Managing Risk as Value

While we all believe in the value we offer customers, it's good to explore the ways they might perceive value we provide themselves. Today we’ll focus on ways to help your customers reduce risk and feel safer. You probably know that selling insurance is an old and very profitable business. People really appreciate the peace of mind even if there is no actual improvement in safety. Just the fact that a trusted 3rd party is partially at risk and standing behind them gives them comfort and benefit. The value of insurance is often far above whatever premium cost there may be as it gives people a sense of safety as well as mitigating their downside. Insurance gives people confidence to take on more challenging goals or overcome overwhelming fear. Reducing fear is an age-old sales technique that still resonates in today’s unpredictable world. There are many ways you can offer value in the form of reduced risk for your customers. We’ll cover 5 top areas you might be able to speak to for your customers:

• Service Level Agreements

• Vendor Management

• Disaster Response & Recovery

• Secure Valuable Assets

• Regulatory Compliance

Let’s unpack each and explore the areas you may be able to leverage in your own messaging. Your potential customers aren't just looking for a product; they're feeling insecure about some things. How can you align your value proposition in ways that reduce their fears and build confidence?

Service Level Agreements

Service Level Agreements govern the relationship between parties when something goes wrong. Help your customers understand the right metrics, goals, tiers and reporting that is necessary to deliver consistent service over time. You might provide key elements to enable responsiveness, provide tools that give early warnings to problems or even solve the potentially disastrous issues directly for certain risks. There may be numerous ways you can help your clients with their commitments. Naturally, delivering on your own services at a high level is also critical.

Vendor Management

Companies struggle with their vendors constantly. Vendors cause a wide array of problems including increasing prices, missing delivery dates, unresponsive communications, poor quality and many other issues. If you can help make vendors more consistent, reliable or cost effective, you may be able to reduce or eliminate vendor issues that become customer issues. If you can help manage contracts, improve communication, monitor performance or bring structure to vendor governance, you may be able to offer substantial risk reduction in some highly critical processes in your client’s business.

Disaster Response & Recovery

Almost regardless of how well prepared anyone is for disaster, it will eventually strike. One big area of value companies need is to be prepared to respond to disaster quickly when it does happen. You may be able to offer benefits by improving your customer’s response to some disasters. Documenting critical items, being prepared to respond quickly, providing redundant capabilities and communicating effectively during a disaster are all substantial value to your customers that you may naturally be providing anyway. Consider ways that you might speak to the benefits you can offer during the course of a disaster and it’s recovery.

Secure Valuable Assets

Most potential customers have some underlying fear of having their digital systems hacked or disabled. Some have already suffered similar fates and are

highly aware of the threats and that it’s difficult to know about all of the potential threats. Your offerings will either improve or reduce your client’s preparedness for disaster. Your ability to protect assets from loss through improved surveillance, elimination of threats or immediate replacement upon need are all potentially of great value to your customers. If you offer redundancy, remote communications or hardened protection as part of your offering, it pays to help customers understand how you can protect them and in what circumstances.

Regulatory Compliance

Companies in regulated industries struggle constantly with the overhead of complying with complicated and changing rules set out often by multiple regulators at the local, state and national levels. Help in tracking, managing and maintaining compliance with these myriad of rules is something you may be able to help with. Even if you can’t engage the regulators yourself, you might be able to provide supporting data, automation or other service that aids in your client’s regulatory challenges. If you can overcome even small elements of regulatory burdens, you may be able to integrate with your client’s overall regulatory information management systems to make the job easier.

Guiding Principles

Reducing customer risk isn't just about offering security measures. Risk mitigation comes in many flavors from eliminating the need to take the risk in the first place to understanding it deeply to automating risk management, it's about identifying elements of risk that you can mitigate as part of your solution. At least try not to increase your customer’s risk profile while you’re solving other problems..