A value proposition helps to clearly articulate why someone would want to buy from your company rather than anyone else’s. A value proposition does precisely what it says on the tin. It’s a promise of value to be delivered, and the main reason a prospect should buy from you and not from your competitor(s).
We’re currently working through our own VP at OB, with a desire to focus our proposition as we look to expand our market and grow. We felt it might be useful to share this experience with you, to give you a bit of insight into how a value proposition might be approached and give you some guidance on how to establish your own.
EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT
Our VP began with a short employee survey, designed and carried out by our VP Specialist, to establish an inside-out view of OB and understand what OB means to its team. All feedback given was to remain anonymous, in order to encourage staff to be as honest and open as possible and give in-depth responses to the questions, ‘warts and all’. With a 100% response rate (the average for a business is around 60%), the survey was met by the OB team with enthusiasm and energy, with everyone keen to offer input, share their thoughts and opinions. Our employee survey was swiftly followed by a summary team workshop. The main purpose of this was to build a view of our target market and offer differentiators to go out and test with three existing OB clients – thus gaining an outside-in view and helping us to validate our findings with a selection of key clients.
CONVERSATIONS WITH CLIENTS
The workshop was insightful and the next stage for us is to validate what our clients also see – the same key differentiators as we do, and to build on expanding and deepening those. Once this is done, the VP can be written – with features, benefits and positioning for OB. We’ll also start to use our findings to re-shape our marketing collateral over the coming months to ensure our prospects understand why they should be working with us and how we can offer them something different.
Check out our next blog over the coming weeks for Stage Two of the VP process.
