Last week I was placing a grocery order on Instacart and I noticed the following message after the checkout process:
You saved with Instacart
565 hours
The "565 hours" is displayed bright and large to really stands out. It's big, bold, and impactful. I know there's a convenience and time saving element to the Instacart value proposition, only this makes it front and center as a regular reminder.
Now, how does Instacart calculate this number? Is it an arbitrary allocation of one hour per order (thus, I've made 565 orders over the many years of usage)? Or, is there a slightly more involved calculation that incorporates the number of items ordered and assigns a value of time to each? Regardless, I do believe I've saved hundreds of hours of time over the years using Instacart, and for that I'm thankful.
Seeing this made me think of other ways products and services need to tie value back to the user, especially in the B2B context.
Some common ones:
- Return on investment
- Increase in XYZ metric (revenue, profitability, NPS, etc.)
- Decrease in XYZ metric (days sales outstanding, average response time, bounced emails, etc.)
Ideally, this is automated and prominent in the application. By using the product, the value is clear. Sometimes it's more difficult to calculate and requires a person to do a quarterly business review where you meet with a customer to walk through how you're contributing to their success. A word of warning: if you can't clearly articulate the customer's success, the solution isn't likely to achieve large scale success.
The next time you use a product, figure out how it expresses value. Is it obvious or is it nearly hidden/non existent? The best products provide both tremendous value and make it easy to see the value.
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