What Is The Value Of A Value Proposition?
May 10, 2016
by Beverly Flaxington
Beverly Flaxington is a practice management consultant. She answers questions from advisors facing human resource issues. To submit yours, email us here.
Advisor Perspectives welcomes guest contributions. The views presented here do not necessarily represent those of Advisor Perspectives.
Dear Bev,
It is that time of year again at my advisory firm. We are revisiting our value proposition, restating our mission and overhauling all of our marketing material. Everyone keeps getting pulled into the conference room so an outside person can take us through a process and say essentially the same thing with different words. What is your perspective on the value of the value proposition?
Jeremy P.
Dear Jeremy,
Is your question about my perspective on actually having a clear value proposition or on the process your firm is using to establish one? The process sounds frustrating and probably isn’t yielding the results desired. A strong value proposition should stay put for longer than a year (unless your business model dramatically changes, of course). The value proposition should answer fundamental questions: Why would someone do business with you? What do you offer? What’s the benefit to your market? Often, when a firm is reviewing value proposition, they are also reviewing target market, product alignment, elevator pitches and other elements. My guess is that you are doing many things and not just establishing the value prop in these meetings.
If the value proposition is changing, it could be that you are working too hard to wordsmith, or that your team isn’t embracing the ones that have been established in the past. I find that firms often work hard at creating a sentence or paragraph that describes who they are but might not really speak to the value they offer their audience. You want to think in terms of results – what is the outcome to the client from working with you?
Incorporating the value proposition into the day-to-day is also important. You could keep meeting on it because your leaders don’t see it being pulled through in conversations and marketing material that people are using. Maybe they are bringing you all in for practice purposes or to make sure the value prop is being delivered consistently by all team members.
And yes, I concur that having a different facilitator do this each time could be complicating efforts for implementing consistency.
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