Can links in the existing chain be eliminated or combined with other links?

Can you completely replace this set of links with some other set?

Can you accomplish the same outcome with a different chain?

Can you reshuffle the links to improve your customer’s experience?

If parts of the chain are a hassle, can you solve the problem in a different way?

Can you create a complete solution to replace a piecemeal solution?

Replacing or combining links?

Improving links by making the customer experience better, cheaper, or more convenient?

Capturing and mining data about the market or about your service delivery?

Better managing your logistics?

Adding new links that customers will be willing to pay for?

Creating new offerings from the information you now collect anyway?

Inspect each major link in your consumption chain. Can you find ways of deploying digital intelligence at that link to make your offering

• More responsive?

• Less of a hassle?

• More informative?

• More fine-tuned?

• More user-friendly?

• More convenient?

and thereby dramatically enhance the quality or convenience of the links in your chain?

Can you use digital intelligence to create greater awareness of the benefits you offer at that link?

Can you use digital intelligence to tell you when a customer is at the trigger point for that link?

In some links, are there delays between the time demand occurs and the time delivery is completed?

Are these delays expensive, dangerous, or frustrating for customers?

Are there ways to eliminate or shorten these delays? Are there ways to compensate for them?

Are there ways you can help your customers reduce delays for their customers?

How can you position your offering to monopolize a trigger?

Can you be the first to know that a trigger event has occurred?

Can your firm be the first in line or first in the customer’s mind when the triggering event occurs?

Can you create triggers that favor your firm or your offering?

Why do they buy from you and not the competition?

What do you offer that they not only like but also are prepared to pay a premium for?

What does your offering do better than anyone else’s?

Tolerables

What are the features that your most important segments would list if you asked them to complete the following sentence: “If only you could eliminate _______ from your offering, I would buy (or pay) a lot more”?

Can you get rid of the tolerables in ways that competitors can’t? How?

Are you experiencing increasing complaints about a feature or characteristic?

To what extent are your target customers beginning to compare you to your competition unfavorably with respect to this attribute?

Dissatisfiers

Which attributes do people who interact with customers hear the most grumbling about? Is it something all providers do? Is it something only you do?

Is this attribute increasingly cited as a key reason for customers returning the product or discontinuing the service?

Are any competitors claiming that they are superior with respect to this attribute?

Underserved Segments

Is there any current or emerging segment that is being underserved by the current attribute maps for major links in the consumption chain?

Are there trends that might give you the opportunity to break apart an existing segment?

Behavioral Segmentation

Have you looked at how various people behave at various links in the chain?

Can you segment by creating a set of attributes that will appeal to the need that customers are seeking to address at the moment that behavior becomes important?

Have you considered common behaviors that cut across demographic segments—for instance, when some customers simply want to be taken care of with little fuss while others prefer a more personal touch?

Adding Empathy

Can you redesign the offering at any link to make the customer experience more enjoyable?

Can you make the customer feel more satisfied, safer, more confident, less frustrated, more secure, or more amused?

Behavioral Attuning

Are the attributes you offer a good fit for the target segment’s behavior?

Have you taken these customers’ financial, social, and attitudinal perspectives into account when designing the offering?

Direct Customer Benefits

Is there anything you can offer in parallel with your offering that will give you the edge in attracting customers?

Is there anything you can do to make your customers’ experience better, even if it doesn’t seem to relate to what you produce or do?

Indirect Customer Benefits

Is there any way your company or your offering can be associated with something the customer values?

Are there attributes you could eliminate and thus reduce your cost and potentially the price to the customer?

Are customers complaining about the complexity of your products or services?

Can you readily identify features that many of your target segments don’t care about?

Customer Takes Offering for Granted

Are you providing an important service or benefit to the customer but are not getting paid for it?

Would the customer not buy if you started to charge?

Customer Benefits from Attributes

Can you generate revenues differently—perhaps by menu pricing?

Can you create an annuity stream? In other words, is there a way of charging a per-use fee or monthly fee?

Can you consider how you might generate revenues via a different unit of business?

Can you charge for what you offer in a different way?

Can you incur costs and make payments in a different way?

Can you shift the emphasis in how you charge customers from what you traditionally provide to what they might value (for instance, going from a part of a solution to the actual solution)?

Can you create better incentives for your people by changing the unit of business (for instance, going from an incentive system based on business unit performance to one based on the total relationship between your company and your customer)?

Would some other way of charging for what you sell be more convenient, less effortful, or easier to explain to your customers?

Can you dramatically enhance your productivity by deploying new technology?

• Direct cost productivity

• Fixed cost productivity

• Asset productivity

• Revenue productivity

Can you leapfrog your competition in productivity? Look especially for situations where their resources are already committed to something else (such as integrating a large merger).

Can you eliminate time-wasting repetitive activities to enhance productivity?

Can you figure out how to eliminate transactions costs (such as internal reviews and approvals) by automating some of your internal control practices thus boosting productivity?

How might you accelerate the cash flow velocity of your firm?

Could you eliminate or reduce inventory?

Might you delay payments to others?

Can you speed up receipts from your customers?

Can you generate cash before you have to incur costs (such as with Dell’s “build to order” computers)?

Can you speed up the ordering cycle of your customers?

Can you get paid more frequently over the lifetime of a contract?

Can you automate the payment stream so that manual delays don’t hold up incoming cash?

Can you make sure that your invoicing mechanisms are easy for your customers to respond to, so that you don’t create additional payment delays?

Have you checked to see whether you might link up with customers electronically to speed payments?

Have you explored technologies such as direct-deposit or lock-boxes to speed payments?

Can you reduce the asset intensity of your business by outsourcing some activities to specialist providers?

Can you eliminate the need to own certain assets?

Can you utilize assets owned by someone else on an as-needed basis?

Can you use assets more effectively—for instance, by extending the time of day in which they are used or by using remote electronics to operate them?

Might you be able to pool your assets with those of other firms and reduce the asset intensity for the whole group?

Can you change fixed assets to variable assets, for instance by establishing utilization contracts with suppliers for certain services?

Can you help your customers reduce their fixed asset burden by taking on their assets and charging them for usage?

What are the key numbers your customers seek to achieve? (Be explicit.)

How do your customers measure this outcome?

What are the key ratios in your customers’ businesses?

What are some ways to

•  Help your customers improve their key ratios (financial, operating, investment)?

•  Conceive of a better way to help customers hit the numbers they care about (market share, cash flow, EBITDA, revenue growth, profit)?

•  Help customers better understand what really drives success in their businesses?

Can you find ways to improve your customers’ productivity?

Can you help customers make better use of their assets? Their working capital?

Can you take over some aspect of your customers’ operations that they find burdensome?

Can you change the way you do business to save your customers time?

Can you reduce the number of steps a customer must take to do business with you?

Can you eliminate hassles and annoyances in your transactions (for instance, forcing the customer to repeat information on forms, to collect information from different places, or to get material from third parties before they can do business with you)?

Can you create a single point of interface between your company and your customers?

Can you address some customer issues with a single interaction rather than with multiple interactions?

Can you routinize customer-facing activities to make them faster?

Can you find ways to improve the personal productivity of your customers’ staff? On the job? In their private lives?

Can you change the way you do business to help customers get revenues in more quickly or delay expenditures?

Can you help customers better coordinate their activities to eliminate cash flow losses due to internal inefficiencies?

Can you change the way you do business to make some fixed costs variable for your customer?

Can you eliminate “nuisance” payments for your customers?

Can you redesign the way you do business with customers to help them improve quality metrics?

Can you offer examples or advice to customers to help them improve quality?

Can you offer consulting solutions to improve customer quality (or related concepts such as safety)?

Can you lead your industry in creating more high-quality offerings than it does today?

Can you provide quality-oriented feedback to your customers so that they can respond in real time?

What bottlenecks are likely to occur in the cyclical peaks?

What surpluses are likely to occur in the troughs?

Are there ways to end-run swings in the industry by positioning your firm to exploit bottlenecks during peak demand and to avoid troughs?

What second-order effects will cyclical swings have on the industry?

What second-order demands or surpluses will be created? For you? For members of the industry value chain, such as suppliers and distributors?

Are there opportunities to introduce innovations that mute or eliminate the impact of cycles?

Is there a way of capitalizing on this shift by exploiting the new competitive opportunities that it creates?

What are the second-order effects that this shift will create in your industry? In the value chain that supports it?

Can you exploit these second-order effects by making a marketbusting move?

Can you exploit this shift to disrupt the way competitors compete?

Are there places (proliferation of product models, emergence of dominant design, preemptive roll-up, or consolidation) where you can anticipate and capture first-mover advantages by preemptive evolutionary moves?

Can you anticipate second-order effects of industry evolution by pinpointing places where industry fragmentation, disintermediation, or concentration creates marketbusting opportunities?

Are there ways you might be able to move boldly to redirect, alter, or disrupt the current course of the industry?

Can you spot places to exploit shifts that are occurring or will occur in the value chain structure?

Can you pinpoint second-order consequences up and down the chain where you can reposition your participation?

Can you spot places where you can disrupt the current value chain and change it in ways that suit you?

Have you uncovered a new dimension of competing that is different from the current standard modes of competing?

Will it appeal to a large or growing segment of the market that is unimpressed with the current competitive criteria?

Are competitors largely wedded to the current criteria?

Has the very success of an existing solution created new problems that you might address?

Have you uncovered a potential offering that will significantly attend to a problem that is not serviced for a large emergent segment of the market?

Can you present your revised solution in a way that lets you thoroughly test market reaction before you commit major resources?

Are you convinced that this offering will be insulated from rapid matching by entrenched or emergent players?

Have you identified an offering that is demonstrably superior on a dimension that is demonstrably attractive to an emergent segment of the market?

If the offering is not demonstrably attractive, can you deliver it at a lower price and still make good money?

Can you identify places in which large target segments are persistently unhappy with existing solutions? Have you got a potential solution that might work?

Will you be able to build a technically successful offering at limited cost and incrementally introduce it to clearly identified beta-friendly customers?

Can the process of market education and product development be unfolded without major initial resource commitments?

As you evaluate the trends in your markets, are new needs emerging that you might have a solution to address?

Are there growing areas of persistent unhappiness or unease among your target segments?

Have segments become newly aware of social or other issues that might prompt a change in their behavior (such as certain industry categories falling out of favor, new health concerns, social changes with respect to acceptable behavior, and so on)?

Are you sure that your solution works for the target segment? Has it been validated by the market?

Do you know how to advertise, promote, distribute, and service the market? Do you need to do it yourself, or can you use existing infrastructure?

Can you identify small markets with new needs that are wealthy enough to afford to have the need met?

Have you developed something new in terms of products or services that might prove compelling to a customer group you have not served before?

Is the initial market large enough to minimize cash burn, or will you be able to capitalize on a large long-term market? If so, can you gain rapid dominance of the emerging market and lock out competitors?

Can you protect the long-term market well enough that you can build it without losing your profits to competitors?

Are you confident that you can get a reliable solution in place quickly and profitably?

Are you being encouraged by the target segment to attend to this problem?

Are these customers willing to place advance orders at good prices? Do you have a win-win?

Are they willing to take on beta models and learn with you?

Will you be able to protect your long-term position?

Has no other approach recommended in this book shown you a less risky alternative, or are you so convinced of the enormous upside that you simply must go for this particular brass ring?

What evidence do you have of a huge upside, a controllable downside, and the sustainability of future profits?