3 simple frameworks that make your value obvious

Competing today means being seen as an undeniable “must-have.” Anything else spells death for a brand.

According to Harvard Innovation Labs (and anyone paying attention) one of the biggest reasons startups fail is an unclear value proposition. Without a truly compelling reason for customers to buy, even the best product can struggle to sustain a business. 

Too often, value prop language is crafted on the fly by whoever happens to be writing the website copy, boilerplate statement, or press release.

This is insane to me.

When the value proposition is the most important element of the overall marketing message, why aren’t company leaders focused invested in making sure theirs is as clear, compelling, and relevant as it can be to their target audiences?

Nailing your value proposition is crucial. Done right, it frames, qualifies, and sells your value in seconds. It also pinpoints how your method and difference is meaningful from your competitors.

In a world where decisions are more collaborative than ever, positioning value so it’s seen as a priority and making the impact understood and compelling enough to gain consensus is absolutely critical for a company to break through, lead and succeed. 

I regularly speak with company operators who have truly great offerings but who also continue to struggle to get even the most qualified prospect to see, understand, appreciate, care, or act. For those selling highly customized services or a complex product, this is often the biggest marketing and sales challenge. So often, a weak value prop is a big part of their problem.

This is because a weak value prop means their business has to overspend to find, qualify, and acquire every single customer they get. A sloppy prop also means the company has to work much harder to gain consensus and close deals. Both of these things kill growth and profitability.

Not only do smart founders need to define a strong value prop at the outset to succeed, savvy operators of established companies must also continue to revisit and refine their value prop as they change and mature the business.

If you’re tracking meaningful metrics, you’ll see the downstream impact of a poor value prop in your KPIs. When you’re always shooting from the hip, your hit rate is either going to completely suck or fall to luck. When you never calibrate or reposition your aim, you are going to miss your target whenever it moves. It’s common sense.

You can half-ass some things, but your value prop isn’t one of them. A weak value prop means you’re building your business on “hard-mode”

You can’t brand, spend, or market your way out of the a weak value prop. But if you make your value prop sharp enough to pierce through the competitive din, and strong enough to build credibility and consensus towards the sale, then you are differentiating for competitive advantage and exponentially increasing your luck surface area.

How to make your value prop qualify, differentiate, and sell your true value

Value prop frameworks can help you make your value crystal clear and crazy relevant, but not all are equally useful.

There are thousands of frameworks, formulas, and canvases out there for businesses to consider and use to dial in and sharpen their core value prop. But most value prop exercises aren’t that useful for the practical needs of an evolving or growing business. 

Working with hundreds of B2C, B2B and B2G clients, I’ve come in at various stages to help the business reword, rethink, and revisit their value proposition so that it does more for their business. I’ve worked with all sorts of tools and templates, with varying degrees of practicality. I’ve seen painstakingly-worded USPs come across as bland, boring, and unremarkable to the target customer. I’ve seen overly clever language confuse and disenfranchise. Most value prop problems come from writing from the business’ perspective versus the customer’s perspective. The rest of the issues come from getting too cute about it.

Frameworks are supposed to help us make hard problems simpler to tackle. But many value prop tools just add confusion and complexity that leaves everyone frustrated and wishing they never brought the idea up. 

The ones intended to vet startup ideas are often too surface-level for an established business. The ones in many business strategy books get more in the weeds than most businesses really need to. Some are too philosophical and end up breaking a perfectly good flywheel, as was the case with Zappos.

3 Obvious Value Frameworks that save you from the desert of “Nice to Have”

The last thing you want to do is to add complexity or reduce the relevance of your value prop. Here’s the best framework I’ve found, and the one I use with clients. It’s an interpretation of one I learned from Michael Skok, who teaches a Harvard Innovation Lab startup workshop and which I have iterated upon and developed over time while working with clients.

On the surface this framework is very similar to some of the more popular universal positioning statements, but because it has sub-frameworks establishing each level of the value prop, the end-result is more defensible, robust and meaningful. 

Obvious Value Prop Framework

I prefer this kind of framework because it’s a strategy exercise that can extend to marketing and sales.

Put another way, it allows the business to define, shape, and sharpen their value prop in a way that differentiates meaningful value from the customer perspective, and identifies the best position for advantage from the market perspective.

This exercise is enormously helpful for the business, as it:

1. Clearly establishes the ICP that the brand needs to appeal to and resonate with

2. Defines differentiated, unique value that connects to the reality and goals of the customer

3. Pinpoints the status quo that must be sufficiently disrupted to compel change

This means that all functions and teams across management, marketing, sales, product, services, etc. know 1) what they are building, 2) who they are marketing to, 3) what value to lead with, and 4) where to focus innovation and investments to create the most customer value and brand loyalty.

Using the value prop work, you can easily create a compelling value hook that helps you focus your marketing messages at the brand level and each audience segment. 

The Value Hook is a simple framework I’ve developed and used for many clients. It’s power is in the fact that it maps urgent business value to present customer pain. This frames the brand’s unique value as a “must have” versus a “nice to have”. 

Obvious Value Hook Framework

Once you have your Value Prop and Value Hook nailed down, it’s easy to tell a compelling Value Story that anyone in your customer’s business can understand and appreciate. 

Here’s a framework that I’ve used with clients who need a simple narrative to convey the value they create and the impact they make.

Obvious Value Story Framework

Every strategy exercise project I do with clients uses these frameworks to ensure that we are positioning and messaging relevant, compelling value to the people they need to reach.

If you’ve found these to be helpful, please use and share. If you see the value but want someone to help you unpack and find the right language to fill these frameworks, then I’d love to help.

Nailing your value prop is the best investment you can make, and I love helping clients position themselves so they sell easier and shine brighter.

Email me at beulah@beobvious.com if you want some value prop CPR.