What's your value proposition?
Happy Friday, Reader!
If you work in strategic sales, your messaging must be grounded in HOW your company adds value to your specific customers.
In ‘The Discipline of Market Leaders’ by Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema, the core messages resonate to this day. Essentially the authors argue that you must select a ONE OF THREE DISCIPLINES as your company's value proposition.
Product Leadership
Like Tesla or Samsung, these companies deliver value through cutting-edge research and launching new innovations to early adopters. Prices are higher and volumes lower to cover the huge investment in R&D required to stay ahead of the pack.
Operational Excellence
Think Amazon here. Easy to transact and do business with, focused on fast follower strategy and often seen in high volume situations. These businesses often use technology to improve efficiency and lower operating costs that can be passed on to customers. This approach allows them to operate at scale.
Customer Intimacy
This applies to a lot of B2B solutions businesses, including my business - Outside In. Customer intimacy means targetting customers that are specifically selected to be a close fit to your value proposition, and engaging with them in deeper relationships.
Customer-intimate companies will typically be great problem solvers. They will spend time understanding the specific problems of each customer and developing solutions to each customer's situation.
Which should you choose?
I agree with the authors of the book, that you need to get off the fence and pick one as your primary focus. You cannot be all things to all people.
Once you have made your choice, invest effort to build your company's whole business model around your choice.
Once you have this pretty much nailed, only then should you consider the other two areas. You focus here is to maxamise their potential without ditracting from your selected one.
For example, if you are focused on customer intimacy, you will spend your time to invest in understanding your customer deeply. Then have the business aligned in the development of custom/bespoke solutions to a specific customer.
How does each discipline impact your sales approach?
Your sales operating model has a profound impact on how you approach sales, marketing and business development.
Customer Intimate Selling
For a customer intimate business, the sales approach is very consultative. Customer success is a key focus and sales teams exist to help customers achieve better performance.
Sales messaging must focus on value, not price and delivery; the sales process relies heavily on great discovery skills, business case building and the development of bespoke solutions.
They try to be as efficient as possible whist delivering these highly-tailored solutions, but they won’t sell products from a catalogue or deliver commodity services.
Solutions are often built on a set of core building blocks, but the way they are delivered is subtly different for each customer. CI businessess are not trying to be product leaders and don’t operate at the bleeding edge of technology. Their solutions are perfect for those who want to adopt new methods and solutions but don’t want to pay a premium to cover the latest R&D.
Operationally Excellent Selling
In contrast, operationally excellent businesses typically use more marketing than sales-led sales engagement. They will use online e-commerce stores, Artifical Intelligence guidance for customers to help them transact friction free. This is followed by automated and fast supply chains to ship the product.
They will rarely customise their solutions for customer specific needs and their sales messaging is focused on speed, delivery and price. As they are not first to market (often fast followers offering the same for less) innovation is not top of the list and sellers have much shorter sales cycles, and a greater urgency to get to the end fast.
Product Leadership Selling
Product leaders will use both sales and marketing in their go-to-market approach.
Their messaigng will highlight the innovation they are brining to the market , both near term and long term investment in new technology. Near term, they will focus on the latest features, widgets and tech advancements.
Buyers are often early adopters who love something new, and they become advocates for the brand in social media to influence others.
The sales approach is therefore focused on identifying and nurturing early adopters, helping them to pilot and test the new solutions.
So what approach are you taking? Ask yourself this, is your approach grounded in your company value proposition? Do you have a clear understanding of what your value proposition is?
I hope this is helpful in thinking about your sales approach. Before you try and copy someone elses approach, think about how well this align to your value proposition first.