Own your value

Back when I wrote case studies, I noticed a tendency of some marketing folks to ignore the value their customers actually said they got from the product or think that it was ‘not enough.’ For example, the head of marketing would hear that the product that saves developers 30 minutes per day and an unmeasurable amount of frustration related to one specific type of task. The marketing person would say is that all? or We need to highlight another point here.

Meanwhile, their customer is singing their praises and happily signing renewal contracts and and spending a bunch of time talking about how excited they are to be using the product. Even though the product did only one thing for them.

Are you having trouble owning the value you provide?

Sometimes the value a product provides isn’t sexy. Sometimes a product only provides one value. Assuming that:

  • Customers really care about the one value you provide; and

  • Your product delivers that value better than any of the competitive alternatives,

it doesn’t matter at all that your product delivers just one value and that it isn’t sexy. We’d all like to hear that our product saves every single developer four hours a day, plus makes everyone coffee, but a) I doubt one tool could provide that much time savings, and b) no engineering organization expects to save that much time from one single tool.

When customers tell you the value they get, listen

If your customers are super excited about the value your product provides, listen to them, even if you don’t think that value is very exciting. You don’t have to solve all of a customer’s problems to be of value, you only have to solve one of them.

In fact, positioning is much simplier, and so is communicating your value proposition, if you have only one value you provide. It eliminates confusion, which ultimately increases the likelihood that prospects will convert and that they will get what they expected from the product.

Whatever value you provide, be proud of it. Don’t try to hide the true value you offer because it seems uninteresting or hide it with BS because you think you need 3 different types of value.

Emily Omier