How Good Is Your Value Proposition?

IT’S BEEN AN INTERESTING PATH to today’s vaunted Value Proposition, as a key tool in differentiating one’s offerings.
        For a long time, the tool was the USP, or Unique Selling Proposition. This had a positive purpose of getting people to look at what was special about their product or service and the benefit it offered. But it too often led to long-winded screeds that were all about “Me”. Even if it was short, a USP could ignore the audience’s or prospects’ needs and still be true to talking about uniqueness.
        Next came the Elevator Pitch. This has a very specific formula, at least as laid out by Geoffrey Moore in Crossing the Chasm, so it doesn’t allow people to waffle on endlessly. But if you read what Moore wrote (on page 154), it is clearly geared toward VCs or analysts who want to understand what your business is about. It is NOT focused on how a particular prospect can improve their business or their life with the help of your product or service. In its classic form, it leaves the audience or prospect to figure out whether or not it’s of value to them.
        So enter the Value Proposition. At its heart, it’s a good thing — talking about the value that people can gain from your product or service. But with such a vague term as “value proposition”, it’s really easy to subvert the true value of this tool. In fact, a Google search returns more than 21,400,000 entries, so the permutations on this are almost endless.
        Jill Konrath has a good description of what an effective value proposition should be. But I’m going to give you an even shorter version:

· If your value proposition starts with “We have” or “We do” or “We make” or “We are in the business of”, then you’re NOT talking about the value your prospects or audience can gain. It’s not a value proposition, even if you declare it to be so. Instead, it’s an obvious (and too typical) declaration about what you want to sell.

· If your value proposition starts with “We help”, you’re on the right track. If you then get specific (with one to three items) about tangible gains or objectives they can achieve, you’re really dialed into a powerful value proposition.

Take a look at how you describe your offerings — look at the first two words — and see whether you’re focusing on yourself or on the ones you want to influence.
        OR, just write the words “We help” on a sheet of paper and then try completing the sentence. This will help your efforts immensely.