A powerful value proposition can be the difference between winning a customer and losing them to a competitor and yet, it's one of those things that many teams rush through or treat as an afterthought.

If you've ever watched a promising deal fall apart because a prospect didn't quite "get" what you were offering, you'll know exactly what I mean.

The value proposition is where clarity lives. Get it right, and everything downstream becomes easier for your marketing team, your sellers, and your customers.

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Sales Enablement CollectiveYulia Ogorodnikova

So let's get into it. What makes a strong value proposition, how do you build one, and how do you know if it's actually working?

What is a value proposition?

At its core, a value proposition communicates how your product or service will benefit your customer. It outlines why your product is essential for your target segment, how it solves their pain points, and why it's more desirable than what else is out there.

Research suggests you have somewhere between five and 30 seconds to hold the attention of a visitor to your landing page before they move on. That's a very short window. Which means your value proposition can't afford to be vague, wordy, or generic.

Beyond the landing page, though, an articulated value proposition gives your selling teams a concise, confident way of communicating the product's capabilities in any selling scenario.

Think about it as one of the strongest enablement tools you can give your team. It creates focus. It creates clarity and when sellers are clear on the value they're delivering, their conversations with prospects become a lot more natural and a lot more effective.

How to format a value proposition

There's no single universally accepted format for a value proposition. What works brilliantly for one company might fall completely flat for another. That said, most effective value propositions share a few common structural elements that are worth knowing.

A basic formula that many companies use includes:

  • A headline
  • A sub-headline
  • Key benefits of the product or service
  • An accompanying image

Let's talk about the headline first, because it carries enormous weight.

On average, eight out of 10 people will only read the headline, with just two out of 10 going on to read anything else. That stat alone should tell you how much effort needs to go into getting it right.

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A strong headline needs to be short, concise, and clear enough to make someone want to keep reading.

Once you've earned their attention with the headline, the sub-headline is your opportunity to expand on the benefits. This is where you can go a little deeper and speak more directly to what your product does and why it matters. Use this space wisely.

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Hone in on the features most relevant to your buyer personas, and resist the temptation to say everything at once.

Finally, there's the image. Many people treat this as decoration, but it should be doing real work. The image you choose should reinforce your value proposition, not just make the page look nice.

A picture of real people using and genuinely enjoying your product, for example, will almost always outperform a generic stock photo.

Aesthetics matter, but value matters more.

How to create a value proposition

A strong value proposition is essential for any company and can be achieved by completing four steps:

Research your audience

If you don’t understand what’s motivating your audience, how can you produce a value proposition that’ll resonate with them and convince them to buy your product?

Researching the market will allow you to identify what kind of language is appropriate to include so you can pinpoint your product's USP effectively.

If you have an existing customer base, conduct customer and market research sessions. This will provide you with essential information on how your product is already helping them in their daily lives.

Always ask questions that’ll help you establish:

  • The type of language you should be using - craft your messages with prospective customers in mind, and speak their language. For example, if your target segment is 16-24-year-olds, colloquial language would be justifiable. On the other hand, if you’re creating messaging for middle-aged professionals, this wouldn’t be appropriate.
  • Their problems and pain points - You need to present yourself as the definitive solution to the problem. If a prospect doesn’t consider you to be the best option on the market, they’ll take their custom elsewhere.

In some instances, feedback from your customers may indicate that what you initially considered your main selling point isn’t held in the same esteem among your customers, in which case you need to reposition your product and reevaluate your initial messaging.

Create buyer personas

Teams that segment accounts with clear buyer personas are over three times more likely to say their reps nail prospect prioritization (39 % vs 11.5%), paving the way for more deals.

If you and your teams understand who your customers are and what they want, selling to them becomes more natural and authentic. From an enablement perspective, by creating buyer personas you're giving your teams the confidence and belief they need to have genuine conversations with potential customers.

How to create buyer personas

Your personas have to be built with real information from real people - using your gut instinct won’t do. And remember, creating personas is all about understanding audiences you already know want to buy from you; not people you wish would buy from you.

Buyer personas vs user personas
Understanding the difference between a buyer persona and user persona is essential. To help you on your way, here are our insights on what separates the two
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Buyer personas can be created in four steps:

Step 1: conduct thorough research

Start by sifting through your records to see what kind of information you’ve already got on your customers. It’s unlikely you’ll stumble across everything you need to build a robust persona, but at the very least it’ll give you a jump start.

Some other outlets to gather information include:

  • Adding relevant fields into any forms on your website;
  • Communicate with sales teams - they’re talking to these people day in, day out after all;
  • Introducing useful questions to your customer onboarding process; and/or
  • Interviewing existing customers face-to-face or over-the-phone - this option will usually provide you with the richest information.
If you’re struggling to get people to say ‘yes’ to an interview, start by making it clear it’s not sales-driven, give them flexibility around days and times, and think about adding an incentive.

If you’re picking up insights from several different sources remember to create some sort of forum for it all to be collated - it doesn’t need to be complicated, something as simple as an Excel spreadsheet with clearly defined headings would do.

There isn’t a set number of people you need to speak to. The more the better, but, as a rule, for a persona to be considered credible you should aim for between 5 - 10 matching patterns.

Step 2: understand your aims

The two core areas you should be aiming to understand are:

  1. What problems people are trying to solve, and
  2. What they want to achieve.

This kind of intel is gold dust for your marketing efforts because it enables you to relate to their motivations and tailor-make your proposition to their wants and needs.

As well as 1 and 2 above, though, get around a table at the outset and think about anything specific to your business that would come in handy, the last thing you want is to realize you missed something key later down the line.

Step 3: ask the right questions

There are endless questions you could ask, but here are a few ideas to help you hit various touchpoints and create a holistic picture:

create buyer personas | ask the right questions

Step 4: collate your learnings

By this point, you should have insights coming out of your ears. To turn them into something actionable and meaningful, start by grouping common characteristics - it’s important not to rush this stage or make any hasty generalizations.

Go through everything with a fine-tooth comb and only solidify an assumption if you’ve got enough evidence to go off.

To help you get from A to B, here’s an overview of the types of areas you’ll want your personas to cover:

  • Job title and decision-making authority
  • Gender, age, and geographic location
  • Communication preferences
  • What they’re struggling with
  • Their overarching aims
  • How your product or service helps
  • How you should position your marketing messaging.

One of your buyer personas might look like this:

When you’ve identified your target audience, you need to develop your product messaging and product positioning.

Your positioning statement will be used to communicate your value and highlight the benefits of your product, above those of your competitors.

Be sure to answer key questions, such as:

  • What can you offer your customers?
  • What value do you bring to the table?
  • How will you solve the customer’s pain points?

Complete competitive intelligence

Never assume you’re the market leader.

You need to conduct thorough competitive intelligence to establish what other businesses are doing, and if they’re offering something different, you have to develop your product to surpass the competition.

If a customer has a choice between two competing products doing the same thing, you’re relying on the toss of a coin.

When a differentiating feature genuinely matters, think just-in-time content delivery, companies have cut ramp time by more than 50%, from roughly eight weeks to four, and seen ROI follow suit.

This research is a boost for your sellers as well. If a potential customer were to bring up a competitor in conversation, your sellers wouldn't be caught off guard. This intelligence enables them to pivot to discussing the differentiating features and USPs of your product with full confidence in your product's value compared to your competitors.

Identify the main benefit of your product

Having identified your buyer persona and competitors, you need to establish the main benefit of your product.

In some cases, there may be multiple reasons you think a customer should use your product or service.

For example, Uber acknowledges the frustrations associated with ordering a ‘traditional’ cab, before highlighting why users should use their app instead.

They have three features that could be deemed USPs: a car comes directly to you, your driver knows exactly where to go, and payment is cashless.

However, the collective USP is that commuters can order a cab at the touch of a button - that’s what users are interested in most.

How to test your value proposition

Creating a value proposition is one thing. Knowing whether it actually works is another. Once you've built yours, you need to put it to the test before you bet the farm on it.

Here's a straightforward five-step process for doing that:

  1. Define who you're targeting and what benefits you're bringing them. Be specific here. The clearer you are, the more useful your test results will be.
  2. Build a simple landing page. Keep it focused. The goal is to isolate your value proposition and see how it performs, so don't clutter the page with other messaging.
  3. Set up a cold email or LinkedIn outreach campaign. You want to reach people who have no prior relationship with your brand.
  4. Launch the outreach. Let it run long enough to gather meaningful data.
  5. Evaluate whether the offer resonates or fails. Look at response rates, click-throughs, and conversion. Be honest about what the data is telling you.
A cold outreach campaign is genuinely one of the best tests you can run. If you're able to convert prospects who've never heard of you before, that's a strong signal that your value proposition is doing its job. If the response is flat, you've learned something important, and you can go back and refine before you've wasted significant budget on a message that isn't landing.

A strong value proposition doesn't happen accidentally. It's the result of understanding your audience deeply, knowing your competitive landscape, getting clear on what you uniquely offer, and then communicating all of that in a way that's concise, credible, and human.

For sales enablement professionals, this matters on two levels.

  • On one level, it's about helping the business attract and convert customers.
  • On another level, it's about giving your sellers the tools and clarity they need to have confident, authentic conversations.

When the value proposition is solid, selling becomes less about persuasion and more about connection.

Take the time to build it properly. Research your audience. Create real buyer personas. Know your competitors. Find your core benefit, back it up with data, and then test it rigorously.

That process might take longer than you'd like, but the payoff, in terms of clarity, confidence, and conversion, is absolutely worth it.