How To Write a Winning Value Proposition
Blunt works with a lot of start-up companies on go to market strategies. One of the most important, yet most frequently overlooked, hurdles for a young company to clear is the articulation of a winning value proposition.
Just how do you write a winning value proposition? Based on our experience, we’ve outlined five steps that every start-up owner should have in mind when crafting their company’s value proposition.
Focus on core:
Your value proposition is not an essay, a corporate autobiography, or a manifesto. It should enunciate the core value that your products/services bring to the marketplace. It should strip the value of your company’s offerings down to a critical essence, paring away anything that might be superfluous. Your corporate value proposition is your way of telling the marketplace exactly what you hang you hat on; if all else fails, you and your company can still kick ass at delivering this. It’s easy to lose focus here and try to make your value proposition encompass three or four different ideas. Get rid of the noise, boil it down to the one thing you do best, and stick to it.
Keep it short:
The shorter the better. I’m an English major, so this part is especially tough for me. I’m prone to wandering off on long discursive passages, crafting value propositions that sound more like Shakespeare than Cisco. When it comes to value propositions, you don’t get extra credit for elaborate, ornately-crafted sentences; instead, pithiness tends to be rewarded. With our clients, we employ a useful exercise. We ask them to start by writing a 100-word description of what sets their services apart in the marketplace. Usually it ends up sounding something like a boilerplate description. Then, we make them pare it down in stages–from 75 words to 50 words and finally down to 25 words. What emerges after the successive cut downs is something much punchier, more precise, and ultimately more compelling than the verbose version with which they started.
Think concrete ROI:
Your value proposition should specify the accomplishment of a concrete goal, especially if you’re operating in a B2B environment. This is a common pitfall many start-ups stumble into when crafting the initial value proposition they will take to market. They assume that the marketplace will embrace their technology simply because of its intricacy, its beauty, or its novelty. Unfortunately, decision makers are not going to look at your wonderful, glowing technology as a Kantian end in itself. Rather, they’re going to look at your offering as a means to an end and attempt to figure out how much money they can accrue/save by implementing it. Growing audience, lowering churn, boosting loyalty—these are concrete ROI propositions that can catch decision makers’ attention and make budgetary sign-off that much easier.
Use language that is precise, not vague:
Optimize, actioning, granularity, drill-downs–all words that through overuse have been become cliched in recent years. In general, try to avoid vague and imprecise jargon or commonly used business speak. You want your offering to sound different and remarkable. A trick is to try to cut down on the number of Latinate words you use. Latinate words are those derived from a Latin root, and which have cognates in French, Spanish, and other Romance languages. A simple dictionary search can tell you whether a word is derived from a Latin root or an Anglo-Saxon root. Latinates tend to be indirect and abstract, while Anglo Saxon-based words tend to be vibrant and visual. I’ll let you guess at which ones create a more stirring picture in the buyer’s mind.
Get your entire company onboard:
Your value proposition shouldn’t be open to interpretation. A value proposition is a safe haven that your employees can fall back on in times of crisis. Leadership changes, styles change, technology evolves, but the underlying value of your offering should be consistent and enduring. Make sure that everybody is on the same page when you craft it and, once there’s consensus, make sure that it’s drilled into every employee’s head like a mantra. Value propositions condition every aspect of corporate behavior. You want everybody to be pulling in the right direction, so make sure that your corporate value proposition is the one thing about which there is absolutely no disagreement or ambiguity.
