B2BNavigator.com

Maximise the Perceived Value of Your Offering

Your ability to articulate your value to your target audience is fundamental to your ability to build pipeline, the price you can sell at, your win rate, and just about every other metric that matters to the revenue team. And yet very few organisations have an agreed, methodical and repeatable approach to building value. We set out to change that with B2B Navigator.

Few terms are used more inconsistently than value proposition. This is unfortunate as tight, well constructed value propositions are critical in the construction of a successful go to market effort. A solid value proposition consists of an audience, a need, an outcome and a distinction – a definition that came from SiriusDecisions (now Forrester).

This is a great start. However, in B2B markets an essential part of building value is to be able to describe the capabilities that deliver customer outcomes. In B2B tech markets we also need to take account of the product category as part of the competitive landscape. Accordingly we have developed a simple, modular approach we refer to as the value network.

The graphic illustrates the principles at work. We seek to understand how your value is generated, answering questions such as:

• How do the outcomes you deliver meet the needs of your customer?
• How do your capabilities deliver those outcomes?
• What is unique about your capabilities relative to the competition and in your product category?

We use this model as part of a simple, modular approach to unlocking your value, and to help determine where you play and how you will win.

The value you can convey is based on what you can identify,
differentiate and prove for a given audience.

Align the Revenue Team

Many of the forces that shape the market and influence growth, including the competition and the economy, are outside of our control, but one of the most powerful factors of all is something that we can harness – if we have the will to do so.

This is the alignment of the revenue team – across Sales, Marketing and Product teams.  Growth can and does occur in organisations where these teams are not well aligned, but it is harder – and unnecessarily so. Research on this topic is relatively scarce, but a study by SiriusDecisions in 2018 showed revenue growth in well aligned organisations was 18% faster than those with poor alignment.

Most of us have experience of the costly nature of poor alignment across or within these teams, particularly between Sales and Marketing, the question is – what can be done to improve it?

At the heart of the challenge of alignment are different viewpoints and a lack of a common understanding. Our approach is to develop a common buyer-centric viewpoint across the revenue team. This approach works on the basis that it will make Sales, Marketing and Product teams more effective both separately and in collaboration by pursuing and achieving a shared challenge. Our approach rests on four key pillars.

• Agreeing clear, simple and usable definitions – Important go to market artefacts like use cases and value propositions and vital processes like targeting are all defined and agreed. We also show how these can be created in a repeatable fashion.
• Developing a shared approach to value – Elements such needs, outcomes and capabilities are some of the key building blocks of value. Gaining an understanding of these and their relationships enables a common, fact-based, rational and collaborative approach.
• Adopting common practices and tools – Important tasks such as developing a value proposition, defining a use case or developing a competitive analysis, quickly and in a repeatable fashion becomes much simpler and easier once the tasks are broken down.
• Learning via doing – The team learn together in a practical fashion by tackling worthwhile challenges. We avoid theory in favour of a practical approach with the goal of subsequent adoption.

We typically conduct this work with a small group of representatives from Sales, Product and Marketing teams who become the catalysts for change in the wider organisation.

Engage Your Audience

Stories are an intrinsic part of the human experience and how we engage with one another, but many B2B tech businesses rely too heavily on their product and neglect to develop a powerful enough narrative to be engaging. In some cases, the value of storytelling plays a recognised role but it is limited to the brand story. We believe that every value proposition you take to market deserves to be told as a compelling story.

Even a well-constructed value proposition is not a story – it is different to a story in both purpose and construction. In the work we do, the creation and testing of a story is the final part of the B2B Navigator workflow and creates the call to action that is so vital for B2B messaging.

The most important element of the B2B storytelling is the structure. The five point story structure commonly is use has DNA directly traceable to the ancient principles of rhetoric.

We generally use SCR (Situation, Complication, Resolution) to structure the B2B stories we create.  SCR clearly explains the rationale behind a recommendation, and so offers both a call to action and an argument to support it, which is why it is commonly used by consulting companies like McKinsey to support transformative recommendations.

Story development is often a standalone exercise, but in B2B Navigator it is part of a workflow that includes the development of a strong value proposition. One flows into the other, making the process easier to repeat.

SCR Story Structure