Do you help customers increase revenue, decrease costs or mitigate risk?

If you take value propositions to the highest level, there are really only three things you can deliver, as a B2B company:

• Increase revenue

• Decrease costs

• Mitigate risk

Of those three, in normal times, the one most likely to make companies open their wallets is the promise of increased revenue. There is abundant research supporting this, and it holds for individuals as well as companies.

This means two things. First, while you obviously want to be more specific about your value proposition, you should know which category your value prop falls under. You should, however, know how to connect the dots between your value prop and increased revenue, decreased costs or mitigated risk. And you should be prepared to connect the dots for your customers on your website.

Second, if you’re deciding between stressing your ‘revenue increasing’ attributes or your ‘cost cutting’ features, go with the former. Always prioritize talking about how you increase customers’ revenue, not how you decrease costs or mitigate risk, if you have the choice between the two.

Now: exceptions to the rule. In an economic downturn, companies might care more about decreasing costs. But even then, increasing revenue is the better message — just that given particularly bad economic conditions, reducing costs can be a more powerful motivator than otherwise.

Also, if risk mitigation is among your value, and a major company has just had to pay a massive fine (or pay their lawyers to attempt to get out of it) for something that you could prevent, well, talking about that is not a bad idea.