The Value Pricing Dashboard is where you integrate applications across the customer journey

Written By Steven Forth

Steven Forth is a Managing Partner at Ibbaka. See his Skill Profile on Ibbaka Talent.

A lot of data is generated across the customer journey. Innovations platforms, product development applications, marketing automation, sales management (CRM), configure price quote (CPQ), project management, customer service platforms, customer success … where does the data from all of these applications get gathered and put in the context of value?

One of the challenges to integrating all this data is that integration needs a context. Sure, one could dump everything into a data lake, run some analytics, even hook up a data pipeline and hope that machine learning will sort everything out. I have no confidence that will work.

Judea Pearl, who got a Turing award for inventing Bayesian Networks, put his finger on the problem years ago. One needs a framework to interpret the data. Pearl uses causal models to do this, and this will be a big part of the technical solution. But I think we need something simple and more relatable to start with. I propose we use the customer journey as a framework to organize data integration.

Customer journey maps in their many different flavours are seeing increasing use in all parts of business. They were introduced by the service design and customer experience (CX) communities. I have seen many different ways to use them. Leading healthcare companies are using them to organize the ‘patient journey’ and the ‘provider journey’ (providers is the catch all term for everyone who provides care, from orderlies to nurses and doctors).

At Ibbaka, we have added swimlanes (or corridors if you prefer) to customer journey maps for value and pricing. These are intended to capture information on value and pricing. At what touch points is

  • Value communicated (and promised)

  • Value delivered

  • Value documented
    and

  • Price communicated

  • Price (revenues) collected

Note that we have also layered skills into the journey map. Skill growth across the customer journey is especially important for innovation and category creation.

We are now adding two additional swimlanes to some of our journey maps. These are the swimlanes needed to frame data integration. The two swimlanes are

  1. What data should be collected at each touchpoint?

  2. What system can the data be collected from?

By organizing integration along the touchpoints of the customer journey it is easier to understand why and how the data is being collected. At Ibbaka we are primarily concerned with value and price. How value is created, communicated and documented and how to capture that value in price. Our basic method has not changed. Value Drivers remain central to our work. Uncovering and quantifying value divers is where our work starts. But not where it ends.

The value integration ecosystem

Let’s consider the types of data exchange between the key business systems that could informa value and pricing and that touch the customer journey. We think of this as the value integration ecosystem.

The integration ecosystem construct is something that has been getting increasing attention as a business strategy. See What Ecosystem Integration Is And Why Its Time Has Come in Forbes.

What are some of the systems that participate in this ecosystem?

Innovation Management

Innovation management platforms are increasingly used early in innovation to find ways to create new value. The first information about value drivers often surfaces here. These platforms are increasingly looking to cover more of the innovation journey. See our recent conversation with Jessica Day of IdeaScale, one of the vendors active in this space.

Product Development and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)

More and more companies are managing products across the lifecycle and using software platforms to do this. Siemens and PTC are both active players here. The platforms can be used to collect and organize a wide variety of data that helps understand how products deliver value.

Marketing Automation

In today’s world of inbound and content marketing the first touchpoints with customers and potential customers are often managed through marketing automation platforms. At Ibbaka we use Hubspot.

These platforms need to be organized around value messaging and directing messages by stage in the buying process (the buying process being one part of the customer journey) .

Data from these early touchpoints is critical to understanding how the market is responding to the value messages and how to carryout value-based market segmentation.

Sales Management (CRM)

The CRM (Customer Relationship Management but really these systems are mostly used for sales management) are one of the most important integration points. At this point many companies are having real person-to-person conversations and when they are well documented (not always the case) there is a great deal of important data collected and organized. This data can be extremely important to the evaluation of value messages and price. Important but not uniquely important. This data needs to be integrated with other data.

Configure Price Quote (CPQ)

Configure Price Quote (CPQ) solutions have fallen a bit out of fashion since the heyday of Big Machines (acquired by Oracle and rebranded CPQ Cloud). They are poised to re emerge though, and to shift from configuring what can be sold to configuring the solution that optimizes for Value to Customer (V2C) and Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). V2C > LTV. As this evolution accelerates these systems will become a key part of the value ecosystem.

Your Solution

The most important source of data on value should be your own software platform. To the extent possible it should be designed to automatically collect data on the use that is creating value for your customer. Ibbaka takes this into account in designing value and pricing models. For more on this see

A value model will change your business

Value paths are the key to usage-based pricing

Project Management

Once the sale is closed implementation and activation begins. For complex solutions this becomes its own project. As a result project management software like Asana, Basecamp and even Jira are used to manage this work.

Value delivery can break down here as the value promises made by sales are not always communicated to the implementation team. At the same time, the project management records are where one can often find unresolved issues.

An integration can help to automate these insights when implementations are happening at scale.

Customer Service

Customer service applications are where customer issues are tacked and resolved. Knowing if your customers are having issues accessing or using your solution gives great insights into value. This is not a one-to-one relationship. Analysis is needed. But ignore this data at your peril.

Customer Success

With the growing dominance of subscription based models customer success has emerged as a critical business function and is increasingly well supported by software such as Gainsight and Totanga. These applications rival CRMs as the most important species in the ecosystem. There is a lot of work to be done to truly inject value, and value to customer (V2C) into customer success, but this is a key to success. Customer success is often the business function accountable for churn.

The design goal for the Ibbaka Value Pricing Dashboard is to

Connect Value to Price Across the Customer Journey

We will only be able to do this by integrating with the other systems that are part of the value ecology. We invite you to join us on this journey.

Steven Forth
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