How consistent is your value proposition from customer to customer? If you haven’t created a robust, yet nimble, value 
proposition, you may be a value proposition chameleon. Your business development strategy seems to change shape, form and color on a daily basis. Your delivery of – and belief in – your value proposition seems to be just as inconsistent.
How do you keep it all straight?
With the plethora of information available for gathering customer insights and trigger events, you may feel tsunami’d by information overload. There hardly seems to be a one-size-fits-all approach to business development these days, let alone selling. And there shouldn’t be.
If you are working as a sales newbie or a startup CEO, your company may seem to be shape-shifting instead of moving forward. Your value proposition should be a constant, in spite of the variability of the marketplace.
Instead, your value proposition feels like a big experiment with the marketplace. Keep spieling something at them until they react to a certain phrase or concept. Once you have the “hot” value prop, full steam ahead: go-go-go!
If you find that you change your value proposition every time you visit a customer or prospect, or read a tweet or white paper, take a step back from the situation and re-evaluate.
Your value proposition is something you wear like a second skin. Your value proposition is part and parcel of who you are as a person of worth, representing your specific brand of product/service/platform.
Your value proposition is the tangible deliverable that your customers receive from having made the wise choice of doing business with you.
There’s a lot of responsibility involved in value proposition creation. When put this way, your value proposition is hardly a grand experiment in marketing or marketing communications and PR. It’s more a statement of how you will professionally and ethically deliver whatever it is you are selling, on behalf of your customer.
Your value proposition is a promise you make to your customer, based on your ethics as a technical or non-technical professional.
Now that’s a sobering thought.
Perhaps the healthiest way to create and uphold your value proposition is to take a realistic look at how you, your company, and your solutions serve your customers. How you serve your customers is related to the value they place on product and service quality delivery.
How well have you integrated your company DNA into your customers’ companies’ DNA? Are you an essential element of how your customers deliver to their marketplaces?
Your solution may be a necessity for your customers’ enduring livelihood to their own customers. Collaborate with them. Determine how to capture their perceptions within your value proposition. You will find that your value proposition becomes robust and consistent. You may find your value proposition means the same thing to every one of your customers and prospects.
That’s an enduring value proposition. No one will accuse you of being a chameleon. Most importantly, you will wear your value proposition as a second skin – and not a skin that changes color on a daily basis.
Babette N. Ten Haken, Founder & President of Sales Aerobics for Engineers®, LLC, brings entrepreneurial mojo and business- and revenue-producing collaboration and communication tools to small and mid-sized Seller-Doer businesses, corporate divisions, and startups.
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