A side effect of being in business is that we have to sell our services or products, and let’s face it, not many of us like feeling salesy. The most painless way of selling is by being clear about the value that your service/product will deliver. By successfully describing that value you should remove most of the common objections people give you for not making a positive buying decision.
The good news is that very few businesses focus their marketing material on the value they deliver so this makes it easier for your value based marketing to stand out; the bad news is that it can be a bit tricky to articulate the value. This is usually because we seem to naturally default to talking about the features of our service/product rather than the value. It’s easy to talk about the features as we know them inside and out but we have to think to express the value.
The best way to understand the value we deliver is to put yourself in the shoes of your ideal client and ask yourself a few key questions:
What pain does my service/product take away? Or what advantage does it provide?
What is the transformation that it enables?
Think of it this way…people want to buy the destination not the plane. This means that they want to buy the end result that your product or service delivers rather than the way it achieves that. For example if you provide social media training you need to focus on the end value your ideal clients will get from attending your course (more sales, increased brand awareness, increased website traffic and so on) and not the actual course content.
I keep the 80/20 rule in mind when I’m writing my marketing…80% on the transformation (the value I deliver) and 20% on the how I deliver it (broadly speaking this is the features).
Your challenge this week is to write out the value you deliver to your clients. The better you do this the more clients you will attract and the less salesy you’ll need to be!