Yesterday we discussed the 3 essential questions you need to ask and answer to begin setting your strategy for the New Year.
The first question was pretty simple: What tangible value does our company produce or want to produce?
The challenge for most organizations in answering this question comes in the way that they have been trained to think about their value and the jobs that they do for their clients.
In too many instances, we get trapped in a scenario where we asked to deliver specific activities for clients like:
Web design
SEO
Social media marketing
Facebook advertising
Sales training
And, the list can go on and on.
This usually makes us look at ourselves as just a provider of a set of services that the market is ready to buy.
In too many cases, this is a great deal for our clients and a bad deal for us.
Why?
Because when we are just another set of hands, we are a commodity and we quickly become looped into a contest of price sensitivity that drives our ability to earn a decent wage down the tubes.
Think about it like this:
If you are just doing some graphic design, why would you get paid $300 an hour when some new grad student will do the work for $25?
And, you would be correct in saying your experience counts and your ability to make decisions is important and any other number of things that you might know to be the truth, but where you lose the battle for mindshare is in not defining your value in advance.
Not to pick on designers because this challenge is at play in so many professional service environments like law, accounting, consulting, and many others.
Your challenge is to stop the madness and begin by defining yourself in reference to the value you create.
So let’s work through a few questions that will help you identify and explain your value in the way that enables you to differentiate yourself from your competitors and others that are just playing the commodity game.
1. What are the key benefits your clients gain from working with you?
Let’s use me as an example.
When you work with me, I give you significant revenue improvements and changes to the way that your business looks at your revenue generation machinery.
For you, what are these results:
Do you help your clients tell their stories better?
Are you all about changing the amount of time it takes your clients to close business?
Does your product help your clients achieve better business relationships with their clients?
How do you help them?
List those.
2. How can we quantify these gains?
Does your improvement easily translate to more money? Less time wasted? Greater ability to reach a certain market?
Or, does your product or service go right to the bottom line? Increased sales? Increased sales pipelines?
Think about the ways that you can quantify your value.
3. What about your intangible value?
How much time do you save your clients?
What about saving them stress?
How about combining those two?
List those things down.
4. Now, combine everything into a value proposition:
Tell your potential market the biggest benefit that they gain from working with you with quantifiable points.
Think about it like this:
“I work with organizations to deliver new revenue opportunities and my clients have consistently improved their new business acquisitions by 33% or more.”
Your mileage may vary.
My challenge to you is to spend a little time working through these questions and come up with some version of your value statement.
If you have any issues, email me or leave me a comment below.