Todd Youngblood's "SPE" Blog

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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?

Related posts:

1. Selling with video (…better get busy)