The Value Proposition: What Input Can Salespeople Offer?

Great salespeople love great value propositions.

And why wouldn’t they? A true value proposition distinguishes a product from its competition, accelerates the sales process, creates competitive advantage, and provides for the stronger possibility of closing sales and meeting quotas.

Yet when most companies build their value proposition, they do it with almost everyone in mind but the people that will be selling it. They consider the market, their prospects and customers, and direct competitors.

While those groups should factor into the construction of a value proposition, omitting input from the sales staff is leaving out a pretty important perspective. After all, that group might be able to give you feedback on how the company’s value proposition is helping (or hurting) their ability to sell. That information is not only important to the salespeople that currently work for you, but the top flight talent that you may be trying to recruit, too.

Think about it: any new hire you’re pursuing is probably examining your business like a customer. They assess their opportunity to succeed based on your sales methodology and their answers to questions like:

• Would I buy this solution?
• Will I make a lot of money selling it?
• Can I hit the quota based on the company’s current value proposition?

If that person doesn’t answer those questions affirmatively, it’s probably bad news for your chances to hire them. Great sales people want to sell great products with great value propositions. Just as a company might lose a customer with a poorly defined value proposition, it might have trouble recruiting highly sought after salespeople, too.

Creating a Purposeful Value Proposition

The problem for a lot of startup and expansion stage businesses is that their own employees (let alone prospective ones) often fail to understand the company’s true value proposition. As Anthony Tjan argues in the Harvard Business Review, a good chunk of early stage companies’ employees lack a clear definition of its value proposition. As a result, the value proposition being communicated to the customer can vary greatly — even among a relatively small sales staff.

That’s not good. If your employees can’t articulate it, how is the sales staff supposed to sell that value to the market?

The bottom line is that your value proposition can’t simply be about your customers and your market. It has to have a legitimate purpose tied to your business aspirations, strategy, and capabilities. Otherwise, your value proposition is simply a mindless customer pitch that the absolute best sales talent will have no interest in attempting to sell.

Tjan suggests that companies can fix that by following these four guidelines:

• Create clarity, consistency, and frequency of the customer message points from the top.
• Host forums for employees to articulate the value proposition. You might hear a wide variety of opinions, but it will give you a better picture of how your own staff is selling that value.
• Include executives and staff from different divisions to answer questions that reveal their thoughts on the product’s purpose, its target customer, and the things that make the product unique or valuable. Share any disconnects and have every division work to resolve them.
• Make sure that all marketing collateral is articulating a consistent value proposition and incorporate that message across all channels and the sales department.

That collaborative approach will make for a much more well-rounded value proposition that everyone in the company will feel comfortable pitching. It should be honest, relevant, and speak specifically to why your product or company is a better value than any competitor.

Value Proposition and the Sales Process

We recently asked attendees at our Sales Execution Workshop to share their value propositions with each other and provide feedback on each of them. The discussion was positioned to address the aforementioned “highly sought after” salespeople that expansion stage companies should be trying to hire.

Most of the respondents struggled. That’s typical, in my experience, because at the expansion stage there tends to be confusion in messaging between the marketing and sales teams. They’re not often on the same page and, as such, the value proposition doesn’t necessarily take sales execution into consideration.

My suggestion to them was simple: build your value proposition and test it at every point in the sales process. That includes the prospect, the customer, the market, and, of course, the salesperson.

Most importantly, involve both marketing and sales when developing it. Collaboration between those two departments will create consistency and provide for a more purposeful value proposition. Prospects and customers will respond to that, but so too will those ever-valuable “highly sought after” salespeople that you’re trying to recruit to sell your product to them.