How To Communicate Value Propositions Clearly

Good B2B messaging is all about TRANSLATION. Because in B2B, different teams speak different languages. And more importantly… They care about different things. Different teams, with different workflows (use cases), trying to achieve different goals (outcomes). That means you can’t use the same value prop for everyone — even inside the same company. ——— Take Vanta for example. (see image) Notice how the use cases and outcomes shift dramatically by role. The Security Director (champion) and the sales team (user) actually use the product. So your message to them should focus on: → What they’ll do with it (use case) → How the use case is addressed (capability) → What product-level outcome they’ll get In this case: • The security team spends less time on security questionnaires • The sales team gets faster responses to unblock deals Now contrast that with the CFO or CEO. They don’t touch the product. They don’t care about features. They don’t even have the use case the product addresses. So you have to translate those product-level outcomes the champions care about, into the business-level impact these executives might care about. “Faster questionnaire turnaround → deals move faster → more deals closed.” And then translate again for the CFO — because they prefer hard numbers, not qualitative abstractions. “1 extra deal per quarter = $500K ARR annually.” Different language. Same product. Different stakeholder. Different value story. If you don't understand and apply this principle, there is a good chance your "universal value proposition" won't actually resonate with any of the stakeholders in your target accounts. #valuepropositions #messaging #b2b

You'll never convince me that describing your startup as an 'AI platform for X' is the best way to get your message across and yet so many of the startups I meet do just that. Vague, jargon-heavy phrases do little to set a business apart or make the value proposition clear. Instead of leading with buzzwords or generic categories, focus on communicating your company’s mission, who you serve, and the specific problems you solve. For example, rather than saying an “AI platform for X,” describe the tangible impact your product or service delivers: “We help logistics companies reduce shipping delays by predicting disruptions before they happen,” or “Our solution enables retailers to personalize every customer interaction, increasing loyalty and sales.” This approach clarifies the offering AND makes it relevant and memorable to your audience. Unless you are building AI infrastructure, we can assume that you are powering your solution with AI and also using it internally to be the most efficient and effective. So I'm not sure that you need to lead with the AI part - it's really not the most important element. Ultimately, the goal is to make your company’s value unmistakable, so that anyone reading your description immediately understands not just what you do, but why it matters to them. So let's get back to basics and just say what we do!

If you sell a highly technical product, keep this in mind. You don’t know need to know more than others — you just need to help buyers communicate more clearly. Even if you make up a few words along the way... Like in this example, from a convo while writing my first book. It's a pretty interesting excerpt, from a Sr. Director Data Science at a Fortune 200 finance firm ⤵ ____ Nate: “Reps who work with technical buyers can feel intimidated, like they should know more than a buyer. What’s your take on that?” Her: “I can see it. But for me, I like working with people who have different knowledge. If they’re a data science expert, what’s the point? I don’t need that. I have that. What I need is help communicating the value to my business.” Nate: “What’s an example of a seller who did that well?” Her: “Well here’s one. Culturally, we’re a ‘build’ organization. I mean, we even built our own CRM. And data science is hard to tie to revenue, so it’s hard to make a case to buy something when the default is build.” Nate: “Sounds frustrating.” Her: “It is. We have this chicken and egg problem. We need to spend to prove our impact on revenue. But we don’t have the proof, so we don’t get the spend. So then we just start building to solve the issue." Nate: “And what was the issue in this case?” Her: “Grunt work. Spending months of time on basic data work in Python, instead of actually looking at and sharing results from our models." Nate: “Okay got it, and that wasn’t easy to communicate?” Her: “Well that’s the irony, and the message we developed with this sales rep. We’d been spending 6 months of people time at minimum on these types of tasks. And the thing is, people aren’t free. So by building, we were spending quite a lot. But we weren’t showing the cost of our time to achieve an input. All the value we create is in a model's output. So the more we cut the cost of an input, the greater our value. You follow?” Nate: “Yep, I’m with you.” Her: “Okay, so when I first proposed new spend, our finance team saw a vendor as new. Something extra. Telling them about how we'd improve our data processing didn't matter. But our people’s time? They took that for granted. It was already budgeted. So we re-approached it as a cost-reduction argument. Re-allocating the spend for a basic data task to software from a person meant the cost of that job decreased. Plus our team was freed to develop new models. So our cost-per-insight went way down. Which was a completely made up metric. Nobody tracks that. But I liked that it was so much simpler. The two things. More insights, at less cost to produce them.” Nate: “And that’s what this rep helped you come up with? Lowering your cost-per-insight?” Her: “Yes, and it worked.” _______ TL;DR: 1/ You don’t have to be smarter than others. Just think differently. 2/ Simplicity sells. Even if it’s a made-up term, give your buyers the language they need to communicate more clearly.

Explaining your "value proposition" is probably doing more harm than good with your prospects.  Value propositions are meaningless to prospects when they don't connect the dots between what your product does and what problems it eliminates. Here's an example: If I were selling cookware, pitching "titanium-plated non-stick pans" would not resonate with my prospects, especially if they liked their current cookware. In order for "titanium-plated non-stick pans" to mean anything of value to my prospect, I would need to remind them of the gnarly egg crust that they had scrub away when doing the dishes last week and then explain that the "features" of my product are what would eliminate their egg-scrubbing problem. ___ Expecting your prospect to infer what problems your "value proposition" solves for them dumps all the work on your prospect. Do the work for them and put 2 and 2 together so they don't have to. You make it far easier for them to understand why your "Automated Billing Workflows" or "Unified Data Platform" or "Titanium-Plated Pan" is valuable when you ALSO tell them what that means for them. It's YOUR responsibility to remind your prospect of the egg stuck to their pan.