A customer value proposition is the handshake between a company brand and its products and services

Insight - helen blake

Image by Austin Kehmeier at Unsplash

Having talked all things value proposition to a conference audience last week, I was asked, “I’ve got a brand, I’ve got products and services, so why do I need a value proposition?”

Certainly a familiar and fair question in our line of work…

First of all, a value proposition is about being clear about the value you deliver and the difference you make to customers. Not a better way of describing what you do and how you do it.

A value proposition’s purpose is to help you win new work, better work, with the right kind of market positioning.  It acts as the metaphorical handshake between the company brand, and its product and service offerings.  The worst possible thing is for customers to be experiencing one type of value, with the business promoting another.

It all must align and be consistent and coherent.  The misalignment of brand promotion and the customer value experience – either by under-selling or over-selling your value – creates unsettled and confused customers.  And confused customers don’t buy.

To create a sharp, potent value proposition and ensure the ‘handshake’ between brand and products/services happens, we share and apply our own methodology, Futurecurve’s Value Proposition Builder™.  

Uncovering and revealing the value you deliver for customers

The Value Proposition Builder™ is a six-phase approach built around the principles of bringing the outside in – markets, clients, competitors; and the inside out - uncovering and revealing the value that client teams create for their customers. One of Futurecurve’s jobs is then to uncover and test that value. 

The way we do that is by bringing the customer into the centre of our work by interviewing our clients’ most valuable customers, discussing not just their experience of working with our client but also how they would like to take their working relationships forward.  To ensure a full outside in perspective we also pull in market trends, relevant business challenges and opportunities and competitor analysis to create value themes, a value proposition, all built into a Value Proposition Blueprint™.

This Blueprint™ is like a treasure chest; a central repository of the value themes and insights which are aligned with the brand and hard to claim by obvious competitors.  It's from this Value Proposition Blueprint™ that you can draw messaging, build ‘use cases’, focus business strategies and create marketing campaigns.

Whether you're working with people involved in account management, sales, or marketing and business development, all customer-focused communication comes from a common source.  In this way everything is aligned in a cohesive and coherent manner.  No disconnects in messaging. It's all built around the same value themes.

Unfortunately, what we at Futurecurve see, more often than not, is people going to market with a version of ‘what we do and how we do it’ with a load of puff words around it to make it sound more interesting and alluring.  Customers are mildly interested in that at best.

What customers are interested in is ‘what are you going to do for me’?  And that has got to be based on the difference you will make to that customer.

Creating alignment around your customer value proposition

When we start the process of implementing a value proposition, we set in place a programme of work based around creating a ‘Value Proposition Champions’ team.

The ‘Champions’ are usually people who will be responsible for implementing the value proposition within the business - people in demand-generation disciplines, such as sales, marketing, account management and bids.

This programme is focused on upskilling the Champions team to drive the value proposition into the business for growth.  We design a programme of workshops and individual coaching sessions, supported by guidance and easy-to-use tools.  In our experience this approach is much for effective than cascade rollouts with guidance notes. 

To achieve real buy-in and effect change in behaviours people need time to discuss and reflect on the value proposition and its themes, trying it out in their own role to see how it lands with customers.  Our follow-up sessions allow everyone to share and collaborate around the ‘treasure chest’ and practice working with value themes and reorienting messages based on the value customers can expect rather that what is going to happen to or be done to them.

A sharp, focused strategic value proposition really does have to work hard, and value themes provide a great framework for everyone to work with and adapt.  That's what we focus on creating for our clients.  It's all about creating the handshake.