Would you “hire” yourself based on the value proposition you communicate to your prospects? Just how clear are you?
Could a prospect immediately recognise themselves having the problems you can solve?
We all buy on emotion and justify our decisions with logic, we need to present our value to a potential client in both left brain (quantifiable) and right 
brain (emotional) terms.
Most people make their value statements too verbose or too vague. So they don’t clearly and succinctly communicate the impact our solutions have for our clients.
There are 3 aspects we must be deliberate about:
- Be results oriented, not action oriented. This is about the outcome not your process.
- Be clear. Don’t use vague words or “consultancy speak”. Avoid words like accountability, best practice capacity, efficiency, effectiveness, sustainability, reliability, quality.
- What specific results will they get. For example % improvement in production. Reduce rework by X%. Reduce costs by X.
For example:
“I help leadership teams determine their strategies and turn them into concrete projects”
This is describing the solution – and not the impact or the value for them.
We want clients to understand that what we do is going to solve their problems, they don’t necessarily want to buy more work to do. They want to buy a changed or improved future.
So take your action statement and turn it into a result.
With each statement keep asking “So What?”.
If they worked with us how would things be different?
What would change for them? How would their future be different?
So what would implementing these concrete projects give them? What would the tangible and intangible results be?
Another common example is:
“Improving team communication and productivity”
But what does “communication” or “productivity” mean? Both can mean different things in different contexts.
So we need to make this more specific, tangible and meaningful to the client.
“Understanding different personalities and how to deal with them helps your teams work together to reach their goals sooner.”
The right brain (emotive) part could be, “A happy team is a place where people want to belong. And that improves output with fewer mistakes.”
You could quantify this by including statistics on how much time is saved and how many projects fail due to team members simply not getting on and being obstructive, mainly because they don’t understand and know how to deal with different personality types.
Of course, the best statistics are ones you collect from your own clients. Interview them and ask what results they’ve achieved with your help. Get both quantifiable (something you can count) as well as emotional payoff.
And finally, when describing your value, use language a 12 year old would recognise. Make it as sensory specific as possible.
Wrapping up, interviewing your clients on a regular basis is one of the most important things you can do.
You’ll find out what’s working, what you could improve as well as what additional services you could provide. And your clients will really appreciate your taking the trouble to ask them.
Having said that, a third party interviewing your clients will give you more information as your clients will be more open than if they’re speaking directly with you.
We’ve conducted hundreds of these in depth interviews for our clients. If you’d like to take advantage of our expertise, give Rashid a call on 0414 913 334 and we’ll get started.
