The first step in creating a high performance business web is to separate the value proposition that the end customer receives and experiences. Think about the genuine customer needs that your service addresses, not just what you do to get the business. Avoid preoccupation with the channels that stand between you and the real customer. Take apart the end customer’s experience in terms of your value proposition as well as the enabling services, resources, business processes and organizational structure into individual components.

You want to ask the essential questions about your services, knowing who benefits and what your customer will see as the strengths and weaknesses. You should always be looking to how you can improve things. A business value proposition differs from its products and services. When a traveler needs to get from A to B, how to he gets there matters much less than actually getting there. For your marketplace, what value is offered, delivered, and consumed that justifies a business’s right to exist?

Prepare and inform all steps of this process with a review and assessment of customer/market/channel trends; supply-side trends; competition; current and expected product/service innovations; industry use of human, relationship, and structural capital; business events (for example, consolidation); environmental issues and regulation.

What are your end customers as opposed to intermediary customers? Define the customer categories, and who else is serving them, regardless of value propositions. What services does the current business system provide its customers? What are the main strengths and weaknesses of the value proposition and the enabling products and services? Who else delivers more value, and in what ways?