Knowledge
Value proposition: why clients should choose your company
Value proposition, or why your clients see no difference between your company and the competition
Open the website of any B2B technology company. Read the first three sentences. Now open its competitor’s website. And one more. Do you see a difference? Because your clients do not see it either.
Most companies say exactly the same thing about themselves. We have experience, knowledge, the necessary tools and a great team of professionals. Hardly anyone claims their company is like… “just so-so, we are average, but we have low prices”. Everyone claims to be the best, and a client who is not a specialist in the field in which they are looking for support (because if they were, they would not be looking for it) is unable to verify that until they spend the money and find out for themselves.
What a value proposition is
A value proposition is the reason a client decides to spend money at your company instead of at the competition. It is not a tagline for the website or a slogan for a banner, but a real answer to the question every buyer asks themselves, even if they do not say it out loud: what will I get out of it and why should I trust this particular company?
In B2B sales, a value proposition combines three elements: the specific problem your client faces, the business result they will get once it is solved, and the way your company leads to that result. These three elements must be consistent with one another and must follow from the client’s reality, not from how you perceive your offer.
A good value proposition makes the recipient recognize their own situation in it before they learn anything about your company. A weak value proposition describes the provider and counts on the client working out for themselves what follows from it for them.
The value proposition is one of the nine elements of the business model in Alexander Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas, but it is the central element, because it directly affects which clients come to you, how much they will be willing to pay, whether they will come back and whether they will see any reason to talk to you at all. The other eight elements, from client segments through communication channels to the cost structure, are largely tied to what you promise as value and to whom.
What a value proposition is not
A value proposition is not a slogan. It is not an advertising line meant to sound nice on a banner, nor an elevator pitch you rehearse before networking. Nor is it a list of your product’s features, a catalogue of services or a description of your company beginning with “we are a company dealing with…” or “we offer comprehensive solutions in the area of…”.
A value proposition is not a USP, although the two are sometimes confused. A USP, a unique selling proposition, focuses on how your company differs from the competition. A value proposition focuses on what the client gains. The difference may seem subtle, but in communication with the client it matters enormously, because the client is not interested in how unique you are compared to the market; they are interested in whether you will solve their problem and what results it will bring them.
If your value proposition sounds like a textbook definition, or could be pasted onto the website of any company in your industry without changing a single word, it means you do not have one. You have a nice sentence instead, of little use in the sales process.
The provider’s perspective versus the client’s perspective
To understand why so many companies struggle with this, you have to go back to the basic mechanism behind it. B2B technology companies, whether a software house, an implementation company, an integrator or a producer of technical solutions, have a natural tendency to talk about themselves through the lens of what they do and how they do it. That is entirely understandable, because the people who create these companies live it every day, know every detail of their solutions and have every reason to be proud of them.
But that is the provider’s perspective, not the client’s.
The client does not come to you for your solution. The client comes to you because they have a problem that hurts, and they are looking for someone who will remove that problem and deliver the results they care about. Clients are not interested in your solutions; they are interested in the results you can help them achieve. This may seem trivial, but look at your website, at your sales materials, at how your salespeople open conversations, and tell yourself honestly whether you communicate from the client’s perspective or from your own company’s.
If you do not communicate your value in a specific, unique way, clients usually see no difference between companies. That is because most often they do not know the solutions your company proposes, which is why they came to you as an expert in the field. It is not the client’s role to know your products and services. It is your job to get to know the client’s reality and fit your solutions to their situation.
Why B2B technology companies have a particular problem with this
Technology companies have an additional challenge, because what they deliver rests on specific know-how and specialist knowledge that clients find hard to absorb. The client is unable to assess the substance of your solution, because if they could, they would not need you. And since they cannot assess the substance, they will largely have to take the company “at its word” and will not be able to really verify the solution until they buy it.
This opens a space in which the value proposition becomes truly decisive. Because if the substance of the solution is not what will distinguish your company from the competition, then what? Quality, perhaps? And who says they have poor quality? Knowledge and experience, perhaps? The competition also claims to have them. The client will only be able to verify these matters once they have already decided to use the offer.
So if the substance of what you do and how you do it is not what will make the client choose your company, then what? Everything else. The entire client experience, from what your website looks like, which clients you have in your portfolio, who recommends you, through all direct interactions, down to what the terms of a contract with your company look like. The value proposition is the first piece of this puzzle, because it decides whether the client will want to start a conversation with you at all.
We do not buy from people we know and like; that can be an extra bonus. Above all we buy from those we trust to deliver exactly what was promised.
Three typical problems with the value proposition
B2B technology companies most often have a few recurring problems with communicating value, which result in them having no value proposition in practice.
The first is the breadth of the offer, which historically grew in the company because different clients came for different things, and the owner faced a dilemma: true, you had not done that particular thing, but basically you are bright, you can figure it out, and cash flow has to be taken care of. And so the offer grew, while the scale of the company not necessarily. And the broader the offer with limited resources, the harder it is to deliver all services at the same high, specialist level, and the harder it is to formulate a value proposition that is specific and precise. I often see ideas like “let’s add something to the offer” as a cure for a lack of sales. I do not understand, however, how the inability to sell basic solutions is supposed to be solved by a greater number of solutions we will not be able to sell either.
The second problem is trying to compete on price. There will always be companies that are just starting out, that are willing to give up margin, that will have a smaller scale and lower costs. There will always be someone who delivers something cheaper. A value proposition built around price is doomed to fail in the longer term, because when the client can lay three proposals side by side and compare them parameter by parameter, the only criterion left to them will be precisely price. A good strategy is to create value that is hard to relate to the competition, to parametrize, to put in a table and compare.
The third and probably most serious problem is that technology companies are so focused on their solution that they build communication from the end. They start with the technology, the methodology, the tools, instead of the problem these things are meant to solve. “We offer consulting in the area of X”, “We are a company dealing with Y”, “Our solution enables Z”. Each such opening is detached from the client’s context and makes the recipient work out for themselves whether it applies to them. And most often they will not bother.
The Value Triangle, or the sequence for building a value proposition
A value proposition is not a single sentence you come up with once and paste onto the website. It is a communication sequence that has to appear in the right order to work. At TechMine I named it the Value Triangle and it consists of three nodes: Problem, Result, Solution. In exactly that order.
The order is not a matter of style or preference. It follows from how your recipient’s cognitive mechanism works. If you start with the solution, as most companies do, the recipient reads about you instead of about themselves. And people are interested above all in their own situation, not your offer. Reversing this order is the most common communication mistake of B2B technology companies and results from a natural focus on one’s own product or service.
Problem
The first node is a description of the client’s problem, but not in the form of a vague statement like “you have a problem with sales” or “you lack clients”, because such phrases are so broad that nobody recognizes themselves in them. The point is to describe the mechanism, not the symptom.
There is a difference between saying “lack of leads” and describing a situation in which sales based on the founder’s network hit a ceiling when the company grows beyond a dozen or so people, because that model, which worked great at the start, simply does not scale further, and the owner is increasingly pulled into delivering projects instead of working on the company.
The first wording fits any company. The second makes a specific owner of a specific technology company read it and think: this is about me. Self-recognition, not scare tactics. The recipient must feel that you are describing their situation before they learn anything about your company. The problem must show the business consequences, not just an operational inconvenience, and must be precise enough for the recipient to feel it describes their situation specifically.
Result
Once the client has recognized themselves in the description of the problem, a natural bridge appears to the second node, the result. And here is another trap many companies fall into: the result described as a list of delivered components.
“You will get a sales strategy, processes, tools, team training” is not a result. It is a description of what you do. A result is the business state the client will find themselves in after the problem is solved, expressed in the categories that are their measure of success.
Revenue, margin, predictability of sales, independence from the founder in the day-to-day running of the company. These are the units in which your clients think about their business. They do not think about MQLs, conversion or the number of meetings in the funnel. They think about whether the company earns in proportion to the effort they put into it, whether they can delegate without the risk of everything falling apart, and whether what they do today gives them a chance of a better tomorrow.
The result must connect logically with the problem you named. It cannot sit beside it; it must be the exact answer. If the problem is that sales depend on the founder, the result cannot talk about “increasing the number of leads”, but about sales starting to work regardless of whether the owner is in the office.
Solution
Only in third place does the solution appear. A solution presented after the problem and the result is something completely different from a solution presented as the opening of the message. In the first case the client already knows you understand their situation, sees where it leads, and is now naturally curious how you intend to achieve it. In the second case they have to take your word that what you are saying is what they need.
The solution should be a description of how it works, not a list of features. It should show why a given approach solves precisely the problem named in the first node, and may include elements of proof in the form of case studies, a framework or experience, but all subordinated to the problem-result logic.
How to build a value proposition step by step
Start with the problem. Not with the solution, not with your company, not with a list of services. With your client’s problem.
Find a problem that bothers a group of people badly enough that they will be willing to pay your company the kind of money you are interested in to solve it. One problem. The most painful one, whose solution will have the greatest positive financial consequences for your potential client.
Next, think about who your ideal client with exactly that problem will be, and describe the results from their perspective, not yours. What consequences does leaving this problem unsolved carry, and what benefits can they gain if it is solved? These will be the pillars of your communication and the core of your value proposition.
Only then show how your company arrives at those results. Not through a list of features and functionalities, but through a mechanism of action that makes the problem disappear and the result appear.
If there are many different potential clients with this problem, focus on one specific type of client. Do not try to think about many different clients. There will be time for that later, once you master communication with that one group and start generating repeatable results from it.
A value proposition not only on the website
A value proposition is not a text for the website, although of course it can appear there. It is a communication frame that should run through every point of contact with the client. From the website, through content materials and social media posts, to sales conversations.
In a sales conversation, the value proposition is not something you recite at the start of the meeting. Quite the opposite. Well-conducted needs discovery consists in asking questions in order to really understand the client’s situation, not in order to wait in the starting blocks for the moment when you can say what you wanted to say from the very beginning.
Trying to understand the client’s reality, the problems they face and the results they care about is the foundation without which no value proposition will work in direct interaction. The client will not let you solve their problems if they are not convinced you understand them at all.
If your value proposition is consistent and you offer the same things every time, the objections you meet from clients will most often be repeatable. And if they are repeatable, you can build neutralizing them into the sales process before they even arise, and leave no room for them. A consistent value proposition not only attracts clients, it also brings order to your whole sales process.
How to check whether your value proposition works
You can run a simple test. Take your current message, as it is on your website, in your materials, in your salespeople’s heads, and check four things.
Does the first paragraph describe your client’s situation, not your company? Does the recipient recognize themselves before they learn who the sender is? Is the result formulated in the categories by which the recipient’s success is measured? And does the solution appear as an answer to a specifically named problem, not as a standalone offer?
If the answer to any of these questions is “no”, you have a message, but you do not have a value proposition.
If you operate in a business model that does not generate financial surpluses, then before you start looking for a solution in more salespeople, an additional marketing channel or a broader offer, it is worth iterating on the value proposition, the way it is delivered and the client segments until you find a way to deliver value repeatably while keeping the right margin. Because adding something to the offer as a cure for a lack of sales rarely works. If you cannot sell what you have, more things to sell will only make the problem bigger.
A value proposition is not a one-off project. It is a process of continuous iteration, testing and refinement based on how your clients respond to it. Every sales conversation, every reaction to your content, every question a potential client asks is feedback on whether your value proposition hits the mark.
Start with one problem, one type of client and one communication channel. Only once that works, expand.
If you are not sure what stage your company is at, if you are wondering whether your value proposition actually works, whether sales are repeatable and whether the model you operate in lets you grow, you can check it yourself. I have prepared a free diagnostic tool that in a few minutes will show you where you are and what specifically needs attention. Take the online sales diagnosis (in Polish) yourself and see, or order a full B2B sales audit.
