Click Here for Value

The most important thing a business needs to do is create value for its customers. A value proposition helps marketers create awareness of this value to their target buyers.

1. What is a value proposition?

In last week’s issue on Marketing, I talked about how one of the goals for Marketing is to figure out

• who their buyers are

• what are their needs

A value proposition is how a business, product, or service will address those needs. It should clearly answer the question: “Why should a buyer choose you over your competitors?”

A value proposition is not talking about what a company does. It is not a list of all of a product’s features.

Value is all about benefits and outcomes.

This is why it’s critical to understand the needs of the buyer. Needs tell marketers how to talk about their product or service as the best way for the buyer to achieve their desired outcomes.

Addressing buyers needs makes the buyer feel understood, and is an effective way to get their attention. Attention is scarce, and information is very cheap.

The more a business can communicate to a buyer they they understand their unique needs, the more the buyer will trust that business to deliver their desired outcomes.

The power of being unique

Many companies will claim to offer the same benefits. A unique selling proposition (USP) is what makes a product or service uniquely valuable compared to its competitors. It is a critical component to the value proposition.

The more unique your buyers needs are, the stronger your USP will be. The stronger your USP, the stronger your overall value proposition will be.

A strong USP will also help marketing with positioning. Positioning is all about helping the buyer perceive a company as unique relative to their competitors. Marketers want to position their offering as the best solution to their buyers’ unique needs.

Perception is everything

Value is subjective.

This subjectivity is what plays a role in why certain things are more valuable than others. This is why it’s so important for entrepreneurs to validate their ideas by getting feedback from the market before launching.

It will only be valuable if people believe that it’s valuable. It’s therefore also important to understand what people think is valuable.

I’ll likely do another post on the concept of perceived value, but in short: what people perceive to be valuable often comes down to core human desires like health, wealth, and status.

It’s critical for a business to understand how their buyers perceive the value of their product or services. If they don’t perceive that the value is greater than the price they’d be paying, then they likely won’t transact.

2. Why should data care

One way to provide value to the business is to help the business communicate how they provide value to their customers. If you can help them explain why this value is unique to the specific needs of your customers, then even better!

How can data teams help with this? Look to your existing customers.

What results are your customers seeing from using your product? What are their outcomes?

There are so many ways to extract value from customer data. This value will greatly benefit your go-to-market teams.

This value not only helps make content and conversations more interesting (as we mentioned in our intro to Sales), but it also increases the confidence in the buyer that your product will deliver the outcomes they desire.

Some questions to ask of your data that may help prompt these insights:

• Who are your most engaged customers?

• Why are they engaged?

• What about them makes them such a great and unique fit for your product or service?

• What results are they seeing?

• How are they benefiting?

Go through these questions with the goal of helping your go-to-market team figure out how to communicate unique value to buyers.

3. Why every business needs a value proposition

Positioning and USPs make selling easier. The more unique the value proposition is, the harder it will be for the buyer to find alternative solutions.

The greater the value proposition, the harder it will be for the buyer to say no.

Getting buyers to say yes should be everyone’s goal.

More buyers saying yes means more customers and more revenue. Growing revenue increases the valuation of the business, and opens up opportunities for the business to reinvest in the operations.