Sales & Customer Service: Writing a Value Proposition Through the Perspective of the Customer

1. Introduction: Businesses and business people tend to speak their own language, which they've developed around their industry, their product, and their expertise. But buyers and customers are approaching the world from their view and their needs. Bridging this communication gap has been a large part of my work and motivation. Value, just like Bushi, exists in the eye of the beholder. When it comes to your value proposition, the beholder is your customer, and your value proposition must be telling a story that they will understand and be able to relate to. Welcome to my class on writing a value proposition through the eyes of the customer name. I'm Rebecca Brizi, a management consultant whose main mission in life is to make business simple. This class will teach you to write a value proposition that truly resonates with your customer. This class is for any individual whose work includes business development. That includes you if you are a salesperson, if you are a member of the marketing team, if you're a product manager or product developer. If you are a business executive who's making company-wide decisions. If you're a customer-experienced professional and if you are somebody who has contact with customers in any way, we will go through three steps that you can use to define what your customers value. Your final project will be to complete a single sentence value proposition, which includes your customer description. The problem that they need to solve, why your solution is the right one or benefits and how you solve their problem, the features, as well as the final outcome that the customer receives. Don't forget to share your value proposition in the project gallery. Once you have completed this class and the project, you will know all the ways in which your product can improve your customer's life. This will change your perspective not only on how to connect with that customer, but how to provide internal feedback for improved customer support and improved product development. There is often a bit of brushes sets to start a sales conversation or a fear of being pitched to. With the value proposition built around the customer, that barrier will disappear. Let's get started. 2. Defining a Value Proposition: In this first lesson, we will set the foundations for your work by addressing what value means to the customer, how it might be different from your definition and why that matters. Understanding the true meaning of value means achieving wisdom about both your product and your customer. Think of it like this. Information is knowing what you are. Let's say you're a CPA, saying I'm a CPA demonstrates that you have the correct information. Knowledge is about knowing what you do. I will complete your tax return and do your monthly bookkeeping. The next level is wisdom, and that is something else entirely. Wisdom is knowing how what you do matters to your customers. For a CPA, that might be, avoid an audit, maximize tax credits, and build financial reports. Wisdom is where we will find your value proposition. The thing about value is that it is not about what you sell. It's about what the customer buys. Nobody buys for fun or to do you a favor. Nobody is buying a Coke out of concern for the Coca-Cola Company's end of your results. Nobody buys a website without caring what goes on it. Nobody hires a plumber to not come over and fix something. People buy an outcome. They buy the result of your product or service. They are buying the solution that you provide. Quenched thirst, customer communication, a fixed leak. What you sell, what you do, doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is how you solve the problem. The first step in understanding your customers is to understand what you solve for them. In other words, how they think of your product. You may have only one product, but you have as many solutions as you have customers. A value proposition describes what a customer receives by working with you, not the product that they buy but what that product enables for them. It is a statement about how your service increases the value of your customer's organization or life if you are a business-to-consumer company. For example, think of the difference between a Toyota and a Ferrari. They are not both cars. A Toyota is a commute. A Ferrari is an image. These two cars offer something different to buyers. Crafting that message puts each product in front of the right buyers and compels those buyers to purchase. Here are some tactics to help distinguish between benefits and features. Test yourself on noshing these differences. Think of three common products or services and try to describe them from the point of view of what people buy rather than what the businesses sell. For example, if you sell pens, your customers get the ability to write a postcard. If you sell running shoes, your customers get comfort and support for meaningful exercise. If you sell family law services, your customer gets a simple and quick settlement with minimal disruption. Now it's your turn. Start with a blanket statement for your company. Try to describe what your customers buy instead of what you sell in one sentence. This will get you in the correct mindset for the rest of the exercises. Instead of starting the sentence with I offer, fill in the blank, start the sentence with my customer needs and fill in the blank. In the next lesson, we will work on understanding the business value your customer receives from your product or service. Be prepared to start walking in your customer's shoes. 3. Achieving Business Targets: Business value is anything that has a positive impact on the strategic goals of the organization. To recognize that positive impact, you must know both what the goals are and how your buyer's work is expected to contribute to those goals. Here's one way to look at it. Your work as a salesperson contributes to your company's goals through revenue increases, customer acquisition, market reach, and more. Business value is about revenue, product development, services, customer retention. It includes anything that shows an improvement to the bottom line and an advancement towards corporate strategic goals. Another way to think of this is that business value is the transformation that your customers receive by hiring you. They are able to achieve business targets after working with you that they could not achieve before that. Let's look at an example. Think of business value for a company that offers corporate gifts. The gifts can be purchased directly from their website, and they also offer appointments to meet with their consultants and request customized products. The company's strategic goals will include things like revenue targets, customer acquisition, increased brand reach, and more. An effective website for that company contributes to all of those goals. A website designer must be able to explain how a good website will increase revenue through either more sales or higher prices, increase new customer acquisition by reaching more people and conversing more visitors. Expand brand reach through a good customer experience and more. Think about this in your own context. You target a particular profile or department within a business. Describe how your customers work contributes to that company's overall goals. This will help you understand what pressures and expectations your customer is working under. Now it's your turn. Guess 3-5 strategic goals for the customers organizations. Consider subjects such as finances, growth, innovation, operations, HR, and company culture. Now, describe how your customer is expected to contribute to those goals through their work and their targets. Select the goals on which your customers work, makes a difference. How does your customers work contribute to achieving those corporate goals? With this exercise, you will be able to tap into the core long-term value a customer receives from what you sell. In the next lesson, we will look at how you can talk to customers about the technical value of your product or service. 4. Providing a Technical Solution: The next type of value that your customer receives from your product is technical value. Technical value is about the technical skills or the technical product that you're offering. It is the skill gap that you're plugging with your product or service and it describes how that product or service will be used by the customer. This value has to connect nicely with the skills your customers do have so that your solution is easy for them to adopt. Technical value is the base value of any offering in the sense that it is the simplest form of value to explain. Customers will buy from you because your product or service has a technical expertise or ability that they lack. The technical value of a pen is writing in ink. The technical value of running shoes is in the design and materials. The technical value of a family law attorney is in her degree and experience. Let's go back to our website example. The technical value of a web developer is all of that coding and designing and user experience knowledge and training that they have. An effective website will offer a seamless buyer experience with high-quality images, simple payment methods, and all in as few clicks as possible. It will also allow prospects to book appointments online at a time of their choosing. It continues to work as a sales and scheduling platform at any time of day, whenever the customer visits the site. It is doing all this without interrupting the company employees. These are technical features that the website developer offers. The customers themselves probably do not have the skills to achieve on their own. A simple way to think of this is that technical value describes the things that a customer needs, which you know how to do and they don't. It is about the means to an end. How does your product or service allow better work overall for the customer? It explains why your service is better than a DIY option. Now it's your turn to describe the technical value your product or service offers. Start by writing down three ways your customer might try to DIY a solution instead of buying yours. Next, explain what they are losing or missing out on by trying to do it on their own. Finally, explain how the technical expertise your company offers will take them from all of those gaps and weaknesses of their DIY option to a great, easy-to-use, comprehensive solution. Once you have completed the explanation, you will have all the value points relevant to your product offering. In the next lesson, we will address the third form of value, personal value. There, we will look at what the customer gets out of the deal personally. 5. Offering Personal Value: In this lesson, we get to know your customer on a whole new level. Personal value is what makes your buyer smile. Even when you sell to a business, businesses are still run by people. Personal value is about the individual involved rather than the business. They are the ones making the decision, doing the things, and enjoying the business benefits. Your customer is a person with their own business and technical needs, as well as personal hopes and preferences. People are ultimately driven by the width and urge. What's in it or me? As we established earlier, nobody buys a Coke to do a favor to the Coca-Cola Corporation. They buy it to quench their thirst, maybe also to satisfy a sweet tooth. That's what's in it for the customer. That's the personal value. Know what's in it for your customers when they buy from you? What are their personal benefits from the deal? Ask yourself how a successful purchase and project will make your customers' life better. When your buyer is able to implement a solution that achieves the company's business goals through what you sell, that means that they are successful in their work. Tell them what they can report internally to show that success and find out what motivates your buyer in their work every day and what they hope to achieve. It might be things like an increase in salary, a bonus, a promotion, an improved working environment, improved working hours. More interesting work, professional development, clocking out early every Thursday so that they can see their daughter's soccer game, and much more. To put this understanding into action, think beyond your customer's day-to-day work. Try to imagine what motivates them to do their job and what other interests and desires they have in life. Personal goals that are supported by the work that they do. You can get a lot of information from things they say or things you might see. Like, do they have a picture of their dog on their desk? Or do they mention their hobbies during small talk? For the rest, it's okay to make some assumptions to give you that initial direction. Now it's your turn to identify the personal value you can provide to your customers. The effective way to get to the personal value is describe how your customer is evaluated in their work, what is expected of them, and how do they get recognized in their own company? Next, explain how your product or service can increase their chances of recognition and what that might do for the individual overall. Finally, take it a step further and add some thoughts on how that might change your customers' working environment for the better, how it might contribute to a promotion or a bonus, or better hours and so on. Now you see your customer in a deeper way. You can connect all the types of value that they receive from your product or service and you know what they are really buying. In the next lesson, we will take this knowledge and translate it into both the features and benefits you offer in your product or service. 6. Honing in on Benefits: You know all the value you bring to a customer for the business needs, the technical needs, and the personal needs. Now, you're ready to take all of this customer context and use it to create a new customer-centric description of your product, a customer-centric value proposition. This work is where we describe your product and draw the lines between benefits and features connecting each to a technical, business or personal value. In describing your product or service, features and benefits are equally important. You could say they both describe the same thing, but for different purposes. Features are facts about what your product does. While benefits are the outcomes and changes that your product enables. Use the benefits to give value to the features by explaining why the features matter, and use the features to prove the benefits by showing how you achieve those outcomes. You end up with a sentence like, I can promise this benefit because we offer this feature. One of the best examples we have of the difference between features and benefits is the classic description of the first iPod. Feature, one gigabyte of music storage. Benefit, 1,000 songs in your pocket. Nobody wanted one gigabyte of music storage, but everybody wanted 1,000 songs in their pocket. The iPod could promise 1,000 songs in your pocket because it featured one gigabyte of storage. Here's an example of how I might fill in this table of features and corresponding benefits. One feature I offer in my work is flat fees. This is a fact. It's a thing that is part of what I offer. The corresponding benefit to a client is simplicity, transparency, and ease in planning, financial planning and looking at their projections. Is this a business, technical or personal benefits? I would say it's a business benefit because it impacts their financial projections. Another feature I offer is a report after every single meeting. The corresponding benefit is having the background of the work we did together and a constant reference for them to look at about that work. Is this a business, technical or personal benefit? I would say that it's a technical benefit because it is the reference point to go back and remember what we agreed upon and remember the thought process behind it. It gives them direction. I will add to that, that each report includes at least three action items of what they have to do next. The corresponding benefit is that they know exactly what to do. It removes their own decision-making or having to recall what we talked about. It allows them to focus on action instead of thought. Is this the business, technical, or personal benefit? I would argue that there is a personal benefit element to this because it is making it simpler for them to take action, which means that it removes stress for them. It removes the weight of having to remember, of having to make decisions and instead it allows them to focus on the work and anything that relieves stress for a client is certainly a personal benefit. Here are some examples of how you can look at your features, at the benefits and determine if it impacts your client in their business in a technical way or in a personal way. To learn the difference between features and benefits for your product or service. Separate the facts from the outcomes using the same examples we shared at the beginning. If you sell pens, the features are the size and color, the materials, the ink color, the grip type, the type of ink, the cost, etc. The benefits are beautiful calligraphy, no leaks, multiple colors, a soft and easy application, a thick or thin line. If you sell running shoes, the features are the materials, the weight, the added components to the shoe, the cost. The benefits are comfort, fewer injuries, less soreness, greater speed, long-term wear. If you sell family law services, the features are where and how often you meet customers, the contracts, the communication methods, how you share files and so on. The benefits are outsourcing the mediation, getting expert advice, not making mistakes, maximizing opportunities, crafting long-term custodial decisions, and so on. Benefits are the outcomes or results that customers will experience by using your product or service. The very reason why the prospective customer becomes an active customer. It's time to list the features and benefits for your business, creating a connection between each one. Using the worksheet in the resources section, fill in the features and benefits columns of the table at the bottom. On one side, list the key features your product or service has developed and offers. Next to each one under the corresponding benefits heading write the benefit that that feature offers. Why should the customer care about this feature? The answer describes your benefit, the what's in it for the customer statements. With this list and all the work that came before, you will do more than be able to craft a value proposition. You will also learn how to inform the future product improvements and decision. If a feature does not have a connected benefit that adds value to the customer in either their business, technical, or personal needs, then that feature is not necessary. 7. Final Thoughts: Thank you for taking my class on writing a value proposition through the perspective of the customer. I hope you're coming away from this class with a deeper understanding of your customer's world, their wants, and how you contribute to make their life better. Your class project will be to write your own value proposition and include the supporting material from the work you did throughout this class. I can't wait to see your value proposition in the project gallery. I look forward to questions and comments on the discussion board. Please use these resources to share ideas, ask questions, and show us your results. Thank you for taking this class and enjoy your new value proposition.