Selling The Value Proposition
Do your potential customers understand the limitations of their own business and why your propositions could add value to their business?
Is your messaging easy to understand and memorable business speak, rather than ‘techno babble’?
Will you make an impact such that customers remember your ‘value proposition’, sufficient for them to keep them coming back to you, instead of looking elsewhere or doing nothing?
Typically, your company’s offerings are a solution waiting for a problem to be identified within a target account. You have the advantage in that you know the value that you can bring to a customer, but the customer does not.
You therefore have to provoke them into thinking about the ‘problem area’ or ‘capability gap’ in which you have capability. They need to understand the implications of not fixing the problem, and then you need to persuade them of the benefits of working with you, to implement your ‘Value Proposition’.
Your company may have equipped you with the corporate standard value proposition format, with associated notes and references. Your role now is to select the appropriate slides, personalise the content and bring the deck ‘to life’.
This means you need to understand your customer’s current vision and starting point on their journey, before you can propose a solution. Remember, you are dealing with people and you must also take into account the personal aspect of “What’s in it for me?” by selecting your value proposition, i.e. “Will I gain any recognition out of this activity?”
However, to dramatically increase your chances of success, you need to create a ‘Commanding’ headline that ‘Connects’ with the audience and ‘Compels’ them to act.
The Process
To help you create the most appropriate and therefore compelling value proposition, here is a a simple structure you can follow.
1. Start by answering these questions
- Their Vision – what do they want to achieve as an organisation?
- The Starting point – where are they now?
- Consequences of not progressing – what will happen to business performance?
- Stakeholder ‘Win’ themes – different people have different ‘wins’; what are they?
- What is your value proposal to bridge the gap between points 1 and 2?
- What are your credentials to show how you have done this before, together with metrics to illustrate what the customer achieved with your help?
This should now give you a good understanding of what your customer is trying to achieve in business terms and how you might help – your capability matching their capability gap.
2. Write a draft Value Proposition, which will form the ‘story board’ for everything else that you will do
- Have a bold statement: This value proposal will enable “customer name” to achieve your vision and increase revenue/decrease costs by…
- Context for the proposal: Acknowledge your customer’s needs in a positive way
3. Capability
State how you will help your customer (in plain business language, not technical), which needs to include reference to timing to achieve the results, risk mitigation, investment (including the investment from the customer to implement the proposal).
Apply your benefit to your customer by unveiling the real value to the person and company from your value proposal
4. Credentials
Provide references that are relevant to this proposition and include metrics in terms of hard numbers or percentage improvement.
5. Call to action
What do you want your customer to do next?
6. Restate the initial bold statement
Implementation of this value proposal will enable “customer name” to achieve your vision and increase revenue/decrease costs by…
Once you have completed your preparation, ask someone not involved with this customer to read your draft Value Proposition. Present it to them and check to see if they hear a compelling Value Proposition. If not, further preparation is needed.
If you need help with developing your Value Proposition, call us now on 01494 716 688 or email us at info@youd-andrews.co.uk.
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