How to create a customer obsessed value proposition

When you’re running an organisation, you often get caught up describing your organisation in terms that you and your people understand.

The problem is that often this isn’t how your customers see and understand things.

When you dig deeper, you’ll find that either they don’t understand what you’re saying, or to them you just sound the same as everyone else who does what you do.

What’s the answer?

You’re right, it’s a value proposition.

If you haven’t worked on this yet, you’re not alone. A lot of organisations don’t have a clearly defined value proposition.

This is usually because they don't realise how important and valuable it is. It’s important that you have one, because it sums up what you offer to your ideal customers.

In this post I’m going to share with you a simple structure to create a value proposition for your organisation, products and services.

Why it’s important to have a value proposition

Creating your value proposition encourages you to look at the value you offer from the customer’s perspective.

It’s ideal for your value proposition to be summarised in one sentence, as it defines who your customers are and why they should buy from you. In short:

Who your customers are and why they should care.

Defining it in one sentence makes it easy to remember and gives you a framework to build your marketing and sales messages around.

Creating a value proposition for your organisation and individual products and services

If your organisation offers different products and services it will be helpful to create individual value propositions for each. This is especially important if the products and services have different audiences.

The approach and template that I’ve shared below works well at both an organisational level and for your individual products and services.

If you haven't created one already, then I recommend you start by creating one for your organisation.

Where to start when creating your value proposition

To build a value proposition it’s important to start with your ideal customer in mind. So the first thing you need to do is to build a profile of your ideal customer.

Defining your ideal customer profile

Your ideal customer profile, is based on the attributes that your best customers have. Start by defining them and when you have, combine them to create a picture of your ideal customer.

Be clear on:

• Who they are
• What their problem is that you fix
• Why they would buy from you
• What is stopping them buying from you
• What else are they considering to solve their problem
• Who else they involve or ask for advice from when buying
• Where they get their information from

When you’ve clearly defined your Ideal Customer Profile, you are in a good place to build your value proposition.

What to include in your value proposition

When you are defining your value proposition. Define the following first:

• Your produce or service
• The customer segment you are targeting
• The job that your product or service does
• The pain they are looking to eliminate or reduce
• The gain they are looking to achieve
• The main competing value proposition

I recommend that you can create a few options for each, so that you can test what works best.

Now you’ve created your options, you can combine these together to create your outline value proposition.

Use the following structure to create your first draft.

The first draft of your value proposition

Our [product or service] help(s) [customer segment] who want to [job that needs to be done] by [reducing verb] [customer pain] and [increasing verb] customer gain, unlike [competing value proposition]

Here’s an example:

Our Value Proposition Template, helps busy business owners, who want to stand out from their competition, avoid sounding the same as their competitors and attract more loyal customers, without spending a fortune on a marketing agency.

Refining your value proposition

When you’ve done this, share it with your team to get feedback and suggestions on how it can be refined and simplified.

I’ve refined the example I gave above to:

Our Value Proposition Template, helps busy business owners build, test and refine a unique and compelling message that attracts loyal customers.

Testing your value proposition

When you’ve created your value proposition, it’s important to test it, so that you can get feedback on how your customers and potential customer react to it.

Give it to your sales people, as they’ll see and hear the reactions from people they speak with and meet directly.

Another great channel to test it is by using digital advertising.

Google Adwords and Facebook are both perfect for this, because you can test different versions of your message using split tests.

You can target your adverts containing your value proposition messages to very defined audiences either using keywords or audience demographics.

By targeting different versions of the message to the same audience, you can then understand which performs better.

Look at the click through rates and conversion rates that each version of your value proposition gets. You should see that one outperforms the other. You can then try and beat this best performer, if you want to test your message any further. Otherwise you’ve found your winner.

This is a quick and simple way to build, test and refine a unique value proposition for your organisation.

If you want to come back to this guide in the future, check out this post on how to build a value proposition our site.

I hope you’ve found this post useful. If you’d like to keep up to date with us, connect with me on LinkedIn or follow the LexisClick Company page for regular updates like this.