The importance of communicating your value to a prospect

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by jim-piper

What is a good value proposition? Our role in new business development is to help our clients define just that.

It doesn’t matter if you are a creative, digital, research or any kind of agency, competition for business is rife and any prospective buyer of your services needs to be able to quickly identify the value you can bring to THEM. That value needs to be clear in any touchpoint, be that the phone, the website or collateral.

A quick search for SEO agencies brings up the following example:

“We are the leading digital marketing, design and SEO agency London has to offer”

So what? Yes, it does describe what the agency does and yes, I still may consider it an option if I were looking for an SEO agency. However, it fails to really tell me what they can do for me or address the issue of my specific objective from SEO?

It describes the mechanics (digital marketing and SEO) as a function, but fails to give me the context around my specific goals. E.g. brand awareness, lead generation, selling more products.

It is the emphasis on tangible outcomes that sits at the heart of a solid value position. It may also be that this starts to define the agency, its people and core proposition.

As part of the buying process, I probably do want to know at some point what you have done for similar clients or indeed that you have won awards, but from the outset, I want to know what you will do for me. So the messaging to market, whether that be via your website, outbound approaches or content driven inbound marketing need to take the focus off you. If your messages revolve too heavily around what you do and how great you are then you may miss out.

We always instil this ethos into our Account Managers and it is how we view all clients and propositions. We are very adept at listening to a client telling us all about their agency, but flipping this information and via conversations with prospects, tailoring this to demonstrate the value proposition for them. If we are to generate the leads our clients want, this aspect is essential.

This is not about defining a USP as very few agencies will genuinely have one. It is purely focusing the message towards the audience and making it as highly relevant to their needs as possible.

Being able to do this clearly and succinctly may give you that edge and marginal difference between yours and the next agency. With so much competition out there in the SEO space, make yourself relevant and you are giving yourself a chance.

It is relatively straightforward to do this in a conversation, either over the phone or in a meeting as you have the opportunity to question effectively to find out exactly what those personal objectives are for a prospective client, but it is much harder via collateral and websites, which is why working with your team and spending time to define that value proposition is fundamental.

Deciding not just who you are, but who you want to be is arguably the most crucial aspect of any new business activity.