In today's dynamic and competitive business environment, the quest to maximize value is a constant driving force. Enter product value management (PVM), a new software category focused on maximizing the value of product portfolios with insights, collaboration, and engagement across the entire value chain.
PVM not only drives value for the customer but also infuses value into every facet of the business.
Below are the five key value drivers that form the backbone of a robust and effective PVM strategy.
Leverage Propel PVM to optimize product portfolios and maximize customer lifetime value by connecting everybody who touches your products and customers. Learn more.
1. Growing the Business
In a recent survey, Propel found the number one top-of-mind concern among business leaders on both the product and commercial teams is revenue growth.
With its core benefits of providing a continuous product thread and immersive collaboration, PVM drives growth implicitly.
A single, cohesive product thread unifies the activities of all teams. This means the same product record that’s owned by product teams can be accessed and enriched by commercial teams and stays in sync as changes happen.
This also means the product team can access on-demand visibility of customer requirements and sales forecasts, allowing them to determine the best design, sourcing, and production strategies, and to secure volume purchase discounts from suppliers.
On the flip side, ecommerce teams can work with confidence and in parallel with product development to ready channels for product introduction prior to product release. Sales and marketing teams can begin omnichannel commercialization efforts earlier in the process, shortening the time to revenue for new products.
2. Delivering Innovative Products and Sources of Value
In a market teeming with competition all clamoring for the attention of a more demanding consumer base, businesses have to take big swings to capture and maintain market differentiation.
It's a fine needle to thread, continuously identifying and delivering innovative products with unique sources of value.
Threading the all-important needle of differentiation relies on speed. Market share is more competitive than ever, and you need a setup that is fast to deploy, easy to use and train on, as well as to onboard.
At the same time, it requires powerful tech that can support uptime and a massive ecosystem for a massive marketplace.
Because PVM provides real-time data visibility—including customer feedback—to everyone along the value chain, creating innovative products and product experiences is a much easier and speedier process.
The magic ingredient to customer engagement is a single system across the entire enterprise. When product and customer-facing teams are unified and the system of record is contained, creative decisions for improving customer experiences and maintaining engagement can happen quickly and effectively.
As marketing and ecommerce work in parallel with product development in the system, they can create rich experiences based on the entire lifecycle of the product, which provide confidence and boost excitement for customers before the next launch cycle. Moreover, they can cater their content for effective, accurate, and specified omnichannel enablement.
3. Increasing Enterprise Productivity & Profitability
Fifty percent of IT teams state slow productivity is a top-of-mind concern, according to a recent Propel survey. And when there’s lower productivity across every stage of the value chain, companies stand to lose revenue and market share.
In a standard serial structure that requires manual handoffs from team to team, the process itself is not only slower, it’s also prone to efficacy issues like data loss and lack of visibility to changes.
When all product information (SKU, technical specs, part numbers, branding, content, images, etc.) lives in a single platform, it creates a single source of product truth in which all teams can work simultaneously.
Propel Software’s PVM solution is built on Salesforce, a powerful, secure, flexible platform with a familiar, intuitive user interface. The superpower that makes the platform so configurable is its business application development framework called Lightning Web Components (LWC).
The customizable components in LWC tick all of the boxes for user-friendly composable architecture: open API, drag-and-drop, highly visual, with no code or low code required.
Plus, these types of composable solutions are highly capable of integration. When you connect all of your most critical business systems and make their output and data accessible in one global platform, less time is wasted with employees jumping from one application to another.
When you take all of the ingredients above and add in a dash of custom components designed especially for the needs of product development, sales, and service, you have a recipe for PVM success.
4. Optimize Customer Experience
When the customer is king every move your business makes needs to cater to improving their experience with your product and brand. Delivering compelling experiences across all touchpoints of the customer journey can and will set you apart from the competition.
Yet every marketer faces the same problem: the need to aggregate and manage product data from disparate sources, hunting down all the information they need in different email threads, Google Docs, and wherever else it’s hidden away.
When they share a common platform with product development teams, all this hunting is eliminated and they can deliver on their go-to-market plans faster. And by analyzing and optimizing enterprise data, they can create richer, more valuable content to unlock revenue growth.
Furthermore, customizable training capabilities built into a PVM platform help to activate sales teams and distribution partners to speed ROI. For every new product, feature, or initiative, training can be designed quickly and effectively to match the needs of each particular business and each particular team.
Similarly, by keeping every member of the organization connected, those on the product development team can see relevant new cases as they appear directly from the field service team. Case management solutions can be tied to specific products to trace field issues to product designs.
In this same way, customer complaints and quality assurance investigations can be resolved smoothly to improve product safety and customer loyalty. Where needed, businesses can implement closed-loop quality workflows across service and product teams, and integrate PLM and QMS for complete visibility on Corrective and Preventive Actions (CAPAs) for customer compliance.
5. Mitigate Corporate Risks
With risk around every corner, there are many areas of exposure that increase a company’s chances of getting hobbled—or even taken out completely—by a disruption to their value chain. That may be why IT leaders ranked risk mitigation as their third most pressing departmental concern, a recent Propel survey shows.
With the single-system approach implicit in PVM, businesses can secure continuity by mitigating potential sources of risk, including those related to supply disruption, regulatory compliance, litigation, data sharing, and information security.
With built-in workflow automation, any potential risks are flagged and disseminated instantaneously so teams can work together to solve the problem while simultaneously reassuring customers (if needed).
Propel’s PVM solution is built on a cloud-based collaboration platform that has supplier lifecycle management built right in. When you’re working within a single system that tracks everything in real-time, you’re not only strengthening supplier collaboration, you’re dramatically diminishing your risk.
Conclusion
Product value management (PVM) offers a comprehensive solution to the challenges faced by businesses in the modern marketplace. As product companies continue to navigate the complexities of the market, the adoption of PVM is a game-changer, offering a strategic edge in a competitive landscape.
In Chapter 2 of the PVM Handbook, you can read more about each of the five value drivers, including:
- More findings from our survey examining the need for PVM
- Specific areas where PLM falls short
- Real success stories and proof points from companies like MSA Safety, Kierton, & ASP
Click here to read the full handbook, the ultimate guide to value creation and capture.
