Strategy Process Associates Services

ValueForge Process

The best customer engagements validate and enhance Strategy & Planning, rather than hold an impressive event.

Customers agree.

For example, our Breakthrough Board consists of a handful of carefully selected Customer Advisors that are provided insight into the vendors product plans, and provide candid feedback on plans, timelines, and directions.

Our work with you is divided into the following segments that follow the life of the Strategy - Planning function:

Services Across Your Value Chain

ValueForge is our process that creates new value for you. To do that, we synergize good practice from many fields — market research, CRM, strategy and planning, product management, marketing, sales, human relations, etc. We study your company's offerings and strategic intent. We assess key customer strategies, and their strategic intent. We find the best touch points between them, and develop a regular relationship - research process to mine that area. It culminates in a Council format to bring the parties together, and achieve breakthroughs. We use the results to enhance strategy and execution. Each customer engagement cycle builds on the previous one, and goes deeper and wider.

Practices and Services

ValueForge	Consistent process, regularly injecting customer intent into your strategy process
Breakthrough Board	Strategy Enhancing Customer Satisfaction
Technical Forum	Focused Forums for Technical Stakeholders
Executive Council	Building Synergy with Executive Customers
Strategy & Customer Satisfaction Advisories	Experienced, Independent Assessment: Are your efforts working?
Associated Services	Assessment, Recommendation, and Organizational Development Strategic Deliverables

These services can be combined to meet your express needs. No matter which service you employ, our work with you is divided into segments that follow the life of the Strategy / Planning function, enhanced to deliver on the Value Forge promise:

Discover:	We reach agreement on the objectives and scope of the process, and initial learnings about the product and the strategy. Externally, we interview the customers, and gauge the approaches they could use in response to your efforts.
Integrate:	We synergize what you want to do, what the customers want to do, and how many positive touch points there might be between them. We create an agenda and presentations is a step along this path, which reaches a peak with the interaction at the Breakthrough Board itself.
Implement:	We help you continually improve the process by constantly testing and refining your strategy with your evolving customer base. This process culminates with the actions you accomplish after each Board.
Iterate:	We help you make constant / regular use of Board results to enhance your strategy, improve the next engagement, and obtain even better strategy inputs.

How It Works

How it Works for Vendors

Vendors constantly face the issue of too much to deliver with too few resources. The problem isn’t that there aren’t enough requirements. It’s that there are too many requirements. How to prioritize? Involve representative, target customers to help you deliver on time and on budget. Strategy Process Associates will apply our techniques to help determine which core and future requirements resonate best with your ideal customers, thereby ensuring better ROI.

How it Works for Mergers & Acquisitions

In most mergers, the majority of goals are never realized, productivity falls significantly, customers enter due diligence mode, and cultures fail to coalesce. How much better to have a customer focus during M&A, and use the core needs of the newly combined customer base to help guide integration. Strategy Process Associates helps you create that focus, and align your resources with the decisions customers will make in the transition. The result is a smoother transition, quicker integration, and lower costs along the way.

It Can Work for You

How it Works for Venture Capitalists

Strategy Process Associates becomes part of your regular process to vet potential investment candidates. We use the appropriate combination of the above techniques to check out whether there might be potential to justify investment. Will the investment candidate’s customer base adequately reward their product / service concept? Since most investments fail because of business reasons rather than technical ones, such a step is quite prudent. Once you make an investment in a new client, we then regularly check to see if the customer base is still positively inclined. If not, we suggest ways to reinvigorate them, either by changing strategy in communications, marketing, sales, development or partnering.

How it Works for Large IT Shops

Large IT organizations have many of the same stakeholder issues as do the hardware and software vendors. Strategy Process Associates works with you to treat internal customers as a marketplace, using the techniques described above to assess their requirements in a disciplined yet adaptable manner. The benefit is happier stakeholders, greater clarity of requirements, and more demonstrable results, leading to much more positive conversations at budget time.

How it Works for User Groups, Supplier Associations, etc.

Any stakeholder group is a marketplace of ideas, and is amenable to Strategy Process Associates approach.