Crafting a Unique Value Proposition - A CXL Institute Review

We really love buzzwords in 2020.

I'm sure we did back in the '80s as well, but yours truly wasn't born, so don't be that guy and comment "buzzwords have always been a thing, they just change."

We get it, grandpa, you've got experience. But I digress...

One of the buzziest of buzz words is "Value".

And the buzziest of buzzy phrases is "Value Proposition." Some of you may know it by its proper name, "Unique Value Proposition".... fancy...

But what the heck do these even mean?

People bring it up a lot.

I'm pretty sure the word value is in every Linkedin post posted since January of this year and Value Proposition is in every single marketing book you could ever find.

Here's the thing, it's massively important!

Having a clear and concise value proposition is one of the more important aspects to marketing and sales, but most people have a very limited understanding of what it actually is and even why it matters.

Back to the Future

Before we get into it, travel back in time with me to 14 days ago. I posted an article about creating premier product messaging where I went over a conversion heuristic I learned at CXL Institute that I use to this day when writing copy.

C = 4M + 3V + 2 (I-F) - 2A

If we travel back to this conversion formula, the most influential element is your motivation.

What is going on in your prospect's mind when they hit the page?

What are their expectations?

What are they looking for?

As important as motivation is to our probability of conversion, it's not something that we can control.

There's nothing we can do about why they showed up to our page.

It is something that you can try to speak to, but by the time they get to your page, you can't change their motivation, then what's the next biggest element that you can control?

The clarity and power of your value proposition.

That's what we'll dig into in great detail today.

What Is A Value Proposition?

So what is this value proposition?

It's actually pretty simple once you take all the buzzword jargon away from it.

It's the primary reason someone should buy from you.

When digging into sales copy or websites and you don't see a value proposition, what you're seeing is no reason to buy.

When there is a lack of a value proposition, there is a lack of a reason to buy.

So try to keep it simple, when you think about value propositions.

What you're really trying to get to is, what's in it for me, and why should I choose you over other options.

That's what your summarizing value proposition statement should really come down to.

Creating Your Value Proposition

Now that all the confusion is out of the way and we have a clear idea that your value proposition is simply explaining a reason to buy to your buyer, let's actually get into the nitty-gritty.

The first thing you've got to do is see if your value proposition is actually a reason to buy for your buyers.

First things first, your value prop is not a tagline. For instance our tagline at HALOS is A World of Better.

That's an AWFUL value proposition. It isn't super relevant to our buyer. Sure they want to be in a better world, but how?

So it's got to be relevant, it's got to be quantifiable, meaning it's got to have a specific value and it's got to be differentiated, so why should you buy from us.

From there it's got to pass the "So What?" Test.

When you come up with your value proposition, you've got to ask "So What?" at every level. Why does that matter to your buyer?

The key is don't stop there. Once you've passed the "So What?" test you've got to prove it.

Because I don't believe that I can do what you're saying yet.

So you've given me a claim and it is strong enough that I think, yep, that's a pretty good thing, you've got to prove its validity.

So how do you do that? You tell the people what you do. So you start with the end goal and then walk them backward.

I like to think of it like this: You have what your customers want. They want to fix a problem or get better at something, your product helps them do that.

You want to find the overlap between what your product does and how it helps your customer get what they want.

From there we find what makes you uniquely desirable.

So step 1: Find what your customers want.

Step 2: What your product does that helps customers get what they want.

Step 3: What is unique about your product that helps strengthen that offer.

So you'll notice I didn't give you a framework of "We help X Do Y By doing Z".

I'm in the boat that if you can all of what your customer wants to achieve, what your product does to help and your uniqueness out in a single word do it. As long as you speak in the language of your customer. Go for it!

My Process

So when I'm building out a value proposition I genuinely start from the beginning.

By the time I'm building out a value proposition I've already built my ICP, I've created a persona, I've interviewed them and I know their pains, their problems and their desires.

This is pretty much a pre requisite to actually creating a proper value prop.

From there I have 5 step process. This I learned in the Product Messaging course of CXL Institute and dude it changed the game for me.

Step 1: Meet with Your Team

In a meeting with your team, sit down, and list your product's key features. The big things that your product does.

This is really the easy part. This is really where most companies live, they know their product inside and out. the key here is to get out of that mindset.

Here we're going to list out every feature, even if it seems dumb, write it down. Definitely get your product team in on this meeting, they'll eat it up.

Step 2: Pick Out Your Unique Features

Once you have the features listed out, pinpoint the features that are unique to your product.

Now I totally get it, most of us aren't coming to market with the iPhone in 2007 so in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't need to be universally unique in terms of all products everywhere, but it should be something that is fairly special.

I like to ask the product guys what they were most pumped to build, or even the founders about why they built a certain feature, that usually gets this portion completed.

Step 3: List Customer Pain Points

List customer pain points that each of those features fixes.

This is where we're trying to use a process where we move away from just thinking about what your product can do and we start trying to think about how your product impacts your customer's life, those are the messages you really want to be focusing on.

This is where you can really dig into the "So What?" questions too.

Feature A fixes Problem A - So what? Why does that matter?

Step 4: List the Desirable Outcomes

Once you've got the pain, you want to flip the coin and ask: "When this problem is fixed, what benefit do our customers get?"

If the pain is X, what's thee desirable outcome from eliminating that pain?

These improvements to life are literally the bread and butter of your value proposition.

Step 5: Rank Your Feature/Pain/Pleasure

Once you've got everything mapped out, you want to actually go and rank each of these.

So Feature A alleviates Pain A which brings Pleasure A. On a scale of 1-5, 1 being you better be able to login to the app, 5 being this is life changing, rank each set.

You want to do this, because a lot of times we get so caught up in the day to day and get excited about stuff that really isn't that important to our buyers.

You want to make sure that your value proposition is focusing on eliminating pains that really matter. I've seen too many companies focus on inconveniences over frequent intense pains in their copy and it doesn't convert.

Step Sort of 6: Tally Your Score and Pick a Winner

So you'll tally up the score and pick the one that got the highest score, so what feature, what pain, and what pleasure. Once you have these we can start crafting the value proposition.

Now this might sound like a lot of upfront work again, but if you do this, I can promise you that your copy will convert at a higher rate, your sales team will have better conversations and your business focus will be on the right things.

The Actual Writing

Like I said earlier, I'm not in the camp of having a specific formula to your value proposition, but just like in the conversion heuristic, it has to hit on certain things.

What your customers want.

What your product does that helps customers get what they want.

What is unique about your product that helps strengthen that offer.

Instead of going down a rabbit hole on exactly how to craft one. I'll give you my company's Value Proposition that I built while I was taking the class at CXL.

My company is an analytics and AI platform for value-based organizations in the healthcare space.

Our Ideal Client is a large at risk (meaning if they don't meet certain criteria they have to pay money to the government) organization that is responsible for 10-50,000 lives under 2-5 insurance plans.

Their biggest pain is the time consumption of the aggregation and analysis of data that is sent downstream every month from the health plans.

If they could fix that, they would be able to actually follow the roadmap the data leads them down leading to more proactive patient care and more money in their pockets as well.

So here's our Value Proposition.

Execute on Your Data (I got this from 15 interviews I did with our personas, every single one of them used this phrase in one form or another)

We make it easy for value-based organizations to aggregate, analyze, and take action on their data leading to increased quality of care, reduced costs, and an overall better member experience.

In this, we speak to everything that our clients and the outcomes that they truly care about.

If you're in our target market you're scrolling and digging into how this happens and that's the goal.

So go through this with your team.

Don't skimp on the initial research and the "So What?" tests, it makes all the difference.

Until Next Time.