Why your value prop sucks

& a reframe to help you fix it

Here’s a painful lesson I’ve learned that might save you a few years of headaches.

You’re probably thinking about your value prop wrong… and this is making everything else about your business more difficult than it needs to be.

(You’re extremely likely to do this when following traditional marketing & sales “best practices,” unfortunately.)

The realization: I always had this sense that all I needed was an irresistible value prop - that making the value prop more exciting and desirable was the path to success.

But I would come up with my products’ value propositions following this kind of logic:

• What does the product do?

• What unique value does it provide?

• So what should the value prop be, and how do I make it as exciting as possible?

Here’s the problem with this approach: This leads you to create value props that get prospects to say, “oh that’s interesting!” (At best.) And then they don’t take action.

Why?

It’s very rare that someone buys because they see an attractive value prop. People don’t really stop what they’re doing and say, “You know what? I’m going to throw out my goals and projects in order to take action on this exciting offer.”

Buyers buy because they see a relevant value prop (one that helps them accomplish what’s on their critical path)… that’s also compelling and attractive.

So here are the questions we SHOULD be asking to create a relevant value prop:

• When people buy our product, what are they really trying to achieve? What would they be trying to achieve, without referring to our product, that they’d be trying to achieve even if we didn’t exist?

• What caused them to need to achieve this, vs. the million other things they COULD focus on?

• So what should the value prop be, and how do we make it as exciting as possible?

Here’s an example, from a slide from my upcoming PMF lecture:

When you start from the question, “What benefits and value does our product provide?” you wind up with:

• A value prop that sounds great on a whiteboard, and in theory

• A product direction that sounds right when it supports that theoretical value prop

• And ultimately a lot of head-scratching on “why they don’t get it”… leading to the sense you need to “evangelize” and “educate” the market, that it’s “too early” etc.

But when you start from the question, “What were they trying to accomplish when they bought us?” you wind up with:

• Smoother sales conversations

• A product direction that’s intuitive to you AND your customers

• And often, a business direction that’s differentiated as everyone else looks from a different, dumber angle

What do you think?