How to Quantify Your Value Proposition
Pricing is one of the most powerful tools to communicate the value of your products and services - especially to a marketplace that is not familiar with your offering. Particularly, a quantified value proposition comes in handy when building your marketing messages and sales enablement tools.
What’s in a value proposition?
First and foremost, the “value,” right? Well, it is actually quite surprising how staggeringly many value propositions don’t actually clearly communicate the value that the offering will provide to its different types of buyers and users. While most marketing messages are beautiful, creative, and catchy, they happen to fail to do the number one job of a value proposition: to communicate the offering’s “value.”
A powerful value proposition focuses your messaging around the key benefits that your offering provides to its buyers and users. What makes a focused value proposition even stronger is quantifying those benefits and justifying your price position with respect to the measured benefits.
Quantifying a value proposition works in a similar way to how buyers make purchase decisions. A quantified value proposition builds the value of a differentiated feature or attribute on top of the basis of competition or the substitute solutions and sets your promise apart from the others’.
What’s your promise?
Your promise is an extension of your positioning; it is the tangible benefit that makes a product or service desirable. It is a summary of all the key value factors that go into your offering; it is why you created this solution in the first place.
Value factors vary depending on your space; what’s important is to focus on only those factors that buyers and users are willing to take an action to acquire - as in paying for it or signing up for it. Here is a starter list of the value factors to consider for quantifying the benefits of your offering:
What’s the value of your buyers’ incremental revenue gains over a period of 3,5 or 10 years?
Does your solution help users accomplish certain experiences better, more efficiently or faster?
Does your solution provide additional capabilities for the existing users or new capabilities for the new users? What are the revenue, cost, or productivity values of these newly-found capabilities?
Does your offering provide cost or scale advantages to the bottom line?
Does your offering provide an experience or transformation that changes an outcome?
What opportunity costs can be overcome due to acquiring your product or service?
What risks does your solution help mitigate? What is the total economic value of the mitigated risks?
Your promise is an extension of your positioning; it is the tangible benefit that makes a product or service desirable. It is a summary of all the key value factors that go into your offering; it is why you created this solution in the first place.
What’s the value of selecting your solution over others'?
In most cases, your promise is not only limited to your offering. Aside from making purchase decisions on products and services, buyers also make value judgments on the providers themselves. For example, how widely your services and solutions are being used is a powerful demonstration that you have delivered successfully in the past, and that the benefits of your solution are resulting in customer retention and loyalty.
Particularly in spaces such as professional services, industrial goods, technology, and enterprise solutions, most decision-makers evaluate factors such as your know-how, your networks, your strategic partners, the breadth of your ecosystem, your past successes, your market position etc. Here are some additional value factors that may set you, as a provider, from others in the marketplace:
The quality of your inputs - your materials, engineering, processes etc.: How established, robust or innovative are they?
Product performance: What are the quantified benefits of your differentiated features and functionality in terms of user outcomes?
Product roadmap, including the future benefits that will be available to users: How complete is your vision in this space? How well do you know your users and how is that represented in your product roadmap?
Your brand(s) and proven delivery-on-promise: How expansive is your brand? How widely reaching is your scope of delivery?
The breadth of channels to acquire your product: Are you where your customers are? Do your potential buyers easily have access to your solution?
Packaging and delivery options, including product/service bundles: How easy is it to acquire what you’re offering?
On-time delivery: What’s your track record? Is it better than your competitions’?
Customer support & service: What’s your solution’s time to value? What’s a good testament to the effectiveness of your training and onboarding?
Customer retention metrics: Do your customers love your product so much that they continue to stay and/or upgrade?
Customer satisfaction or net promoter scores: Do you know how likely your customers are to refer you to others?
The principles of value-based pricing can help
Ultimately, the value of your promise largely depends on your ability to deliver over and above your competitors, and that in turn determines your competitive position. The principles of value-based pricing can help to quantify and demonstrate the value of the differentiated benefits of your products and solutions. Learn more about the art and science of value-based pricing and make sure to incorporate them to your promise.
Ready to begin your own pricing innovation?
