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In business today, you only have the ear of a prospective customer for a short period of time. If you cannot articulate a compelling value proposition that resonates precisely with their needs and expectations, they will almost certainly move on to your competitors.

If another competitor does stand-out in the crowd, you may be quickly overlooked. If no competitor stands-out, price will eventually drive customer decision-making. Either way, the consequences are not good. 

In our experience, there are few business owners who can articulate a meaningful value proposition that resonates with customers, so it should come as no surprise that neither can their front-line sales and account management staff.

This manifests itself in common themes – unsatisfactory sales performance, wasted marketing spend, high turnover of sales staff and solely price-based competition.

As an exercise, get your sales people to write down answers to the following questions – 

• What tangible benefit will accrue to customers from using our product or service?
• What do we do, that is important to our customers, differently or better than our competitors?
• Why should a customer select us in favour of the competitive options available?

If you are typical of most businesses, you will get an enormous range of disparate responses. 

A properly formulated value proposition is the most important foundation upon which competitive strategy is built. 

Imagine what it might do for your business if all your sales resources were consistently articulating a powerful value proposition that resonated strongly with prospective clients and established a solid point of differentiation between you and your competitors.

About the author

Michael Evett
Michael has over 25 years executive management and board experience and a record of top-line and bottom-line growth in private, private-equity and public companies in the oil and gas, B2B and manufacturing sectors. This experience includes business and strategic planning, mergers and acquisitions, business integration and organisational development. Michael is a director of a number of private businesses, and an Accredited Associate of the Institute for Independent Business.

Follow Mike Evett on Twitter @MichaelNEvett