Does Your Value Proposition Say that You're Small Time?

Do You Want One Thing and Say Another?

Last year I worked with a fabulous small business. They had spent many years doing the small jobs. Clients saw them as the ones to call when something needed fixing in quick order, but never seemed to call when something new needed to be conceived or designed. Their goal was to move from a “menu driven” production house to the agency status.

The business had the award-winning talent, had the proven expertise, had the elegant web presence, but the projects that came in were still small time. Their client base still saw them as something they had been long ago. Our goal was to change the way clients thought about them.

We looked at their value proposition. It was something like this:

We offer [our niche] a menu of highest quality services at reasonable prices.

It’s an invitation to buy small services according to price. It says “We do the small-time jobs.”

Does Your Value Proposition Say that You’re Small Time?

What do you do when you have big goals and you realize that your customer base sees you as a small-time operation? It’s time to realign your value proposition and how you offer your services to them.

Back to the fabulous small business I worked with last year: Now that we had identified the problem, we could move to a solution that made clients take a new look at what the business had to offer. We talked about the business they wanted to be and outlined this list of criteria.

Corporate level clients
Agency level and agency-level partnerships
Management of major projects not pieces

Using those we constructed a new value proposition that went something like this.

We offer [our niche] the thinking and expertise that moves your ideal customers to action.

We tweaked what they offered — took the itemized list off their web presence, changed how they talked about what they do — in text and in person, made sure the message was clear throughout the business and throughout their offers, and wrote a new tagline to reflect their new direction.

It was two weeks when they called to report a major client project and a possible agency partnership.

What’s your value proposition? Does it reflect your goals?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Need to align your value proposition? Work with Liz!!

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