Your Value Proposition matters far more than most businesses realise.
If you ask most businesses what they do, they can usually answer pretty quickly.
They’ll tell you about their services, their products, their people, their experience, their process, their pricing, their quality, their customer service, and then something like the fact they’re different because they “really care”.
None of that’s necessarily wrong. But it does create a problem. Because your customers aren’t sitting there thinking:
“Which business has the most detailed list of services and comprehensive product range?”
They’re thinking:
“Why should I choose this one?”
In simple terms, that’s where your value proposition comes in.
It’s not a catchy strapline, a funky slogan, or a clever sentence you stick on your homepage and then hope for the best. It’s the clear, customer friendly answer to business-critical question:
- Why should someone choose you over a competitor?
Nailing the answer to that matters. Because most businesses aren’t short on capability. They’re short on clarity.
They’re good at what they do. They care about their customers. They deliver well. They solve real problems. But when everyone in the market is saying the same thing – “we’re experienced”, “we’re trusted”, “we offer great service”, “we tailor our approach”, “we place the customer at the heart of everything we do”, it’s the customer who’s left to do the hard work, tediously sifting through the sea of sameness.
And customers don’t enjoy doing unnecessary hard work because hard work creates friction. Something us people don’t like. We try to stay as far away from it as we can.
Customers want to understand you quickly, easily, with minimum effort. They want to know:
- what you help them achieve,
- what problem you solve,
- why it matters,
- and why you’re a better fit than the next business on the, already short, list.
Answering those questions is what a strong, effective value proposition does – taking everything you offer and turning it into something your customers can easily understand, remember and act on.
What happens without a value proposition.
A weak or unclear value proposition is a long-term business problem. One that shows up commercially well before most businesses even connect it to a brand problem.
Take B2B buyers. Research from CEB, now part of Gartner, suggests more than half of their purchase decision making takes place before they even contact a supplier. They’ve looked you up, checked out what you do, and formed an opinion. Whilst they’ve been doing all that work you’re blissfully unaware of, your brand has either made a clear case for itself or it hasn’t. If it hasn’t, you probably won’t even make their shortlist. Because when buyers can’t clearly see the value you deliver, they don’t sit there and diligently work it out. They move on.
Or they start asking about price. Yep, the default consideration for your brand becomes “how much?“ If they can’t see a meaningful difference between you and the next option, price is the only thing left to go on. So they go on it. And you’re no longer talking about your actual worth and the value you can deliver for their business.
That’s not the conversation you want to have, is it? Every single time.
What changes when you get it right.
When your value proposition is sharp and specific, something shifts commercially across the whole business, not just marketing.
Your website starts converting better because the right people recognise themselves in what you’re saying. Sales conversations start from a stronger foundation – you’re not spending the first twenty minutes explaining what you do and why it matters. Proposals get questioned less because the case for your value has already been made. And the quality of enquiries tends to improve, because the right customers are self-selecting in while the wrong ones are self-selecting out.
Referrals also become more natural. When your value’s clear, the people who rate you can describe you precisely. That makes you much easier to recommend.
Giving you pricing power.
This is the part that tends to make people happy. A clear value proposition isn’t just good for marketing, it has a direct commercial impact on your ability to maintain, or increase, your price.
When buyers understand specifically what they’re getting and why it’s worth it, price sensitivity reduces. They’re not comparing you against the market norm, they’re buying (into) something they understand and value. As Les Binet’s research on brand effectiveness demonstrates, long-term brand building reduces price elasticity, meaning the more clearly and consistently a business communicates its value, the less sensitive buyers become to price.
Clarity of value and strength of price go hand in hand.
Connecting to your positioning.
Your value proposition and your positioning aren’t the same thing, but they’re tightly connected and each one makes the other stronger.
Positioning is the strategic space you can own – the ground you’re claiming as yours in the market. Your value proposition is how you articulate what standing on that ground means for your customer. Specifically, credibly, compellingly.
Think of it this way. Positioning says “this is where we stand”, your value proposition says “here’s exactly what that means for you.”
Both are needed for your brand foundation to be complete.
Where do you start with your value proposition.
There are two ways you could start. One: ask your best customers, the ones who genuinely value what you do:
- why they chose you.
- what problem were they trying to solve?
- what changed after working with you?
- what would they miss if you weren’t there?
In the answers to those questions you’ll find what it is that makes your value proposition. It’s those real customer truths and nuggets of information hiding in plain sight or buried in a conversation.
One word of warning, though. A broad value proposition that tries to be relevant to everyone ends up being a weak one that’s compelling to no one. It’s better to be clear for the customers who matter most rather than vaguely acceptable to all.
And what’s the second way you could start? Give us a shout. Sharpening a value proposition and making sure it works as hard as it can across everything you do, that’s the work that pays off.
If you’d like help with that, let’s have a conversation. And lets make your value clear for everyone to see.
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You might also find this an interesting read:
Brand positioning — what is it and why does it matter? — Differentiate your brand to drive growth and avoid competing on price
