Value Concept and Relationship Management
Value Concept and Relationship Management pairs two questions that are usually asked separately: what unique value do we actually offer, and are we managing the relationships with the people who receive it well enough to keep delivering it.
Two questions sit side by side, each one scored, then checked against the other to see where they line up.
Reach for this when…
- You know your value proposition on paper but keep losing customers or suppliers anyway.
- Growth has come from new deals, not from deepening the ones you already have.
- A key partner relationship has gone stale and nobody owns fixing it.
How to run it
- Write down the value you actually deliver, not the value you claim to deliver.
- List the stakeholders that value depends on: customers, suppliers, key partners.
- For each one, rate the relationship honestly: transactional, functional, or genuinely close.
- Pick the two relationships most at risk and assign someone to own them.
- Check back quarterly: has the value delivered, and the relationship, actually moved.
A worked example
Situation. Noura Al-Otaibi ran a grain co-operative in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, whose members were quietly selling side volumes to a rival buyer.
Applied. She mapped what the co-op actually delivered, better prices through pooled bargaining, against how the relationship with individual farmers had drifted to a once-a-year newsletter.
Result. She assigned a field officer to each cluster of farms for regular visits instead of mass mail. Side-selling dropped within the next harvest.
The catch
This is a looser tool than most on this list, closer to a discipline than a defined method, and it's easy to fill in the value-proposition half convincingly while the relationship half stays vague. It only works if someone is actually accountable for the relationships named.
A value proposition nobody is managing the relationship around is just a claim.