3.6 Building Value Proposition Statements

In your core marketing class, you learned about positioning statements as a key tool to define the unique value of your brand relative to others in your product or service category.  The Konrath reading introduced three more messaging tools to add to your B2B marketing toolkit: business value proposition statements, elevator pitches and unique selling propositions.  This video helps you map how these four messaging tools align with the buying journey, to help you use them to build content that resonates with your buyers as they make progress through it. It then digs more deeply into value propositions, which is the tool that is most useful for initially attracting buyers, and helping them progress through that challenging “solution identification” phase of their buying journey. The lecture transcript is included below the video.

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Transcript

[0:01] Value Proposition Statements

Value proposition statements focus on helping your customer decide whether to move forward on a decision at all, or in other words, the solution identification decision. Here is Jill Konrath definition from your reading. By focusing on business outcomes and stressing the business value of what we offer, we help build momentum to move forward with the decision. Once customers have agreed on this, then the specific value we provide becomes important.

[0:26] Positioning Statements

Positioning statements are something you spent some time on in your core marketing class. They’re most useful for the supplier choice decision because they presume a customer has already settled on a particular category of solution. The focus of the positioning statement is differentiating your brand within a category, helping the customer choose your brand during the second decision.

[0:48] Elevator Pitches and USPs

The Konrath reading also introduced two new sets of messages that marketers often develop, elevator pitches, and unique selling propositions. As Konrath noted in her article, the elevator pitch is a more general version of what a company does and how it helps customers without necessarily focusing on a specific customer segment. The unique selling proposition is a more general version of the positioning statement. Again, not focused on a particular segment.

In this class, we’ll focus on crafting specific value propositions relevant to specific B2B customer profiles so that we can help buying centers move forward on whether to change.

So how do we start?

[1:26] The Structure of Business Value Proposition Statements

Your Konrath reading provided the structure for value proposition statements as business driver, movement, and metrics. Here’s an example of four different value proposition statements that use this structure that a marketing agency might use to describe its value to potential clients.

All four statements start with the same phrase “when working with us, a recent client…”. Note the value proposition statements don’t need to actually reference the specific clients, but as you recall, stronger value propositions are more tailored. So if you have a client in the same industry as a customer you’re targeting, by all means use the client’s name.

Then each of the four statements has a business driver shown in blue, a movement verb shown in red, and a metric shown in green. Note that all four of these value proposition statements might refer to the same recent client project, in this case, a project to create a video campaign to encourage people to visit the client’s website.

Part of your skill as a salesperson is building value propositions that align with the different needs and buying roles of different customers. So you should be able to construct multiple value propositions based on your products and services.

[2:33] Two core frames of reference: “Top Line and Bottom Line”

There are two core ways to frame your value propositions, making it easier for customers to grow and adapt, and creating better ongoing efficiencies.

We’re going to use these benefits to frame the value we create to align our messaging towards these two broad customer goals, in order to provide a value proposition that resonates with all the members of the buying center and helps them come to consensus.

[2:55] The “Top Line” Frame: Growth/Adaptation

A growth adaptation frame focuses on revenues. Because total revenues have a top line in an income statement. You can also think of this as your top line framing for your value propositions. These two statements have this top line frame.

To craft growth or adaptation frame value propositions, think like a brand manager or product leader, and focus on your customer’s customers. Can you help your customers make their product or service more valuable in their customer’s? Can you help them adapt to changing customer needs and competitive forces in their own marketplaces?

And how does this translate to more revenues for them? Contacts in marketing and product development roles are key to help you understand how customers, products, and services compete in their marketplace.

[3:43] The “Bottom Line” Frame: Efficiency/Productivity

An efficiency or productivity frame focuses on costs. Can you help them lower their unit costs? If you can help them get to the same revenue for less cost, that savings drops directly to the bottom line. So you can think of this as the bottom line frame.

To craft efficiency framed value propositions, think like an operations manager or a cost account. Can you help your customers make their products or services more cheaply? Can you help them do so with less waste or risk? Can you help get more output from their current operations? And can you do all this faster and better than they could alone?

Contacts in operations roles are key to help you understand how you might be able to do these things and to build a persuasive case that you can.

[4:30] Laddering links value across buying journey

The key messages our value proposition statements offer is to explain why choosing to move forward with our category of solution is worth it in terms relevant to our business customers. If our value proposition statements resonate with customers, their next question is often, how did you do that? It’s a great opportunity for a salesperson to start a conversation with them.

Once customers have bought into our type or category of solution, we can use laddering to connect features that differentiate us from our competition to the benefits we’re discussing in our value proposition statements. Doing this helps customers connect features of our products and services with benefits to their organization.

And then our frame helps us connect those benefits to their purpose and profit outcomes. So laddering like this can help build alignment within the buying center on both buying decisions that need to happen.

Here’s an example of laddering with one of the value propositions statements we created.

The more we can help customers make these connections, the stronger the case the buying center can build for moving forward together. And doing so with us.