The phrase “value proportion” is thrown around business large or small without a second thought but it’s often poorly understood and not well communicated. A good value proposition puts the customer at its centre, and its built around the ACTUAL value the customer can expect to realise. You need to understand the user and the buyer persona, and it requires product and marketing to work together to build it. Great value propositions have stories build around them that make them come to life, we all know “1000 songs in your pocket”, but there was a lot more to the value proposition than that look at this video where Steve Jobs is talking you through some of his thinking and the process.
We are big fans of the value proposition canvas; it helps you craft a customer-centric value prop. However often when I work with teams using this tool, they struggle to answer the customer-centric questions and often seem to have built solutions that are not a great fit for the pains, gains and jobs to be done that are the essential input into the building the personas. So, the solutions side of the model is complicated and confused – which leads us to the importance and final element to consider that of simplicity, too many products, too much choice and you will overload your customers and risk losing the sale. Today if you look at Microsoft Dynamics 365 product positioning, it’s an example of confused positioning turning the customer off rather than on. If you compare it to Salesforce, for example, the difference clear for all to see.