Value Prop Ups

For whatever reason, I’ve been thinking about value propositions lately. Maybe it’s because I’m currently in an enviable position with respect to them: all the clients I’m working with have value props that are strong, clear, and honest.

This has not always been the case in my career.

At times, I’ve worked on products that were weak, unclear, and if not downright dishonest then….let’s just say that they may have had a somewhat elastic relationship to the truth.

I worked for several years at Genuity, an Internet Services Provider, and my tenure there bridged the go-go dot.com years to the dot.com meltdown. Boom to bust, in 3 short years. To add to the excitement, the meltdown coincided with Genuity’s failure. (I say “coincided with” rather than “caused” because Genuity failed for a number of reasons. The meltdown didn’t help, but it was only one of several factors.)

At one point, when we were on the bust side of things, I was asked to brief our relatively new president on our suite of services. My group feverishly worked to pull together a slide deck that covered our myriad services (hosting, security, access, transport), giving thumbnail descriptions of what each service was, the target market, competition, pricing, and - yes - its value proposition. While my group did all that work - I’m sure I thanked them at the time, but thanks again, guys! - I was the one who got to do the walkthrough for the president.

We got about halfway through the deck, when Joe looked up at me and said, “These value propositions are weak.”

“Well, yes,” I agreed, “They are, to some degree.” They did not, after all, make any extreme promises of ROI. We couldn’t make any raving claims about increasing top line, increasing the bottom line. We couldn’t say that, working with us, a company could reduce staff.

What we could say was that we provided reasonably good service, backed by decent but not groundbreaking SLAs, and that we were pretty smart people who knew what we were doing.

Beyond that, we had no proof points for anything.

“But you’re marketing,” Joe protested. “Just write something.”

I pointed out that, if he wanted stronger value propositions, we’d actually have to make some changes: improve the services, provide better guarantees, and/or lower the pricing.

If he just wanted value prop prop ups, well, sure, we could write anything.

We could say that hosting with us enabled bald men to sprout hair. That our security services turned straw to gold. That our access products gave access to the Fountain of Youth.

Yes, we could write anything.

But that wouldn’t make it right.

When you’re putting together your value propositions, make sure that they have some basis in reality, that the benefits are provable (or at least theoretically supportable), that the claims are true.

Sure, you can put anything in a value proposition. It’s only words. But a value proposition can only temporarily prop up a weak product. That product’s really got to stand on its own.

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