From opportunity to execution…

Over the past year, TeamFit and Ibbaka have been working closely on a series of projects to connect skills to market opportunities. One project has been research into the skills needed for pricing excellence, which is feeding the development of the Open Competency Model for Pricing Excellence. Our joint customers are interested in making the most effective investments in skill development and understanding what skills are needed to deliver value to customers (which Ibbaka refers to as V2C). To do this, they need to be able to map from their market to their talent in order to deliver business outcomes like innovation, category creation and sustainable growth.

Learn more about the combination from an Ibbaka Market perspective here.

To move forward more rapidly, Nugg Solutions Corp. (the company that operates TeamFit) has acquired Ibbaka and we are integrating the people , offers and technology platforms (Ibbaka has a powerful set of technologies for finding clusters in data that can be applied to areas like skill analysis and team building). We are going to call the combined business Ibbaka and the two offers Ibbaka Talent and Ibbaka Market. The following pyramid is how the pieces fit together.

Understanding how you create value is critical

By connecting insights about how value is created for customers, to the skills needed to deliver that value, organizations can become much more strategic about skills and developing capabilities, today and in the future.

Here is a practical example. Many of our customers use customer journey maps to understand the experience that customers have as they interact with a company. Some of our customers are even using employee journey maps. A customer journey map defines the series of touchpoints at which the customer interacts across the lifecycle, from first awareness, to consideration, deciding to engage, adopting a solution to getting value over the full customer lifecycle. At each touchpoint, value should be created for the customer.

Value is an exchange between the two parties. To consistently create and deliver value, there has to be a shared understanding. This is what the Ibbaka Market piece adds to the equation. Ibbaka Market has a way to model the Economic, Emotional and Community value drivers that frame value. But just framing and communicating value is not enough. You have to be able to deliver it as well.

Delivering value requires skills

It requires skills on both sides of exchange. Take your customer journey map and think about each of the touchpoints. Hopefully, there is value being delivered and realized at each touchpoint. To execute well here, the people delivering the value each need certain skills. Just as important though, is that people need skills to realize value. Failure to understand this is why so many new products and services fail.

The emerging best practice is to model the skills needed on both sides all along the customer journey. This is what Ibbaka Talent (formerly TeamFit) brings to Ibbaka Market customers, as well as those interested solely in the Ibbaka Talent offering. Complementary and connecting skills come into play here. Complementary skills are those skills that are generally held by two different people but are more powerful when used together. One needs to map complementary skills across the gap between the two organizations. In the case of organizations adopting Ibbaka Talent, one of our customers, the medical technology company BD (Becton Dickinson), has excellent skills in learning and development innovation. This complementary skill set is one of the keys to our successful partnership (the other is trust).

Connecting skills are a bit different from complementary skills. These are skills that are shared between people, skills that they use to communicate with each other. Building connecting skills is also important to partnership. The number of connecting skills should grow along the customer journey, on both sides of the gap. The Ibbaka Market team frames each engagement with a knowledge transfer session where they help customers learn new pricing skills. At the same time, the Ibbaka Team is learning about the customer’s offer, market and technology. Complementary skills are why partnering is valuable, but without connecting skills partnerships fail.

Ibabka Talent and Ibaka Market provide an integrate solution

Let’s go deeper into the Ibbaka pyramid to see what all of the pieces are and how all the pieces fit together.

Underlying Ibbaka Talent is the Ibbaka Talent Platform, with its Skill Profiles and Competency Management modules. Used together, they help an individual, a team, a company understand its skill differentiation, and identify where there is strategic advantage.

On the Ibbaka Market side, work is centered on understanding the market structure (segmentation through to customer targeting) and the design of pricing.

The key business challenges we solve are …

• Understand how your organization’s skills drive your competitive advantage so that you can invest in maintaining and sharpening that advantage

• Develop the skills you need (and that your customers need) to deliver innovations to market

• Target your skill and learning and development investments to where they will have the most impact

When skills and competencies align with your market strategy and the market strategy is supported by the capabilities you need to succeed you are positioned to achieve sustainable growth.