancing with them perfectly in order to move them to a new “mindset” (lower cost alternative), or by raising their consciousness to the fact that there is much waste and inefficiency in their present practices, products or technologies that you can fix to make their job better or easier while giving them equal or improved outcomes. But first, you must “become your customer” to make these savings and quality gains happen!

Becoming Our Customers By Becoming Customer-Obsessed

The only way to understand our customer’s “mindset” is to “become our customers”. The only way to “become our customers” is to get deep, deep inside our customer’s heads by asking questions like these: What do our customers want or need? What do our customers worry about?  How did they first come to use the products, services or technologies they are buying now? What would happen if they made a change?  We then observe how they use them in the real world.

Getting into our customer’s head isn’t easy, but it can be done if we become “Customer-Obsessed”.  By “Customer-Obsessed” I mean that you need to be preoccupied with the thoughts and feelings of your customers at all times. Your own thoughts and feelings come second, third or even last in the scheme of things, because the customer is king in the world of value management. In fact, value management begins and ends with our customers.

Robert T. Yokl, President, The HCP Group, Ltd., has over 35 years of experience as a consultant and manager in the field of Supply/Value Chain Management and is one of the country's leading healthcare experts in value analysis, value engineering and materials management. He is the developer and program leader of the award winning Certified Value Analysis Practitioner Training Program™. Mr. Yokl is also the developer of the healthcare industry's leading ValueNetCentral™ Value Analysis Software. Over the past two decades he has trained thousands of healthcare managers in his patented Strategic Value Analysis™ and Team-Based Project Management™ processes and has assisted scores of organizations in developing their own value management programs. He has published six books, videos and audios on supply/value chain management. His latest book being, “ Strategic Value Analysis™: The #1 Smart Strategy for Taking Cost Out of a Healthcare Organizations’ Supply/Value Chain”.