Developing a clear proposition for your product can be surprisingly complex. It is often the case with smaller companies just starting to grow that they have developed incredibly innovate solutions to very complex problems and it is considerable task to distill everything they want to get across into a logical story that any member of customer facing staff can tell. It is also incredibly difficult to drive consistency across channels. The story evolves and the website can be left behind the slides currently used by sales.
As an independent consultant looking at the problem I have a huge advantage that I am not embroiled in the fine detail and so I am able to step back and consider the big picture, something that even the best find difficult to do when they have been living and breathing an idea for several years.
Typical of the service I have provided is to create a new “C Level” overview story for a company to use in initial senior level meetings. The process typically involves sitting with the senior management and sales staff and listening to how they sell the product today (which is typically inconsistent) and extracting a clear compelling proposition. After review and refinement I can work with existing marketing staff to create slide decks, website copy, videos or whatever is required. Often I’ll then support the management in training all staff to use a consistent version of this story in their day to day engagements to drive that all important consistency.
I’ve gone far further in this type of work, including for one client interviewing users of the product in their first few customers to find our exactly what value they were seeing in daily use, bringing this learning back into the top level proposition and providing case studies for further sales engagment.