The only thing constant is change.
We are bombarded with thousands of marketing messages a day. With all of this noise, it’s becoming harder for companies to differentiate their message from competitors and stay relevant with customers.
Change is happening at a rapid pace. “Agile” has become a trendy word in business circles for a reason — it’s critical to adapt if you want to stay in business. Your approach to marketing and sales communications should be no different.
Context is everything
Understanding that the customer’s circumstance and priorities change is how you will successfully stay responsive to their needs. If you aren’t communicating in a way that is relevant to your customers, they will find a provider that helps connect the dots from the pain they are facing today to the possibilities of tomorrow.
To be an effective marketer or salesperson, you must first understand what value is.
In our book, “Value-ology: Aligning marketing and sales to shape and deliver customer value propositions,” we define value as:
Value = perceived relevant and distinct benefit – total cost of ownership
The idea of relevance means that only your customer decides what matters to them and that what is relevant to them one day, may be insignificant the next.
Can you think of all the places you communicate your company’s value proposition? When was the last time emphasis was put on reviewing the messaging on your website, sales pitch decks, RFPs, PR boilerplates, social media headers, etc.?
We’ve found that unless something major occurs — such as a leadership turnover, company merger, a big competitor entering or exiting the market, or an extreme market shift — companies are communicating the same stale value proposition that they created years ago.
Communicate value or lose the deal
According to Miller Heiman’s recent research, the number of sales reps that meet or exceed their quota continues to decrease — from 63 percent in 2012 to 53 percent in 2017. The primary reason cited for missing quota is “failure to communicate value to the customer.” (SiriusDecisions).
In a Televerde study, when B2B sales professionals were asked what would help close more deals, they cited better messaging, more qualified leads, better marketing materials and more case studies and testimonials.
The common thread in being able to provide better and more targeted communications starts with truly understanding how you can bring value to your customers — assuming you are constantly in tune with what your customers care about.
It’s about your customers’ pain
In 2008, the U.S. stock market took a major tumble, dropping almost 34 percent that year. In just one quarter, millions of people lost their retirement funds, college funds and saw the value of their homes drop.
As a result, a recession followed, unemployment soared, consumer confidence plummeted and uncertainty caused people to be frugal and fearful.
During that time, the airline industry was hit particularly hard, due to a 6 percent drop in passenger travel and a 13 percent drop in the average price paid to fly. Airlines scrambled to stay in business and introduced another way to make money — baggage fees. Travelers started complaining and resenting these “surprise fees,” which brought in roughly $500 million in Q4 2008 (and continued to rise beyond $1 billion per quarter last year).
Southwest Airlines was the only airline that chose to tune in with this customer sentiment and instead responded with the “Bags fly free” strategy. The result? Southwest went from being travelers’ favorite airline 42 percent of the time in 2006 to 58 percent of the time in 2010.
The airline had a market share increase in 2009 worth roughly $1 billion. (Source: Southwest Airlines annual report and CBS News)
Had Southwest handled the recession like their competitors and followed suit, it would have been dealing with the consequence of a major disconnect between the value their customers were looking for and the service they were providing. Instead, Southwest celebrated its 37th consecutive year of profitability in 2009.
Theme-based approach
A value proposition should be tailored to every customer based on their specific situation. For marketing purposes, we understand this level of extreme personalization isn’t (yet) a reality. Instead, to keep up with the constantly shifting demands and preferences of your customers, we recommend that marketers carefully organize their communications under value themes.
Themes are the overarching idea that resonate with the key issues your customers face. They create a platform that enables you to demonstrate your understanding of each customer’s business issues and provide a solution through value propositions.
Using the Southwest scenario, the following theme-based approach can be visualized and implemented to identify the key points of their marketing message.
Themes can be skillfully created using a “chunking” method. Chunking is basically a hierarchy of categories where the theme is the top and things that are deemed to belong to the theme sit below it. This method can successfully build from the core theme to the specific chunks that align your messaging with customer value.
Is your business staying relevant?
With constant changes in your customer’s industry, competitive environment and context, value propositions should be refreshed at least once a year.
If you cannot remember the last time you revisited your business’ value proposition, sit down with your team for a formal review and ask these questions to begin the process:
- How are the themes here still relevant?
- What elements have changed?
- Is our messaging consistent?
- What value proposition is our sales team using today?
- What current industry or market trends may affect our value proposition?
- How differentiated is our value proposition?
Stacey Danheiser is the CEO of SHAKE Marketing Group, a B2B marketing and sales practice with clients in telecommunications, financial services and technology. She is co-author of “Value-ology: Aligning sales and marketing to shape and deliver profitable customer value propositions.”
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