What’s all this about value propositions?
You probably hear a lot about value.
Be it:
the financial value of a company,
philosophical values that guide your team,
value you’re offering potential new hires,
value equation to support competitive pricing analysis and potential market share
But at the core of market traction and growth is the vital value: your unique “value proposition.”
What is a Value Proposition?
Business strategy starts with a well-defined value proposition. A value proposition is the value your company, your company’s product, and/or your company’s service provides to a customer or partner. For this conversation, we’ll focus on a product’s value proposition for customers. At the core of successful strategies (the roads to achieving your company goals) are clearly articulated value propositions — the unique differentiators that express the customer need(s) your product satisfies. These clear value propositions deliver well-defined solutions to customer pain points and can help inform appropriate, potential partnerships when applicable, and your product’s pricing strategies. There are numerous models on how to pinpoint that unique value proposition. But once you’ve taken a crack at the model, what’s next? What do you “do” internally and in the marketplace?
Communicating Your Value Proposition
There’s a lot to be done, and it’s all interconnected. What’s next is clearly articulating that value proposition and no, that’s not as easy as it seems. Often you’ll see company executives so enamored with their product that they’ll spend 3 minutes telling you about its virtues. Have you ever walked away and thought, “wait, what do they do again?” Or, “what is that product they mentioned?” It’s not you. It’s that they hadn’t clearly articulated the underlying core value proposition for the product. If they had, you would’ve walked away thinking, wow, that’s amazing, and not forgotten because you already would have envisioned how the product would be used and how it meets a specific need.
Another piece of the equation is realizing that for each of your target customer audiences you need to create the targeted messaging – in tandem with the visualizations – which speak to that value. Once you have your product’s value proposition clearly articulated, tweaking communication of that value for each of those key audiences so that you fill a need, or reduce a pain point for them, makes the difference in leading them to buy. Keeping these messages consistent in presentations, in elevator chats, on your website, and in all market communications and visualizations is mission critical.
Making sure every internal team member can clearly understand and articulate the value propositions by audience is equally important and surprisingly often overlooked. Having one team member or a consultant working for your company saying one thing and someone else on the team saying another, lessens your product’s impact in the marketplace.
Understanding Your Customer
Understanding who your customers are is a significant part of supporting the financial and time investment you’ll make on each customer segment. It’s also critical in making sure your value proposition and target customer(s) align. There’s a chance your product doesn’t fill a need for a customer group you’ve been chasing. Vetting the customer segments and aligning the value propositions make a world of difference!
Don’t forget to check your website – what’s each customer segment’s journey on your site? Review what you are saying (words and visuals) to potential customers on your website, which by the way is your 24/7 voice, to make sure you’ve aligned those messages and visualizations with your value propositions for success with potential customers.
Growing Your Business
Your strategies should clearly state how you’ll go about growing your unique value in the marketplace. Communicating those strategies and all of the above to team members, partner agencies, and consultants ensures everyone speaks from the same consistent voice for maximizing success and staying on the same page to meet goals.
All of this adds up to some of the “doing” in the marketplace — where your company will capture some of that value — so you’ll need to make sure your value propositions thread through all that you do, which is much more than a model. It can be challenging to separate yourself from the product you’ve brought into this world and ask yourself the tough questions to best articulate and streamline communications and customer work in the marketplace around value propositions. When you do, you give yourself and your teams the license to perform in ways that are aligned, consistent, and have clarity for the growth you’re looking to achieve.
Check out the EnticEdge Cornerpiece® to learn more about value propositions.
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