You save your customer’s time and energy, if your customer uses your offer to reduce effort. These can be redirected to more productive activities or work-life balance.
What is It?
Effort is productive. To spend time and energy learning new skills is highly productive. We learn how to do something new and gain insights into how it works.
However, doing something ourselves is not always productive. Repeating the same activity over and again becomes tedious. It ceases to be learning and becomes a chore.
Do-it-yourself hoovers up time we could use on more productive tasks and absorbs energy we need to do new things. If it is something we are not particularly good at, it becomes more likely we make mistakes.
This is not about being lazy. It is about the best use of time. In other words, reduce effort in certain areas to increase business capacity.
Value to the Customer
Spending money to pay someone to do something that consumes time and energy builds capacity.
Consider the advantages. You
- save time to use productively elsewhere
- save energy, if you put energy into admin, you have less for other activities.
- reduce mistakes, if you employ someone who understands the work involved.
- employ someone aware of latest legislation and good practice
How to Get There?
Consider where the customer needs help with a task. Will they employ someone outright or buy a service? How will they decide which tasks to outsource?
You need to educate your market about the advantages of reducing effort and how to find the help they seek. What are the advantages of your way to reduce effort compared with your competitors?
Your Offer
Consider the range of activities that reduce effort for your customers. All aspects of administration or accountancy, plus research can be productive. Research is a skill that takes time to learn properly. Engaging a researcher may be real value for money if they do a thorough job.
Similarly online activities reduce effort. For some businesses, help with SEO or social media saves time and energy and generates more results.
However, the more vital the work to the success of the business, the more vital a good working relationship. There is always employing someone to do the work or training a member of staff.
Like most functional elements, your offer may already reduce effort for your customers. If so, spell out exactly how your offer reduces effort.
Be clear about your expertise or qualifications. The customer needs to know they can rely on you and you are insured where that is appropriate.
This is the twenty-fifth of 31 posts about elements of value. Make sure you don’t miss any by signing up for the offer below. The posts in this sequence can be accessed below:
- Social impact: Self-transcendence
- Life Changing: Provide Hope, Self-Actualisation, Motivation, Heirloom, Affiliation and Belonging
- Emotional: Reduces Anxiety, Rewards Me, Nostalgia, Design / Aesthetics, Badge Value, Wellness, Therapeutic Value, Fun / Entertainment, Attractiveness, Provides Access
- Functional: Saves Time, Simplifies, Makes Money, Reduces Risk, Organises, Integrates, Connects, Reduces Effort
Next: Avoids Hassles + 5 more
