More often than not, weak value propositions are the result of a weak or poorly executed value proposition development process. I’d love to hear your opinion on this situation and process…
The Situation: An industrial distributor has partnered with a provider of systems integration and engineering services. The distributor gets a whole new and wide range of high-margin services to sell to existing customers. The service provider dramatically expands its sales force. A key to success for both firms is quick buy-in from distributor sales reps.
First Draft Value Prop: Properly applied, this partnership will consistently increase the size of your commission check and enhance the value you can deliver to your customers.
The Value Proposition Development Process:
Part 1
- Get a group of knowledgeable people together in one place
- The executive sponsors from both firms
- Four black-belt sales reps from both firms
- One outside facilitator (me, in this case)
- Conduct a no-holds-barred round-table discussion to hash out why a distributor sales reps should love this new partnership
- Explore the good, the bad and the ugly
- Focus on the views of those 4 black-belts
(Note: This is how far we’ve gotten to date)
- Make both a video and audio recording of the whole thing
Part 2
- Boil the discussion down to its essentials and embed those key points and the updated Value Proposition into:
- A 3-5 minute video
- A 15-30 podcast
- A series of 15 or so short video and/or audio and/or text clips
- Publish all of the above
- On the portal web site established for the partnership
- On the intranets of both firms
- In the internal newsletters of both firms
- Review the content verbally at sales meetings and one-on-one
- Aggressively and genuinely solicit feedback in all of the above
Part 3 – Repeat parts 1 and 2 as needed, adjusting the message as appropriate
Doesn’t sound like rocket science does it? Sounds like disciplined, thoughtful, hard work. What a shocker…
What do you think of the process? Can a scaled down version be used for specific sales opportunities?
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