Reinventures' seven-phase engagement model

Reinventures' seven-phase engagement model

First, know that Reinventures’ engagement modalities are as diverse as the clients we serve, and are custom-tailored to every assignment. These range from value-proposition workshops to executive education, team coaching, project consulting, executive seminars and off-sites, and more. Dr. Lynn Phillips’ Reinventures team is rounded out with associates across the globe with MBAs from top business schools, as well as line-management experience.

That said, it can be helpful to see how a typical Reinventures seven-phase engagement model is structured, so an example is provided below.

Phase 1: Situation Analysis. Working with you and the key team members you designate, Reinventures will refine the market analysis for the specified business opportunities, identifying your company’s lineup of de facto value propositions (VPs) and value delivery systems (VDSs) in each. How well are they delivering value to customers and shareholders alike? How vulnerable are they to recent discontinuities and global mega-trends?

Phase 2: Common Language and Mindset. The Delivering Winning Value Propositions (DWVP) workshop, conducted by Dr. Lynn Phillips, will establish a common customer-centric language and mindset for your business teams’ journeys. The session will give participants the tools and protocols they need in order to gain an imaginative understanding of customers’ unmet needs, while gaining the teams’ buy-in for the reinvention effort, and paving the way for the delivery of profitable value.

Phase 3: Groundwork for Field Research. This is the foundation for the upcoming day-in-the-life-of-the-customer, or DITLOC, field research (the DTILOC research itself is Phase 4). Here, we’ll distill current knowledge about the “videotape” of unmet customer needs in the targeted spaces and segments, replete with role-playing exercises to help formulate “going-in” hypotheses regarding the most promising specific opportunities, and prime the pump for the upcoming DITLOC interviews.

Phase 4: “Day-In-The-Life-Of-Customers” (DITLOC) Field Research. In this phase, we will study a sample of the actual people whose lives we want to better understand, in order to pinpoint their problems and unmet needs, many of which they themselves may be unaware of. And we’ll subdivide the market into actionable customer groups—beyond our initial Phase 3 hypotheses—defined by the VP(s) and VDS(s) needed to win their preference. Typically, 10 to 15 in-person interviews will be conducted for each of the selected market opportunities, with Dr. Phillips personally facilitating the initial interviews, coaching the team members during this vital interaction in order to glean the most valuable insights.

Phase 5: VP/VDS Architecture. Drawing from the insights gained during the DITLOC interviews, we will work with your teams to develop new and improved customer scenarios, defined by the superior value propositions (VPs) and value delivery systems (VDSs) that we would need to execute in order to improve these target customers’ lives. This would be the articulation of the “to-be” worlds we would propose, which would creatively solve the customers’ current problems in ways they can’t conceive on their own. The designed VPs, for example, would define the combination of customer experiences and price, including trade-offs, which would motivate customers to choose our solutions over competing alternatives.

Phase 6: Concept Testing. Narrative concept descriptions—which can quickly (and economically) be used to socialize the new experience scenarios with customers—will be created at this point. The team members, assisted directly by Reinventures, will re-visit selected customers to “road test” these new customer experiences to get customers’ feedback, to confirm that the newly-minted VPs will indeed be winners, and/or require revision as needed (in the next phase).

Phase 7: VP/VDS Finalization. In this phase, we will choose, revise, and launch the new VP/VDS lineup to reinvent the business and drive growth. This entails evaluating the finalist “vital few” VPs and VDSs which have emerged from the previous phases, documenting them, and developing the business cases for the most promising ones. Certain team members will be tasked with estimating the potential market scale, revenues, and marginal costs associated with extending services into these new spaces. Once authorized, the teams will launch the newly-minted business initiatives.