Discovering Your Value

I’m a mentor and consultant to business owners. So, I use my experience and knowledge to coach and give advice to help the owners move their businesses forward. Part of my business is sales training. In the training I have a number of core beliefs that I impart. Two of these are that every sale is an emotional sale and every product or service is tangible. Even things that we think are intangible can be positioned as tangible. Related to this, every product or service must be seen as having value for the person buying it. In business, that value must have a direct impact on the bottom line. The primary benefits of the product or service either reduce operating costs, grow revenue (sales and other), or improve gross selling margins (sales minus cost of goods sold). There are numerous secondary benefits as well.
Like the people I work with, I also have a few people who mentor/coach me. In my role as a coachee, I’ve been working on defining my own value. What is it that I do, that others can understand easily and get a grasp on? What is it that I really deliver? I’ve discovered that it’s not as easy one thinks to really define this when I myself sometimes think of my services as intangible. It takes work to arrive at a crisp, succinct value proposition.
One coach gave me good advice: ask your clients what value you deliver. Duh…now why didn’t I think of that most basic thing to do? It’s like the cobbler whose children have the worst shoes. They get fixed last because the cobbler is too busy working on other people’s shoes. My business is no different, and yours may be in the same position. So, take time to examine whether this true for you as well.
So, I did what my coach suggested and I got a variety of responses. There were some words and phrases that were similar or aligned but the variety was more than I expected. My wife explained it to me this way- people I work with all get something different from me, based on their own needs. That made sense. It’s often not possible to put everything into one shiny little bucket. A Value Proposition may not really be reflective of one specific thing. Your VP may need to reflect a number of ideas.
For me, I’ve come up with the following value statement: I build business value and I give people more confidence with less pain. That was after sorting out about thirty different words and phrases, and then sifting it all down through many rewrites.
Next, I had to think about what it is that I deliver that is tangible. And what I came up with, again, based on the feedback, was this: I deliver expertise by working (mentoring) with business owners and teams to develop strategy from a different perspective, one that looks beyond their current thought borders. And, I provide an objective business assessment and high level sales systems.
We’re getting near the end of the year. We’re in the beginning of a recession. We face tough times ahead for the next two to three years. You should be planning for 2009. Doesn’t it make sense for you to revisit your Value Proposition? Doesn’t it make sense to check in with your satisfied customers to get their view on your value? I think the answer is obvious.

Discovering Your Value

Doesn’t it make sense for you to revisit your Value Proposition?