Selling Your Value Proposition

How to Transform Your Business into a Selling Organization

Cindy Barnes, Helen Blake, Tamara Howard

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780749479923
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sales
• Index: Business

A value proposition is created from the combination of a company's products and services, and the value gained by the customer. It is used to drive better business, and is essential to success for any business - without it, companies are at risk of losing customers and being drowned out in crowded marketplaces. Selling Your Value Proposition is a practical, user-friendly guide to establishing a streamlined customer-centric selling process to communicate and express value propositions, enabling companies to convey their value-creating stories to customers consistently. Featuring case studies and interviews with renowned business leaders and influencers, Selling Your Value Proposition demonstrates how value propositions adeptly position a business across a range of industries. The techniques and skills shared have all been honed through the authors' experience with more than 600 companies around the world, and clear, step-by-step guidelines will empower all readers to effectively focus their value propositions for competitive success.

APPENDIX 1

Value Proposition Workshop survey results

Many companies participated in a series of workshops using the Value Proposition Builder™ methodology. These companies ranged from technology and industrials to logistics providers, and they were coached to learn and then apply the methodology in their own businesses.

In the context of this book, the workshops essentially followed the steps described in Chapter 3, ‘How to develop a value proposition’.

The businesses involved in this survey were mostly small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

Figure App 1.1 Breakdown of delegate companies by turnover and payroll

Breakdown of delegate companies by turnover and payroll

Reasons for enrolling

This was an optional workshop for businesses, which enrolled on it for a variety of reasons:

• expand into new markets, including overseas;
• improve the customer offer;
• understand the customer offer;
• convey a technical message to investors.

Key challenges cited by delegates included, in rank order:

• lack of growth, either revenue or sales;
• being driven towards commodity price strategies;
• promotions and communication efforts not engaging target audiences effectively;
• cost-cutting and lean efficiencies have been achieved;
• competitors are taking the lead in their markets.

Working with the Value Proposition Builder™ process

We asked delegates to describe the experience of working with the Value Proposition Builder^™ process:

Figure App 1.2 Delegates’ experience of working with the Value Proposition Builder™ process

‘Really forced deep dive analysis and helped us to formulate and then in turn articulate our proposition in a way that could be communicated to and from all levels within the company.’	‘Great for gaining insights into where the customer sees us bringing value. Validates the things we do well. Informs us as to where we need to improve.’
‘It helped cement a belief that we already had but were unable to successfully deliver/promote to our clients. It also made us realize that certain segments of our target industry are best left to the opposition.’	‘The course gave me a really practical tool kit to support the development of a new sales strategy for the business.’
‘It provides a language and structure to use when presenting our business. When building a new business (or working in an existing business) one is very close to it and it can be hard to step back and put key elements into a framework that others (potential clients and/or investors) can understand in a succinct and clear manner.’ ‘The workshop provided an excellent ‘out of the office’ forum for our team to discuss and analyse our offering to the market in a structured and focused fashion. Oftentimes these important concepts and exercises are avoided by small companies as they are considered too complex to tackle but the Futurecurve approach makes it not only achievable in a short time frame but also in a fun and instructive way.’	‘A very valuable exercise that achieved our aim of identifying our value drivers to communicate with investors but also enabled the company to focus on customers needs better.’ ‘Our business is all about identifying value for our customers – the tool is perfect for this. We then put our efforts into developing the capability to create more value and of course to eliminate waste. ‘It was a systematic process where each step in the builder built upon the last. This was something that we could replicate outside of the programme for our different offerings.’

How the businesses have implemented what they learned

Twelve months after the workshop, we contacted businesses to understand how, if at all, they had put what they had learned into practice.

Figure App 1.3 confirms that while the most popular approach was to feed the value proposition work through to marketing messages, over half of delegate businesses had also gone on to repeat the process internally. Nearly half had ‘reset’ their company vision and over one-third had changed the products and services they sold.

Figure App 1.3 How delegates have implemented what they learned

How delegates have implemented what they learned

Barriers to implementation

While none of the businesses had any problem getting management buy-in, one-third cited lack of resources for an implementation programme as a barrier to putting the workshop into practice. The most common problem, however, was the simple fact of being too busy: nearly 60 per cent of respondents were held back by operational business pressures from putting their plans into practice:

Figure App 1.4 Barriers to implementation

Barriers to implementation

Results and successes

Following the work...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 01 How the world has changed
• 02 Why businesses need a value proposition
• 03 How to develop a value proposition
• 04 How to translate a value proposition into a sales proposition
• 05 The sales process
• 06 The sales story
• 07 Winning business: the 10 Laws of Value Proposition Selling
• 08 Creating the selling organization
• Appendix 1: Value Proposition Workshop survey results
• Appendix 2: Case studies
• About the authors
• Index
• Backcover