3 Reasons Most Value Propositions Fail and What to Do About It

Most value propositions stink. They’re boring, generic, feature-heavy garbage that make buyers’ eyes glaze over. And the worst part? Most salespeople don’t even realize their value proposition messaging is hurting them. On this week’s Sales Gravy Podcast, Lisa Dennis breaks down her process for building value propositions that actually work—the kind that grab buyers by the heart and don’t let go. But before we get to the solution, let’s talk about why most value propositions fail miserably. Reason #1: You’re Talking About Yourself, Not Them Here’s the fundamental problem with 90% of value propositions: They’re all about you. “We’re the industry leader with cutting-edge technology and award-winning customer service that delivers best-in-class solutions…” Blah, blah, blah.  Do you hear that sound? That’s the sound of your prospect mentally checking out. Here’s a hard truth about human nature: Nobody cares about you. They care about themselves. Every buyer wants to talk about their problems, their challenges, their goals, and their pain points. When you launch into your pitch about incredible features and market-leading capabilities, your buyer is silently thinking, “What does this mean for me?” And if you don’t answer that question immediately, you’ve lost them. Your value proposition isn’t a corporate brochure. It’s not a marketing slick. It’s the value-bridge between what you do and what they need.  If it’s a monologue about you, your company, and your product features you’ve lost the game before kickoff. What to do instead: Make your value proposition a laser-focused spotlight on them. Start with their problem, not your solution. Lead with their pain, not your product. Reason #2: You’re Using Generic, Meaningless Buzzwords Most value propositions include phrases like “industry leader,” “best-in-class,” “cutting-edge,” or “world-class customer service.” “We’re a one-stop shop with purpose-built solutions that increase efficiency and decrease costs.” Really? And I suppose your competitors specialize in decreasing efficiency and increasing costs? These phrases and buzzwords make you sound exactly like every other salesperson who’s ever walked through your prospect’s door: boring.  Here’s the brutal truth: If your competitor could copy and paste your value proposition and use it for their company, it’s not a value proposition—it’s forgettable noise. What to do instead: Get specific. Use numbers. Use their language, not yours. Instead of “increase efficiency,” say “reduce your monthly reporting time from 40 hours to 4 hours.” Instead of “industry leader,” show them exactly how you’re different and why that difference matters to them. Reason #3: You Haven’t Done Your Homework Most salespeople build their value propositions standing in their own shoes rather than those of their buyers. If you don’t know what keeps your prospects awake at 3 AM, if you don’t understand their specific challenges, and if you haven’t talked to real customers about why they bought from you (or didn’t), then your value proposition is built on sand. Guesswork rather than research. What to do instead: Talk to three groups of people and gain insight through their lens. Your Lovers: These are your raving fans. What do they say about you when you’re not in the room? What specific problem did you solve that made them heroes in their organization? Your Likers: These are satisfied customers who aren’t writing love letters about you. What almost made them choose your competitor? What reservations did they have? Your Haters: These are the tough conversations. The prospects who chose someone else or the customers who fired you. Why? What did they feel you were missing? This insight helps you shape your messaging so that it connects with the buying motivators of potential customers. How to Build a Value Prop That Actually Works Now that we’ve covered why most value propositions fail,

Episode Transcript

(00:04):
If you put
five of your salespeople
in this room and you ask each one
of them to write on the back of
this paper Mhmm. What they believe the value
proposition is. K?
How many of them do you think would
be exactly the same?
Zero. Exactly. K? And that's the problem
because most field people have to think on

(00:24):
the fly.
And if they're getting a marketing packaged
value proposition, which is typically one size fits
all, then they have to mess with it
in order to
have it any relevance with those people. This
is the Sales Gravy Podcast. Hi. I'm Jeb
Blunt, best selling author of fanatical prospecting, Objection,

(00:44):
Sales EQ, and Inked, and I'm here to
help you open more doors, close bigger deals,
and rock your commission check. Thank you so
much for, again, joining us, and we can
talk more about Augustine, more about Thompson. But
I wanna talk about you.
You are an incredibly impressive
woman,
person,
and,
I I I can't believe we got you

(01:05):
to Thompson. I'm I'm I'm, like, jittery because
I I can't believe I'm getting to interview
you. But just to give some context to
the Sales Gravy audience,
Lisa Dennis, who is joining me today, is
the president of Knowledgents
Associates,
the author of Value Propositions That Sell, Turning
Your Message Into a Magnet That Attracts Buyers.
She is an expert in developing buyer centric

(01:26):
value propositions that help sales teams engage prospects
and close deals more effectively.
Lisa has worked with companies across industries to
refine their messaging and sales approach, ensuring that
they resonate with buyers in a competitive market.
Her value proposition platform is a structured method
for creating, refining, and implementing
value propositions tailored to different buyer personas, so

(01:47):
important, and sales situations.
Her approach focuses on making sales messaging relevant,
engaging, persuasive,
helping sellers stand out from the competition. Let's
start there. K. Well, there's all of that.
We'll start with
messaging. Yep. And
salespeople,
in my experience, and I've been a salesperson,

(02:08):
and and this is
this is more more telling of me, is
I I have a hard time paying attention
to messaging. I think that I'm so focused
on the outcome of
getting a meeting and then getting to the
next step. And I've been in these sales
conversations. I've been sold to by AI consultants,
and
you can tell when you're in a sales
process, which is not always a bad thing.

(02:29):
There are great sales processes. There's the very
boring ones, and then there's the very bad
ones. But the very boring ones are almost
all that I experienced. So they're essentially running
BANT or Medpick or Medic Right. Or some
sales methodology.
And look, I I'm hypersensitive because I work
at a sales training organization, but I can
tell. You're asking me questions in such a

(02:50):
way that it's like a checklist for you.
And
the messaging is lost. I have no idea
what their company stands for, the passion that
they do they even like this job?
Where
where do you help teams the most when
it comes to messaging, or where does that
moment sort of hit for a seller?

(03:11):
I think
I think at the end of the day,
what we're supposed to be doing
is creating a conversation.
Mhmm. So we put a ton of, you
know, structure and steps and all of that,
which inhibit a real conversation.
Right? And because we're paid, and I'm a
seller too, we're paid to sell our stuff,

(03:31):
it gets in the way Mhmm. Of actually
creating a real conversation.
Here's the thing, and this is kind of
why I came to the way to what
I'm doing.
If
I'm gonna ask you a question. If you
forget
everything that your parents taught you about being
polite,
about about,
you know, your manners, all of that, And

(03:52):
I invited you to have lunch with me.
And I asked you,
hey, do you wanna talk about
me,
or do you wanna talk about you? I
wanna talk about me. I don't have to
forget. I wanna talk about me. Actually, can
we stop and just talk about me for
a few minutes? Exactly. Okay? Every buyer we
face
feels that way. Mhmm. They don't really care

(04:13):
what you they don't care about any of
it. Mhmm. So in order to have a
conversation,
right, that I'm gonna engage you, the more
I plug into
letting you talk about you and then I
can
work with that, the more that's gonna be
a conversation that you're gonna be interested in
having.
And then the whole kind of med pick,

(04:33):
challenge, or all those questions which everybody's heard
steps away. It kind of goes over here.
Mhmm. And then I come up with questions
that are relevant at the moment while you're
talking about what you care about. That's how
I think of it.
And and I think the crux of that,
if if I'm hearing you correctly, is that
you're essentially letting

(04:54):
go of the the linear process.
Yep. You have to let go of that.
How do you help sellers?
I I imagine that there's lots of curious
people in the world. But if you're in
sales and, you know, the top 80%, you
know, we'll take the the bottom 20%, throw
throw them out the the window. Right? So
top 80%.

(05:15):
There's curious people all all along that way,
but they're not all good at being curious.
Mhmm. And
your messaging,
process and how you develop teams and and
then what they do relies on their ability
to hear
and respond
with the right level of curiosity so that
it does feed into that person's

(05:36):
need to talk about themselves. That self disclosure
loop is what we call it here.
How do you help the people or if
if if you know you're curious but you're
not very good at it, how would you
develop that that skill
that leads into a better messaging process?
So behind having that kind of real authentic
flow of conversation, of course, there's some stuff.
Right? There's some structure. And the first one

(05:57):
is about doing doing the homework.
So what do you really know about them?
What words and language
does your buyer audience use? And and get
really, really targeted.
The problem with most value propositions are that
they're one size fits all, which I can
tell you I have a closet full of
clothes that are one size fits all that
don't fit me, that are that that are
that don't fit anyone. Right? And I think
that's the same thing with the value prop

(06:19):
and messaging. Okay? I mean, there's something to
be said for doing kind of industry based
messaging. But as a seller, if I can't
pull it down to the key members of
my buying team Mhmm. And I can't address,
then I've got a problem. So
it's really about building on I build on
a front end to a value prop that
is really tied
to the top of mind things that my

(06:41):
particular target buyer is going after in their
language.
And I set up a kind of a
an opening statement
that's kind of the top layer of the
value prop. And it's really easy to pull
relevant questions from that.
So that's why I talked about a value
proposition platform because I don't look at it
as a statement or a pitch. Right? Right.

(07:01):
I'm a seller who hates pitches. I do.
I hate that pitch. Though because if you're
listening to this and you heard value prop
and you equated it to pitch,
that's that's not this conversation. Not at all.
Not at all. Nobody wants to be pitched,
and everybody can smell the pitch a mile
away. Okay? I hate elevator pitches. And in
twenty seven years, I've never pitched anyone in
an elevator. Like, can we let go of

(07:22):
that? It's so done. It's one of the
most uncomfortable situations we've been in. So so
it's but it's really hard to build a
conversation
or to build content if all you have
is a one or two liner. Like, where
do you go with that? You could go
anywhere.
So the platform I built is a is
a set of modular pieces
that allows you on the fly

(07:42):
really easily and to do a little advance
work, if you're smart,
for the different types of buyers that you're
going after. So all I'm doing is plugging
in. Oh, they care about these three things.
These are the words that they use about
it. Here's the best questions.
Now I'm set up to have a real
conversation. And if I pay attention and I'm
listening,
I've got that stuff in my back pocket
that I can pull in kind of real

(08:03):
time. It's about understanding
the people in the business, not necessarily the
business in whole. Yeah. Because, you know, sellers,
and I have this problem as well, and
I'm sure you struggle with it sometimes. You
you you come into a new situation, maybe
a really juicy opportunity as, you know, you're
you're looking at this,
at this deal, and you're saying, I could

(08:25):
win this. Mhmm. And then you kind of
get neurotic about it, and you and you
go, I don't know much about,
you know, laser
computer technology
in in in the industrial factory world. I
I've I've been in those situations where I
was meeting with, you know, a chief marketing
officer of this really industrial business, and that's
just not the world that I came out
of. So I tried to learn everything I

(08:46):
could about these laser computer systems. And I
went to speak with the chief marketing officer,
and we didn't talk about lasers or computers
at all. It threw me off. And, actually,
I didn't do well in the deal because
I had spent too much time trying to
prove that I knew their business instead of
showing that person that I was listening, and
their personality type was different than mine. And

(09:07):
you talk about personas,
matching messaging to personas.
So walk
walk me through your philosophy on personas, how
you see them in the business, and and
who what they kind of manifest if you
can categorize them in buckets, if you if
you will. And then we'll get into matching
messaging,
maybe even the same message, but for different
personas across the board. Sure.

(09:29):
My whole attitude about a personas is they're
useful
in
to the extent that they get close to
real people. Because here's the thing. And and
it took me a while to figure this
out. I'm not selling to
organizations. Yeah. An organization doesn't buy. A person
buys Right. Or a group of people buys.
Right? And it and especially if it's like

(09:49):
a big company or it's, you know, it's
that it's that logo that you wanna get,
you're right. It's very mesmerizing. But at the
end of the day, the deal's gonna fail
or or there's gonna be success based on
who I'm sitting in front of. Right? So
on the persona side,
personas have to be based on
interviews with real customers, with real people. They

(10:10):
have to be based on real conversations,
not something that you pull out of AI,
which is really hot right now. Oh, look
at these great personas. I'm like, okay. They're
so good though. Oh, they're so
they're seen them? I have seen them. However
so good. It feels so good, and you're
so happy it took two minutes to do
it. But what I have to tell you
is they're not necessarily

(10:30):
indicative or close enough to the real people.
Right. Right? So it's always gotta be that
plus,
but every persona that I've built is based
on conversations
with in interviews with real customers. Mhmm. Then
you go internally, and you do the internal
conversations. You look at where the matchup is,
and then you extract the right language. And
to make sure that you're focusing on, you

(10:51):
know, what are the key what are the
key drivers
of them making a decision?
Right? How do they look at their own
role in that? What are the biggest risks
to them personally? You know, there's a whole
host of other things
that, honestly,
I don't know that chat p g p
t is really gonna do a great job
of some of that. Right. They're not building
a good three d person. Exactly. It's it's
it's a two d person. It's it's the

(11:14):
likeness of a human.
But when you when rubber meets the road,
you're gonna find a lot of challenges.
Exactly. And and and I think that that's
the biggest one. Like, I hate I really
hate the the personas where, like, Sally Sue
and her dog Spot, and they like walks
on study. Like, totally useless. Right? Yeah. What
do I need to know about their walk
habits Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. To solve them? That's

(11:35):
really not very useful. And then the other
thing is I've seen the extreme, you know,
where I've been in, you know, large tech
company go, we've got personas.
Look, we'll show you in Salesforce, and all
they are is a title. There's no backup.
There's no description. There's no nothing. That's not
a persona either. Mhmm. So it's about it's
about how close can you get to the
real people who are doing the kind of
work that you know you can help and

(11:56):
to have and to pull and extract from
those conversations?
Okay. So you've
if you're building three d,
two and a half d
personas. Right? So you're you're getting as close
as you possibly can because you're doing those
interviews.
As a seller, you're going to come across
people
in the business who are making decisions. And

(12:18):
like you said, people
make decisions. There's a reason that business over
the last fifty years has moved from a
single buyer to a Mhmm.
A committee buy. Yep. It's because when you
have one person making decisions, they do it
emotionally, not with the business. So you're you're
selling to people, not the business, but that's
why committees exist. You're gonna have to sell
to

(12:39):
both the CEO
or the director of sales or the director
of technology
or, you know, the chief marketing officer or
who all maybe all of those people at
the same time or in in a series
in succession.
When you build messaging for a sales team
or or an organization,
how do you help them mold that to
the different people within those committees so that

(13:02):
it makes sense, but it's not
off brand or it doesn't, you know, skewed
to a a place I think it can
feel pant like a pandering
to to a prospect. They go, you're clearly
just messaging to me, and I know it.
Right. Versus If you're being that obvious about
it. Exactly. Exactly. So the way I look
at it is I think about value props
as being in a hierarchy. Right? Because if

(13:24):
you just build one, well, right by definition,
you're doing a one size fits all. Good
luck with that.
But if you come up with who is
my top target within my buying committee. Right?
You know, is that the person that signs
the check? Is that the one who actually
makes the decision, which is sometimes not the
person who signs the check. Right? Like, who
is that person? Build the what I call
the foundational value prop. Right? And the platform

(13:46):
that I put together is pretty modular. Right?
So I'm aiming the buyer needs section, the
front end of the value prop at that
person. Right? And then every other person on
that buying team, I conversion it. Right? So
the offer statement should be pretty solid. Like,
if you've done a good job, it should
be attractive to everybody. Your differentiators,
depending on how many you have, you could

(14:06):
switch in and out.
I also add a piece that doesn't come
with most standard ones, which is I do
a backup,
which is top three to five value drivers,
key points of of, interest, almost like the
mental checklist. Yeah. Right? How do we quantify
those? How do we provide third party proof?
I could switch those in and out depending

(14:27):
upon who I'm talking to on the buyer
team. So it gives me the ability to
version fairly easily Right. That rather than start
with a blank page every time. Because once
you do that, the message starts going off
in 10 different directions. And we've all I
love I love that process, and it's it's
difficult
initially. I think once you get a habit
of doing it, it becomes so much easier

(14:48):
just like anything else. But you have that
backup or several backups.
What's happened
to thousands and thousands and thousands of sellers
is they get into a conversation and they
deliver that value prop that they worked so
hard on. And you can almost just see
the dead eye. It just didn't it didn't
hit them. And you know it. You're you're
in that meeting, and maybe you're on a
Zoom call, which is even harder because we're

(15:10):
sitting right here, and if I I can
tell that you didn't like whatever I said,
I'm gonna make a very quick adjustment. In
a Zoom call, it's just so much silence.
And I love silence as a seller, but
not that kind of silence. Right. Exactly. And
and so I wanna have you walk through
your value proposition
if you're okay with that. Sure. How you
sell your services in business to a buyer.

(15:32):
That way people get an example, and they
get to hear how cool your business is,
of what that looks like when you walk
into a room or you're building a a,
you know, proposal deck or or you're doing
marketing to a specific client or you're prospecting,
what does your value proposition sound like? Okay.
So the first thing I would ask you
is if you put

(15:53):
five of your salespeople
in this room and you ask each one
of them to write on the back of
this paper Mhmm. What they believe the value
proposition is. K?
How many of them do you think would
be exactly the same?
Zero. Exactly. K? And that's the problem.
Because most field people have to think on
the fly.

(16:13):
And if they're getting a marketing packaged
value proposition, which is typically one size fits
all, then they have to mess with it
in order to
have it any have it any relevance with
those people, and they're gonna go in 27
different directions. Right? Now I'm half marketing and
half sell. Okay? So that makes me a
mutant individual.

(16:34):
K? It really does. You usually hate it
on both sides. Right? Pretty much. Yeah. Pretty
much. She's one of them. No. She's one
of them. However,
if I can't
if I don't have an array and I
think of this as a hierarchy, here's our
kind of main
value prop.
Maybe I wanna break that down by industry
vertical.
Maybe I wanna break that down by personas.

(16:54):
Maybe I wanna do both. It's to give
people logical choice
in terms of what they use in the
field that's consistent,
that's already been pressure tested with a customer,
right, or with clients,
and that we know works. Right. Right? Yeah.
And I think that's the key thing. If
we're just kinda winging it out there, even
if a seller
manages to hit it well, right, they said

(17:16):
something. Right? But they don't know that it
they they didn't get there. Get there, and
nobody else has the benefit of it. Right?
So that's the real challenge. It's just lost
in a vacuum somewhere.
So starting with the customer. So I, you
know, usually work through, let's go talk to
a handful of your customers who are madly
in love with you. Let's talk to some
customers who are okay. We we're good. I

(17:38):
wanna talk to somebody who bought within the
last six months, and I wanna talk to
people who did who said no. Mhmm. Which
a lot a lot of companies go, like,
don't you wanna know why they said no?
Do you know why they said no?
Right? And that's usually a very interesting conversation
for those clients who are brave enough to
let us do that. And then you kind
of look through
that. You pull out themes and threads. You

(17:59):
do a similar set of interviews internally
to see what your people are saying, and
you look at where there's overlap, where there's
gaps, where there's opportunities,
and then you pull it in.
You
you discuss
I'm gonna have to be very careful how
I say this. You discuss
the relationship

(18:20):
between marketing and sales Uh-huh. And
communication between these two departments. Right. I love
them both. I'm in both as well. I'm
a marketer.
I have sold all my career. I've done
both. We're one we're maybe one of those
few people who have, like, had to pick
up the phone in the morning and then
also, like, design the website in the afternoon.
You're mutant like me. Exactly.
So

(18:41):
these departments typically have a relationship, and this
is my personal
observations. So I'm gonna let everyone else off
the hook. You can judge me all you
want to. But
marketing sends us shit leads.
We hate them. They don't do anything for
us. All these decks don't make any sense.
My buyers don't like it, and you get
the people who have five different opinions about
what the value proposition is, and they wing

(19:02):
it in the field because marketing is just
not helping them. And they have that Mhmm.
Relationship. And then marketing on the other side
goes, sales doesn't even follow-up with anything. They,
you know, they don't listen to what we
say. They don't, they don't use the decks
that we build. They don't, you know,
care about the kinds of customers that we
know are buying from us because they did
all the research on it. And the sales

(19:23):
team says, those people don't buy from us.
We called them. They don't like it. And
so that relationship can feel very contentious,
and I think it's a good thing in
a way. It builds some
some some camaraderie. You know, sort of commiserate
together.
But you help teams
work through this. Yes.
How?
So I wish I had a better question.

(19:43):
Yeah. No. No. How is a good question?
Even possible? How do you do that? If
marketing's over here in the corner doing messaging
and throwing it over the fence, that's problem
number one. Okay?
If they're talking to customers, fabulous.
Mhmm. But sales should be part of that.
Sales should be part of that that process.
So, typically, I'm I'm always bringing in it's

(20:05):
not just marketing typically hires me. Okay?
Believe it or not, for the value prop
thing. It's usually that side of it. And
my first question is, where are your salespeople?
Right? Where's your head of sales? Because reality
is, whatever you put out there, no buy
in,
not happening. Right? So let's bring everybody into
that room. Those conversations that we have with
customers, we need to do it together.

(20:26):
We need to decide together
what makes sense, what doesn't. Where are the
gaps? Where are the pitfalls? Where are the
opportunities? Because
marketing is gonna miss some stuff,
and sales is gonna miss some stuff around
how to pull together
that better. Yeah. It's hard to say. I
know. I know you've never missed a thing.
I certainly have. Right? And the fact of

(20:47):
the matter is is that you're not gonna
get agreement on what the message is if
one party's building it and the other one's
not. I I I that's the best way
to describe
how
how the landscape plays out typically where you
throw it over the fence
and
you throw things back over the fence, and
you throw things back over the fence, and

(21:08):
it just is ignored. Eventually, it just becomes
an an an ignored message
that the marketing is doing things and the
sales team is doing things, and maybe they
can be successful independently. And that's true. Like,
you've been in organizations where the marketing team
was successful and the sales team was was
successful, but they weren't successful together.
And,
and I think that what you're addressing is

(21:29):
buy in. And we deal with this on
the sales training side where, you know, we
are hired by learning and development, the HR
team who wants to bring us in. And
and it's a wonderful relationship with them, but
then they put us in front of the
sales team, and the sales leader
had either no idea or wasn't on board
with it to begin with and didn't have
any investment into the process.

(21:50):
And we left
after training their team, and then three weeks
later, they were all doing the same things
they were doing before we came in. So
it's it's that process with sales and marketing
that you have to address. And I love
this interview process, the persona process
of going and talking to customers. It's an
undervalued
tool,
but over,

(22:12):
I think over advised
in a way where you're you're telling teams
to go do this, and they go and
they do, but they don't do it with
the right strategy. And I like that you
brought them both together to have these conversations,
and there are customers that love you and
customers that are okay and customers that said
no.
I wanna start with a no. Mhmm.
I have always

(22:33):
had a fear of going and talking to
a customer that said no to me. Mhmm.
Just personally, you know, self admit on this
podcast that I am not stronger than anybody
else.
When they say no to me, it hurts
me. Yep. You know, it's it's personal. Not
that I think that they're bad people or
anything. I just it hurts me personally. Yes.
Do you find that sales teams,

(22:53):
make the story they make up as to
why the customer said no is fairly consistent
with the reason the customer said no? No.
Interesting. What do you find?
The reasons we we typically think of the
same set of reasons.
Like, we have our own little salespeople checklist.
Right? If I could've given them that discount,

(23:15):
that price was too high. You know, they
didn't really understand.
They're gonna do it themselves, you know, blah
blah blah blah. And and you have a
real conversation with somebody who said no, and
you're gonna be shocked because there's the reasons
are,
I mean, yeah, maybe it's the price, but
that means you didn't sell value. So there
you go. But the but the reality is
it could be a number of different things

(23:36):
that you didn't have, and and some of
it's really interesting and really telling. Mhmm. Some
of it may have something to do with
a past experience they had or something they
heard about you or whatever, but you're not
gonna know unless you ask, you know. And
that's the thing. That's why I think it's
really important to go see why did they
say no. Right? I even would like to
talk to a couple people that were customers
and left you. They hate you now. Why

(23:57):
is that? Right? And those are really interesting.
I think there's one other thing. Just to
circle back for a second. I think there's
one other piece here,
that's really important that I think gets missed
a lot is
when marketing pulls together their new messaging and
their new value props. Right? It is a
toss
over. Right? Mhmm. You should launch messaging
internally

(24:19):
before you launch it externally.
And usually, those two things get just smooshed
together.
We're gonna throw this at you and and
we're and and the campaign went out. And
that's a problem because you're not preparing,
that your sales team to deliver it. Right?
Oh, here's a playbook. Here's this. Here's that.
That's great.
Okay. So you threw more content on them.

(24:39):
And then they're not because salespeople have the
attention span of a teaspoon. Right? They do.
And they don't have time. That's the scarcest
resource. Right? So you have to actually launch
it. It there has to be a launch
plan that's internal before it goes external, and
I think that helps.
I think that does too. I agree with
you. Because if you are in in and
I've been in these positions that I worked

(24:59):
for a really large organization, a a massive
organization,
and they did not rule out any messaging
for new products that we were supposedly
selling to our,
you know, business customers.
And,
they would have, you know, three new products
a quarter, and suddenly we'd be expected to
sell them. And here's the value proposition for
it. And I had 13 people on my

(25:20):
sales team.
None of us
use that language because we didn't know it.
We had no we had no anticipation of
it. It wasn't in emails that were sent
to us over time. It wasn't in, you
know, our boss's mouth when she was telling
us how to, how to go sell these
things. She was reading us the value proposition
literally for the first time herself
on a call telling us about this new

(25:43):
service or or product or value proposition that
we had to deliver. So she had no
idea what it was. And then, of course,
we had no idea what it was, and
we went,
that's stupid. We're not doing that. Right. It
was not gonna work. Immediate reaction is not
gonna work. So I think you're absolutely right.
If you give it time, you roll it
out before you launch, you have a better
chance of it sticking and becoming part of

(26:04):
their normal language just because of time. Just
sort of pick it up over over, you
know, a period of weeks or months or
whatever that is.
And then going back to that process. So
you you have the well, the ones that
say no are one thing.
I'm actually interested in what you see when
people say,
I hired them and now I hate them.
I'm I don't think that that's always the

(26:25):
case. Sometimes you just move away. But Right.
What what have you found in those conversations?
Even for your own business or if you
can give any examples of how those conversations
go for a marketing and sales department to
pick pick information out of and learn from.
I think one of the things that I've
I've heard multiple times

(26:47):
is I was told this, this, and this,
and I didn't get it, or it's missing.
Or, like, the messaging actually, they do pay
attention. Yeah. If they've gone that far with
you It's yeah. They do actually pay attention.
Right? And so then it's a question of
where where did the disconnect happen. Right? And
sometimes that's an operational disconnect.

(27:07):
Other times, it's, it's,
an intention disconnect, I guess, is the way
I would I would think about it. Right?
They make assumptions on what the intentions are
gonna be once the deal
turns into, here we go, and then you
go from there. Plus, you never you know,
a lot of times the salespeople are gone.
They move on. Right? Well, wait a minute.

(27:28):
You know, so and so told me this.
Well, you know, sorry, but, you know, we're
over here. It it's like, you know, we
locked you out of that silo. Now you're
in the new silo, and it's different here.
Right? So a lot of I hear a
lot of those kinds of things.
And and I think sometimes the language that
we use
to engage and entice
changes dramatically once they become a customer. That's

(27:50):
another disconnect. So how are we pulling that
through? Are we also
training and and and launching this messaging with
your customer success team, your tech support team,
know, anybody who's in a customer facing role.
No one ever tells them any of this
stuff, you know, ever. So so they get
all the complaints. They have no idea what

(28:10):
was said.
My salesperson said x, y, and z in
promise the moon. And customer success person goes,
they said what? Yeah. Exactly.
Why? Right. So the messaging has to be,
you know,
it's gotta be all the way through. I
I was working with a a company. They
were about a ten year old startup. K?

(28:31):
Yeah. Ten years old, kinda We're an eighteen
year old startup. There you go. But they
had reached sort of a plateau.
Right? So,
very,
very technical,
internal, original founding team. Everybody's an engineer Mhmm.
Selling to nontechnical audience,
and they were selling it the way they
would wanna be sold to, not the way

(28:52):
they wanna be sold to. Right? I imagine
it was very flat. Very flat.
Very yeah. Really fascinating stuff. So,
so we kind of we went to the
customers. We did the whole thing, the whole
shebang. At the end,
the their new CMO who brought me in
said, okay. And he was the only non
engineer on the team.
How do we get this out there? Like,
what's your thought? And I said, we're gonna
get it in here first. Mhmm. And so

(29:14):
we did a company meeting, which, you know,
he was like, well, we'll just tell the
salespeople or we could give them, like, this
deck. And I'm like, no. No. No. No.
No. This has to be rolled out to
the entire organization.
So we did a company meeting,
and we went through the messaging.
We went through why we went in that
direction. We shared all the key points from
the customers that we interviewed,

(29:34):
and we provided
the whole platform,
right, to the sales team. Here's how you
use it. Here's the discovery questions that go
with it. Here's a set of conversations that
you're likely to have. Right? And we made
sure the entire team, not just the salespeople
knew it.
And,
we had one of their newer salespeople come
in come come see us afterwards and said,

(29:57):
I've never worked for any company
that gave me this much to work with.
Right? And that's the thing. Otherwise,
you're on your own. Right? You are. And
that's really hard. It is hard. And that's
why those when we go if it circles
all the way back, those five sales reps
who have five different value propositions Right. And
the customer success team that says,
why do the salespeople say that? I don't

(30:18):
know how to solve that. No. That's not
how we do it over here. And it's
it's, you know, the customer that says yes
and then says no later.
Mhmm. And those those
misunderstandings of intention
or or what was supposed to be delivered
usually comes from
marketing, not working with sales to deliver a
value message that is threaded through our entire

(30:39):
organization
of what of what we do as an
as a business, what we expect of you
as a business,
person, and and as a salesperson. You should
say these things because we know that we
can deliver on those things and that they
mean something to the customer so that when
they go to customer success or they go
to tech support or whatever that is, tech
support and customer success also have the same

(30:59):
congruent message
that they know that you're delivering and they
can address.
If if we're all firing out of our
hip,
there's gonna be a lot more
tension and and and friction in in the
organization, the business, and how we interact with
our customers. Mhmm.
You have a lot of sales conversations. You
have a lot of marketing conversations.
What should people

(31:21):
avoid saying?
What are, like, the
the big no nos in your mind that
that scream,
pandering,
lack of knowledge,
one size fits all, you know, all the
just the the pitfalls and trappings of,
of bad messaging.
So there's a there's a I I keep

(31:42):
a a list of words I or expressions
I hate to find in value props that
I find. What's your what's your least favorite?
My current least favorite is purpose built.
Seriously?
Oh, you built this for a purpose. Good
for you. Let me buy 12. Are you
kidding?
Are you kidding me? I don't like that.
I hate per that gives me the purpose
built.

(32:03):
One size fits all. I have never in
my life seen a buyer who leaped out
of bed and said, oh, I wanna buy
one size fits all. Right? That's not gonna
happen. Right?
One stop shop is in the same bucket.
Really? Everybody thinks that's a that's a real
value add. How many customers really come to
the table where that's
primary? That's one of their three to five

(32:24):
value drivers. No. That's a nice to have.
It's a nice to have. For giving it
to you. But it's not in the top
three. I'm not spending $2,000,000 on your technology
because it's a one stop shop. Right. We're
the industry leader.
Well, three of your competitors also claim to
be the industry leader. Put lie lie your
pants on fire. Like, according to who? Yeah.
So it's those kinds of things.

(32:45):
The other one that really drives me crazy
is,
when in the buried in the value prop
is, you know, we, you know, we increase
profits.
We reduce costs.
We, you know, increase efficiency.
The only problem is nobody ever says by
how much. That's the question. So if you're
not gonna put a stake in the ground
and be able to state, right, so that

(33:05):
it's a real thing Mhmm. And you can
prove it, then it's it's the same kind
of marketing
slough that everybody else does. So it's not
differentiating. And I've had, you know, companies say
to me, well, we can't say that or
legal won't let us say it. Then your
claim of cost savings
Stop it. Pull it out pull it out
of your value prop. Move somewhere else. Move
it somewhere else. Like, if you can get

(33:27):
it in a cut a case study and
you've got permission to to produce their results,
that's great. Use that. But it adds nothing.
I mean, think about it. A value prop
is a very valuable piece of real estate,
really. So you've gotta get all the generic,
fluffy,
doesn't make sense,
you know, out so that what you got

(33:47):
in there is actually meaningful. Then I typically
will, you know, kind of
do a,
a review of what the current state of
a value prop is. Right?
And, I'm actually doing I do a lot
of work.
I'm in big enterprise, but I also do
a lot of work with startups. I have
been in the last few years with some
accelerators. Yep. And I'm doing one with a
robotics accelerator, 12 companies.

(34:10):
And we do a a a kind of
a round robin on their
first value prop, the ones that they use
today. And I just strip all of that
stuff out, and then it's like, what's left?
Not much. Right? Right. There's a lot of
and I I work for a company out
of,
out of out of y combinator.
And
the what I noticed is working and I

(34:31):
worked with then work through them, worked with
other y Combinator companies. Yep. It was a
it was a a firm that did some
design work,
in building for these other startups. And what
I noticed as a seller working with those
founders
and their
their language style was
very,
focused on getting, investment, obviously. Right. But it

(34:54):
was a lot of fluffy,
like
like, it sounded it sounded good to say
it out loud, but it at the end
of the sentence, you didn't know what you
were talking like, it didn't mean anything. No.
And I imagine you're seeing that a lot
at both levels, enterprise and and start up.
Absolutely. I mean, I see it a ton.
In the start up world, it is kind
of like, what is it that the investors

(35:14):
wanna hear? And there's such a thing as
an investor value prop and a buyer value
prop, and they're not the same. They're not
even close. No. Right? No. I've done a
ton of work with Techstars companies. I've done
about a 35
startups.
And it's always kind of,
a it's a real transformation
when, you know, you get them to go
back and say, wait a minute. You know?
I guess that we'll do it with your

(35:36):
investor one. You still have to talk to
buyers. But you they're too different. Yeah. They're
too different, and you have to really think
through about what does that really mean, and
can you really prove it. And and and
if you're early stage, is this something that
will ultimately be provable? Because if it's not,
don't bother saying it now.
So I I like to do I'm sort
of like a surgeon, like, you know, with
with the scalpel and cutting out all the

(35:57):
fluffy stuff. And this is an interesting
part of the conversation because working with these
startups that may not have maybe even maybe
they're founder sellers. Right? So they have they're
founder led. They have somebody at the top
who's selling, and then maybe some a few
people behind them who are doing some of
the work while they're while they're growing. Same
thing with, like, smaller business and medium sized
businesses who may have a, you know, five

(36:18):
sellers. Maybe you have two sellers, and they're
not the enterprise level of organization.
And they might not have a value proposition
that they built purposely.
Right.
Very true. Purpose built.
Sorry. I didn't mean to drop that in
there.
But they
want to go that direction, and yet they're

(36:38):
not in a place where they can say,
I can prove this. I can prove this.
I can prove this. They just don't have
the resource. They have the resources to do
that. They're doing a good service, and maybe
they wanna go out and do some interviews.
But where where would you help them
start with a value proposition that is authentic
to where they're at but doesn't
lose business because it didn't sound good enough?

(37:00):
There's a fine line there. And I'm not
There is a fine line there. So first
of all, it's really about going and doing
the homework. What is really going on in
the industries? It's picking a target. I think
one of the the biggest challenges I see
for a lot of these startups is, you
know, I I can't do you know, we
have, like, 10 different markets. We we could
sell this everywhere. Yeah. Smack yourself. Okay? Yeah.
Because that's not true. It's not gonna be

(37:22):
true for some time, if ever. Right? So
you've gotta pick where you've gotta aim. Mhmm.
So where are the most likely
sectors, industries, and segments?
Pick one.
I mean, I force in these classes, like,
pick one. Right? Now let's go figure out
for that particular industry what's going on right
now. Right? So high level industry research,

(37:45):
who are the local what what who what
are the typical titles in that industry that
you wanna go to? Mhmm. Right? What are
the big trends, challenges, pains in that industry?
Let's extrapolate from there. Now,
who do you know? Let's go pick up
the phone Right. And validate this stuff. Right?
And every one of these accelerators, they make
them, like, make a hundred calls, right, to
potential customers or potential,

(38:06):
influencers or all of that to validate if
that makes sense or not. Mhmm. And that
sort of helps them build out that front
end. The feedback I've gotten, and it's been
really interesting is, it does make you as
a startup founder think differently about your business.
Right? Oh, yeah. It it really does. Oh,
yeah. When you start talk when you have
to pick up the phone and start calling
people, that idea and and I'm not an

(38:27):
entrepreneur
myself. I I work in a business. I
I I haven't built the business.
It is it is admirable.
I can't believe that you if you're listening
to this, you would do so something so,
impressive.
But
what you think is the solution in your
head and and how well you how well
you built the product and that everyone's gonna

(38:49):
want it, the challenges, you have to you
have to go test it. And the reality
is that you may be wrong. It's humbling.
Yeah. It's humbling, but it also can give
you You may be very right though. Right.
I mean, it it could be the other
way. It could be the other way. About
ten years ago because I've been in business
about this is my twenty seventh year. I
can't even believe it. Congratulations. Thank you. But

(39:10):
about ten years ago,
I,
joined this,
group.
It was a mastermind group, and it was
all women entrepreneurs.
And I had to present my business for
the first time to them. And it was
full on, like, you know, nondisclosures,
financials, the whole nine yards. Right?
And, I was pretty nervous about it because

(39:30):
there's some pretty successful people in there.
And,
something I should have known
but didn't,
and I I presented it. And, one of
the people who I really admire a lot
said, you know, you could do so many
things. I have no idea what your business
is. I'm like, what?
I have no idea what you do. I
have no idea what you stand for. I
really don't.

(39:51):
And I'm like, oh my god. And in
the course of, like, about eight years, strip
away, strip away, strip away. And then I
had a really pivotal conversation with Jill Konraff.
Yeah. She's at an event. Love Jill. She's
great. And, and we just kinda sat down
in a corner and had a cup of
coffee. And she said to me, you know,
I had
the business you have right now. Like, I
had that before I kind of

(40:11):
did my you know, got into that selling
to big businesses, the book, and then went
from there. But I was the same kind
of consultant you are. And she said, there's
something that you do
that nobody owns.
And I said, what is that? She said,
it's the value prop stuff, the way you
talk about that. Like, that is that's what
you should do. So I spent time with
this other group, strip away, strip away, strip

(40:33):
away. I have the best part. I have
to tell the story. The best part is
after that conversation with Jill, two weeks later,
a box showed up at my house. No
return address.
She had said to me, you need to
be the queen of value props. And I'm
like
Oh, well, you need your confidence is sort
of, like, not there yet. Oh, yeah. I
mean, I'm just like I I didn't the
queen of anything is like, whatever. And I
open up the box. No card. No note.

(40:55):
There's a tiara in there.
Oh, that's so cool. Yeah. That's amazing. It
was really cool of her to do. And,
that's Jill, if you're listening Thank you, Jill.
I mean, thank you, but I where's mine?
Yeah. Well, you know, sorry. I have I'm
not really of anything. That that prompted me
to write the book.
That prompted me
to really narrow in and to get crystal

(41:15):
clear about and I think this is important
for every seller. You need to get crystal
clear about what value your company's driving, but
you also have to get crystal clear on
what value you add to that.
And I think that's where if we're scrambling
or trying to make stuff up as we're
going along, it's because we're unclear about
one or the other or both.

(41:36):
Yeah. When you combine those two things. Right.
And so the process
that I have, this value proposition platform,
is equally usable whether it's a marketing team
using it or a salesperson using it. Because
even the best value prop that comes out
of marketing,
I still have to massage it in the
field. Absolutely. Absolutely have to, and I need
to know how to do that. None of

(41:57):
us get value prop training. Nobody. I mean,
in marketing for years, product manager. When I
was a product manager, I never got it.
So I kind of took that on thinking,
okay. Wait a minute. It needs to be
a repeatable
process
that I can use
and that I can build up so that
I have my kind of bag of messaging,
and I can easily go back and forth.

(42:18):
That's gonna make me a more effective seller.
That's gonna help drive engagement with the people
I'm sitting in front of. I'm gonna make
it about them instead of about me. Isn't
that refreshing? I mean, it it's kind of
differentiating in and of itself.
I I agree. And and,
I I think that the
if you're a marketer listening to this, which

(42:39):
if you're on the Sales Gravity podcast and
you're a marketer, god bless you. Fantastic.
So glad you're here. If you're a marketer,
what you should have pulled from that is
when you create a value proposition in the
marketing department, it's not
it's not yet done until it's tested in
the field with sales.
And I'm thinking I'm building a website right
now. And one of my,

(43:01):
one of my challenges is with copywriting
is value proposition for the products and services
that we're that we're offering there. And
there are some things that I know work
because I've had to sell it myself.
And there are
value propositions that I'm guessing at, and they
may sound good. They may be in the
right vein of of what makes sense, but

(43:22):
they're again, they're that two and a half
d
human persona that I'm speaking to, not the
full three d person. I have to have
my sellers
go test it and send it back to
me because if if it works in the
field,
it'll work everywhere else.
But if it only works on the website
for, like, a click through rate that's, like,
six and a half percent,
that's not that's not a sales value prop.

(43:45):
That's a nice way to get some click
throughs, and I can make it better. So,
if you're a marketer again, thank you so
much for being here. Sorry for, saying that
you don't send good leads. I don't send
good leads. Sometimes my salespeople yell at me.
Yeah. I mean,
it's I started in marketing, you know, as
as as a product manager.
And,
I had,
what I used to term the little product

(44:06):
line that could. I didn't have the hot
new online
cool product. I had I was selling publications.
Okay. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Okay. So
my salespeople were less than enamored with them
even though our top 500 clients have been
buying that for years. Mhmm.
They were not they were not really interested

(44:27):
anymore. And so as a marketer,
I kinda panicked. I'm like, uh-oh. Not only
do I have to market my my product
line, now I gotta sell it to? Are
you kidding me? Not a salesperson. And I
needed to understand
why my sales team wasn't wild about it.
And it wasn't just enough to say, well,
it should be online. That's not enough. Right?
I gotta figure out why. And we had

(44:47):
customers who were buying both.
The online product and the okay. That I
gotta figure out. So as a marketer, your
your first audience actually is your salespeople. That's
the first audience you have to market to.
Sorry. It just is. And they're a tough
audience. And they're tough, which is good. Right?
And then and then you have to go
to the customer. And for me, that was
a really great experience.

(45:08):
Right? I, like, went to two or three
of our salespeople, two that I really liked
that I was friends with, and one guy
used to give me a really hard time.
And I'm like, what am I doing wrong?
Like, what am I missing here? You know,
what doesn't make sense to you? And then
go to customers and get those same questions
answered to find that out. And that basically
brought me to the place of saying, I
can't create messaging in a vacuum. Doesn't matter
which side of the fence I'm on. If

(45:30):
I do it in a vacuum,
it's a hit or miss.
It's it's less than a fifty fifty shot.
Right. You're you're
we like to bend win probability in our
favor, here at Sales Gravy, and that is
not bending win probability. That is, chance,
and chance doesn't
always turn out in your favor. So, I
I love that advice.

(45:50):
I I wanna give you, some space here
because, again, going back to your background and
and what you've done and I Jill giving
you a tiara, which I'm now just It's
sitting on my bookcase. Sometimes I wear it
around the office. Jealous. I'm a little angry.
It's fine.
So you have this amazing background, and I'm
so
happy to have you here on the Sales
Grave Sales Gravy Podcast. But where can people

(46:13):
read more and learn more,
how to work with you,
how to,
become better sellers, become better marketers? Where can
they go to advance their messaging skills,
and learn from you? So valueproposition.com,
which is me,
and there's, resources there, and you can reach
me through there. I'm obviously,
on LinkedIn as well. The book is on

(46:34):
Amazon,
Value Propositions That Sell, so that's easy to
do.
Workshops are something I do quite a bit
of. So sometimes it's, you know, it's really
hard to do this solo. Okay? So whether
you're a large organization, I've done it for
HP. I've done value prop work, in the
in, the context of ABM, which I do
a ton of work with with companies like
IBM and Microsoft,

(46:55):
mid market, all the way down to startups.
And so you gotta think through. If you
have a larger group of people who need
to know how to do this,
then, you know, let's go. HP and I,
we brought in all the field marketers, global
field marketers, and we did it as as
a big workshop.
So there's a lot of different ways to
do it.
Workshop, teach your own people, bring me in
to help you with the messaging directly,

(47:17):
or do it yourself. The, the book is
actually a practitioner's guide. So if you go
through it, you'll actually have all the steps,
which is good. That's really cool. Thank you
so much for being here. And, thank you
so much for being in the SalesRemi studios.
The reason that you're here, by the way,
just to let everyone know before we end
the podcast, is that you are,
a world renowned expert in
ABM,

(47:37):
in, messaging,
in value propositions. We just had the whole
conversation about it, but you are also going
to be on the SalesGravy University platform, which
we're so excited about. I'm excited too. It
is the world's most powerful platform for sellers,
marketers, and business people to learn about customer
facing
challenges,
tips and tricks,

(47:58):
not tricks, but tips and techniques and strategies
and to learn everything you can about how
to be a become a better
business person, you can always check out SalesGrav
University at learn.salesgravy.com,
and
follow
your and your website one more time? Valueproposition.com.
Value proposition Com. Go to go