Why and how to enhance your value proposition

Since I sold my consulting business in 2013 I’ve worked with some 60 clients on their growth strategy. I reckon that in 80-90% of cases their unique value proposition (UVP) has ended up as a key area where there have been opportunities for improvement.

By way of just one example, I helped one client turn their value proposition into something much stronger and clearer. This particular consulting business owner believes that the UVP work was instrumental in them doubling their revenue in 12-18 months.

It’s a topic I have read a lot about (book and TED Talk recommendations below) and one I’m passionate about, because it underpins so many areas of your business:

• Sales and marketing – your UVP is instrumental in helping with your messaging.
• Capability – it drives the kind of people you want to hire into your business.
• Referrals – it means that people can refer you even if they don’t understand the depth and complexity of what you do.
• Products/services – it helps you focus your new product development.
• Intellectual property – it’s much clearer where you should invest in terms of developing your IP.

Over the years I have developed a framework that assesses a consulting firm’s value proposition against six key areas. The Consultancy Growth Network growth experts have also added to it, so in our webinar ‘Enhance your value proposition’ I took our members through the framework to help them get clarity on where to focus their attention to enhance their value proposition.

The six elements of the framework cover:

• how much demand there is for your proposition
• how attractive your positioning is and how easily it is recognised and differentiated from competitors
• how valuable your services are to your clients and how well they extend the client journey
• how easy is it to replicate your method and how much it stands out from the crowd
• how much of your approach has been standardised and how much resource you have available to deliver it at scale
• how good your returns are and how competitively priced your offering is.

Within each area are 4 or 5 statements against which owners score themselves on a 1-4 scale depending on how much focus they have given to that area. If they feel they are excelling, they give themselves top marks. If they haven’t given it any attention to date, they score themselves one.

Here is a clip from the webinar in which I discussed the third element of the framework – service lines.

We had almost 60 participants at our webinar, the average score was 58% – proof, if it were needed, that there is plenty of scope to improve.

We encouraged our members to set themselves actions based on their scores, with plenty commenting afterwards that the process had given them lots of food for thought and valuable work to do!

Book recommendation: Value Proposition Design by Alexander Osterwalder

TED talk recommendation: On the brink of understanding organisations, from Colin Price

If you would like to know more about how to enhance your value proposition, please get in touch with me at marc@consultancygrowthnetwork.com, or via LinkedIn. If you’re not a member of The Consultancy Growth Network and you missed this event, you can sign up to one of our upcoming events as a free taster.