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| This process may be viewed in five phases: Translating business issues into projects, customer value workshop, customer value research, constructing a business case for change, and value realization.
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 In the initial phase, senior managers think through the significant issues with which their business is confronted, where greater knowledge of customer value would enable them to make more profitable decisions. A project is defined for each issue, where decisions are made about the scope of the project, the definition of success, and the composition of the team that will conduct the customer value research to address the issue.
 The teams meet for a Customer Value Workshop, which is a two- or three-day session where they gain the requisite knowledge and skills to build customer value models, and plan and launch their projects. During this workshop, they practice building customer value models using one or more proprietary case studies. In breakout sessions, each team begins to: define the value elements for their project, determine the next-best-alternative to their market offering, decide which customers to invite to participate in the customer value research, and create their work plans for completing the project.
 The customer value research conducted by each team proceeds in three phases: gaining initial customer cooperation, gathering the data, and analyzing the data. The teams create a value summary – the Customer Value Model – that expresses each value element in monetary terms. The team should be certain to list any assumptions made in assigning monetary amounts to each element.
 Based on this knowledge of value that the team has gained from its research, what does it recommend that the business do differently?
These business cases are presented to senior managers who have served as project sponsors and the top management of the business unit. This business case should be viewed as a prospective commitment: if senior management provides the requested resources, the business will deliver the specified results, especially the estimated incremental profitability.
 Companies that practice Customer Value Management understand that they must not only demonstrate the value that their offerings would deliver to customers, but that they must document the cost savings and/or incremental profits their offerings actually deliver to customers purchasing them. They work with customers to define the measures which they will implement to track the cost savings or incremental profit produced, and then after a suitable period of time, work with customer managers to document the actual results. They use tools called value documenters to further refine their customer value models, create value case histories, enable the customer managers to turn “gray” money into “green” money, and enhance the credibility of the demonstrated value of their offerings, because customer managers know that the supplier is willing to document the actual value received.
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