The 4 Essential B2B Value Propositions

How can you be sure you have just the right value proposition for your B2B product?  Pick the wrong value proposition and your prospects won’t give you the time of day.  Pick the right one and your products could sell like hot cakes.  As with so many marketing challenges, you won’t know if you’ve picked the right value proposition until it’s too late and you’ve already spent your marketing budget creating marketing content to promote an ineffective value proposition.

I prefer to solve this dilemma with a framework that focuses on just 4 essential B2B value propositions:

1. Increase revenues
2. Decrease costs
3. Save time
4. Reduce risk

Every good value proposition for a B2B offering includes a clear message about 1 or more of these essential value propositions.

Beware of half-baked value propositions such as:

• Simplify…
• Organize…
• Manage…
• Make easier…

These value propositions are “half baked” because they still need to be thought through to their logical conclusions.  For example, do your customers save time and money as a final result of your products “managing” some function to “simplify” a problem or make a process “easier?”

Half-baked value propositions fail to communicate the end of the value chain and settle instead on communicating only an interim step which is much less compelling.  As a result, half-baked value propositions often appeal only to the end users of a software product, not the economic buyer who has the authority to make the final buying decision, and certainly not to executive decision makers with bigger budgets.

Companies employ workers for one essential reason:  to maximize shareholder wealth.  Shareholder wealth typically stems from strong company financials.  And the formula for a company’s financial success boils down to increasing revenue, decreasing costs, accelerating time to these benefits, and reducing the risk that these benefits will not materialize as planned.  So it’s no wonder that every truly compelling value proposition in B2B marketing boils down to these 4 essential value propositions.

Once you understand how your offer benefits your customers in terms of the 4 essential value propositions, the next step is to understand the relative priorities of each value proposition in the eyes of your market.  The value proposition that bubbles up to the top of the priority list is the one your marketing content should lead with.

Of course it’s not enough simply to tell a prospect, “We’ll save you money,” or “We’ll speed up your time to market.”  To be the least bit credible, you’ll need to be a little more specific than that.  The 4 essential value propositions can help you find the most effective value proposition you have to offer, but they’re simply too generic to make for effective marketing messages.

You can turn the 4 essential value propositions into marketing messages you can use directly in your marketing content.  But first you’ll have to break the 4 essential value propositions down into their component parts.  Then you’ll be able to start getting more specific about how your products deliver unique value in a way that’s both compelling and immediately recognizable by your market.

In future posts, I’ll break down the 4 essential value propositions into their components to show exactly how you can find the value proposition that’s specific enough to resonate with your market.