Getting Started on the Insight Map

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you'll be able to:

• Gather insights about your customer's business opportunity
• Get inspiration from other insight maps

Use the Insight Map to Optimize Your Business Conversations

Let's look again at the opportunity Lynn is pursuing with MyHealth.

MyHealth is a chain of health-care clinics. The company is expanding quickly and is upgrading its current systems. Lynn knows that her company, Retail POS, can offer outstanding value by helping MyHealth to scale and upgrade their point-of-sale (POS) software.

Lynn knows how important it is to make sure every conversation with MyHealth has as much value as possible for both sides.

She and her colleagues will use an insight map to gather their knowledge in a way that helps them understand MyHealth's particular business goals and problems.

The basic building blocks of the insight map are:

• MyHealth's relevant business goals.
• The business pressures affecting their goals.
• The initiatives that MyHealth is undertaking to address these pressures so they can achieve their goals.
• The obstacles that need to be overcome.
• The solutions that will help MyHealth to overcome the obstacles.

Gather the Team's Initial Ideas

First, Lynn and the team need to capture their ideas and knowledge about the MyHealth opportunity.

They won't worry about structuring or correctly categorizing the information for now. The important thing is to get the knowledge they've gathered so far onto the board. Then they'll be able to better organize their information and to build on what they have.

So what have they got for the initial ideas?

They know that the goals driving MyHealth's software-upgrade initiative are:

• To reduce pricing issues by 50 percent within six months of the upgrade.
• To improve stock management by reducing nonavailability of stock items by 30 percent.
• To improve pharmacy customer satisfaction from 89 percent to 95 percent within one year of the upgrade.

From their conversations with key people at MyHealth, they've learned about some of the business issues impacting MyHealth's goals. They quickly capture these in a section they call General Notes.

Here's what the insight map looks like after the team's first pass.

As the team grows their relationships with the people in MyHealth, they'll be able to gather additional knowledge and improve their understanding of the business landscape as it relates to this opportunity.

They'll continue to shape and develop the board as the opportunity progresses.

Get Inspiration from Other Insight Maps

Lynn and her colleagues know that sometimes other insight maps can provide inspiration.

The insight map for the MyHealth account tells a wider strategic story about the customer, and it's likely that there are insights on it that are applicable to this particular opportunity.

Lynn clicks the Show Account Board button to slide that account insight map out from the left-hand side. She can quickly check it for any insights that are relevant to this particular opportunity.

If she sees anything she can use, she simply drags a copy of it across to her opportunity's insight map.

She spots the "New data security concerns" pressure. This might have a bearing on MyHealth's thinking about their POS upgrade, so she drags it across.

 

Lynn and the team know that other businesses similar to MyHealth face many similar issues. If they can add these to the insight map, Lynn and the team may be able to demonstrate a better understanding of the business landscape than any of their competitors.

This could put them in a position to provide MyHealth with business insights they wouldn't get anywhere else – a great way to boost Retail POS's value to them.

Lynn clicks Import in the top right of the insight map to look for other, similar insight maps that may be worth checking out.

A likely candidate is the insight map for an opportunity with Murray Medica, a midsized health-care provider similar to MyHealth. So she searches for it.

 

She clicks into the Murray Medica insight map and sees that it has a couple of business pressures that could also be applicable to MyHealth.

So she selects them and clicks Add to import them onto the MyHealth insight map.

She'll discuss these with some of the key players in MyHealth to find out whether they actually are pressures that affect their goals.

Shape and Develop the Insight Map

Now that the initial ideas have been captured, Lynn and the team can collaborate with the key players at MyHealth to further develop the insight map.

The detail they add will help them to articulate a clear story about:

• The goals that MyHealth needs to achieve.
• The problems they need to solve.
• The value they will get from an investment in Retail POS's solutions.

Try It Yourself

Why not open one of your Altify opportunity plans now and start building the insight map? You can:

• Gather the team's initial ideas
• Get inspiration from other insight maps