Introduction: Authenticity matters
A well-crafted value proposition helps you articulate the unique benefits and solutions that your company offers customers, along with how you’re set apart from competitors.
To create a truly authentic value proposition, you need to understand your customers and competitors well, but along with that, you need to build a deep understanding of your own strengths and weaknesses to fully answer the question ‘why YOU?’
Ensuring your value proposition is aligned with your core competencies, your organisation can establish a genuinely authentic and sustainable competitive advantage. The process of incorporating this internal capability into your value proposition development requires an understanding of the company’s strengths, resources, and potential.
It’s all about ensuring that the promised value is not only attractive to customers but also feasible and sustainable for the company to deliver consistently. By bridging the gap between internal capabilities and external market needs, companies can create an authentic value proposition that resonates with customers and stands the test of time.
Recommended Reading: Creating a unique value proposition: The 3 C’s
Talk to your customers
While conducting your customer interviews as part of the first ‘C’, use a little of the time you have with them to ask them their perspectives on your organisation. Some simple, open questions that can help you tease out capabilities they see in your organisation, helping you work out why they bought from you:
- What were the reasons you went with our services instead of someone else? (follow-up: Tell me more / Why?)
- What are the top 5 strengths our organisation or services have?
- What are our top 5 weaknesses, please be honest, no offence will be taken? What can we work on to improve?
- How have we helped you and your business do what you need to do?
- What have been the results for you/your business?
These questions are a good start and often you’ll hear things you didn’t expect, things that aren’t on any slide in your sales decks. The magic of talking to customers about your capabilities is you come to understand what they really saw in you rather than what you think they saw.
Talk to your team
Incorporating views (via interviews or small group sessions) from sales, account management, support services and product development teams will provide a rounded perspective on your organisation’s strengths and potential weaknesses. This feedback should not only reflect current capabilities but also offer a glimpse into future plans or aspirations, ensuring your proposition is both realistic and forward-looking. This means any proposition developed will be realistic today but also be able to link to how the business is evolving.
There is another reason to get perspectives on future capability. Going back to the proposition being a tool to shape strategy and action, having visibility of what is changing in the business will mean any recommendations you make can be positioned in a way that reduces conflict or supports things already in motion. It will also give you the ability to address things earlier that might contradict or impact the success of the proposition rather than having a nasty surprise down the road.
What we do is commoditised…so look at the how.
There is no getting around the fact that the core offer from many B2B providers is very often indistinguishable from competitors and, due to regulation, meet pretty similar standards. So how then do you identify authentic and distinctive capability to use in your proposition if what you do looks like everyone else?
The key here is to go beyond simply collecting information on your product or service features. Through sessions with different parts of the business, you want to go much deeper, not just scratching the surface, to unearth both the tangible and intangible capabilities you offer. This often requires moving away from focusing on the ‘what’ you do and look more at the ‘how’ you do it. To do this, ask a few probing questions in those sessions…
- How do we do things in ways that others might ignore, miss or see as inefficient but might be effective/compelling to your target customers?
- How do we create, build and enhance connections between different parts of the organisation or partners of your organisation in distinctive ways?
- How do we make customers feel at different stages of the relationship or engagement? For example, where do you create moments in their journey that continually get great feedback?
- Do we see the market we operate in ways that others might disagree with?
- How are we structured or organised that can’t be replicated by competitors? A simple example of this would be how mutual organisations don’t have to satisfy quarterly stakeholder returns. This structure means they can potentially invest in things that don’t provide immediate commercial return but benefit their customers.
Avoid sweeping capability statements
By moving beyond product or service features to less obvious, intangible capabilities, it can be very easy to fall into the trap of making sweeping, generic, unspecific statements about your capability.
The most common has to be some variation of ‘our strength is our people’. Yes, your people aren’t replicable commodities, and they are probably great but guess what, all (most) organisations have great people. Therefore, is it really a distinctive thing your customers will recognise? By all means focus on your people (more often than not B2B success is built on relationships) but challenge yourself and the team to dig into what it is about your people and how they operate that’s truly special or different.
The other sweeping statement trap we see repeating itself is organisations resting on the history or longevity of their business. There is no denying a 100 year old business has a certain level of credibility in the eyes of customers. That credibility does provide confidence. But in many traditional B2B industries, several of your competitors will have been around for some time too. Being 30 or 100 years old (or much more in the insurance sector) is likely to make little real difference. Does being older or more traditional really make you more appealing today?
Instead, use your origin as a source of inspiration to answer exactly why your heritage is beneficial to customers. For example, a construction company we worked with was the first company to bring a new type of construction plant machine to the UK market from central Europe. From there, they have multiple examples of being the first in the industry to introduce new developments to that product and guide the sector in setting standards. This changes the narrative from being the longest standing provider to the provider that customers know sets the standards of quality and has a long-term ability to innovate.
So really the question is, if you’ve been around a while, what have you been able to enhance, grow, develop, change in that time that makes you distinctive?
“Leadership’s vision and commitment are foundational for the successful implementation of any new proposition.”
Leadership vision and conviction
Leadership’s vision and commitment are foundational for the successful implementation of any new proposition. Early engagement with company leaders ensures their perspectives are considered, balancing their insights with ground- level realities and customer feedback to shape a proposition that is both ambitious and achievable.
However, a word of caution. Their insight is normally highly opinion-based. As leaders, they’re likely to be more detached from the realities of the day-to-day operation and have specific agendas they want to impose. Different leaders will have different perspectives and trying to cram them all into the final proposition is a recipe for a confusing, complex, conflicting output. In other words, a proposition disaster.
The proposition you develop should consider but not be led only by these views. Your role is to create something that is fact-based, focused on customer insight, and the realities of the business. If this goes against a leader’s point of view, it’s then your job to show them the insight and use the proposition development process to secure their buy-in.
One thing leader vision does provide is often an exciting ‘future’ you can tease out or talk to through your proposition. Your proposition shouldn’t be a static thing, customers want to feel that you are continuing to innovate in line with it and are taking them on a journey to an exciting place.
Recommended Reading: Putting customers at the heart of strategy
Capture, code, theme and rank
As with Customer, for the Capability interviews, you will have reams of notes and transcriptions. To make sense of it all go through the coding and theming exercise outlined in that article.
In the next article we’ll show you how you’ll combine these themes, with your hierarchy of customer needs to identify ways you can message to customers in a way that is compelling and authentic to you.
Conclusion
Incorporating insights on internal capabilities into the value proposition development process, feels like an obvious thing to do but doing it the right way can significantly enhance a company’s market position and long-term success. Aligning your unique strengths with customer needs, you create an authentic value proposition that is both compelling and true to you. This approach ensures that the promised value can be consistently delivered, fostering customer trust and loyalty.
The process of integrating internal capability insights into value proposition development is an ongoing journey that requires continuous refinement. As companies evolve and market conditions change, it’s essential to regularly reassess internal capabilities and adjust your value proposition accordingly. By maintaining this alignment between internal strengths and external offerings, you’ll be more likely to stay ahead of the competition and continue to deliver meaningful value to customers.
Lets be true to ourselves and create and authentic value proposition customers will love.
