Businesses are run to provide value. Thus, to survive in a cut-throat competitive environment, they must make their value proposition ever convincing.
If you must be the go-to business that clients always prefer, then your entity must top the list of value providers who will always win the buyers’ mind.
What VALUE does your business give in exchange for the price buyers pay EACH TIME? This is like your business value proposition.
Value is more expensive than price.
— Toba Beta.
Does your value offering makes buyers feel they have paid even less than they ought to have paid? You need to drive them to this point. That is what will make them become your unpaid advert mouthpiece.
According to Casey Newman, “A value proposition is a statement that answers the ‘why’ someone should do business with you. It should convince a potential customer why your service or product will be of more value to them than similar offerings from your competition.”
The definition above is not static as businesses and services also evolve. It stresses that AT EVERY POINT in time, you have to be convincing to be the chosen brand.
Focus on TODAY
Why should you be the hired legal consultant among a pool of millions of other consultants TODAY?
Why should you be hired to coach a student in a home tuition when there are many other teachers TODAY?
Why should your business get the construction contract when there are other sophisticated entities that can do same thing TODAY?
Why should we choose you to bake the cake instead of your competitor TODAY?
And why exactly should you be the preferred brand TODAY?
These, among others, are the questions value proposition answers.
Care should be taken to observe that the questions above all end with ‘TODAY.’
This means that the focus is not on what your business delivered yesterday but TODAY. This attachment of value provision to time strongly emphasizes that VALUE must be delivered in the present sense and not in terms of past performance.
Staying Valuable EVERY SINGLE TIME
Staying on top of your clients’ list as the preferred brand indeed requires that you deliver value EVERY TIME.
This emphasis on ‘EVERY TIME’ value provision is what makes one brand preferred to others. It is why a client will stick with you for a decade and hardly will they contemplate giving the job to someone else.
This is because you are able to hold them spellbound with an every-engagement topnotch delivery.
If you run a business or you are an employee working for an entity, remember always that you have only one thing that draws people to you — VALUE.
If this is found wanting, your employer or clients will soon start thinking of replacing you.
To close this piece, in the words of Warren Buffet, ‘Price is what you pay and value is what you get.’
If your clients pay the price, then give them the value – not excuses, or some shoddily done jobs!
