(80) Three ways how to communicate value to your customers

As a product manager, one of my most engaging and fond activities at work has always been collaborating with the marketing department to craft the right value messaging for our customers. I have written posts on this earlier:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-make-your-marketing-team-love-you-using-value-canvas-sapata/

I have always believed that marketing needs to be involved with product development from the very beginning of the product development efforts. The dangers of not doing that results in this:

If the marketing and sales team is involved late in the cycle, winning message is often different from the value proposition defined during product development. It is plain irresponsible if they were not part of the value-to-customer story that drove the product design process and pricing. Without real information, they sit around a table to brainstorm ideas and develop a value story, which might not match the discussions the innovation team had when it designed the product.

If the marketing and sales team is involved late in the cycle, winning message is often different from the value proposition defined during product development.

Most companies do not pay enough attention to this gap, believing the handoff from R&D to sales and marketing is a standard business process. But in practice, it’s not. It requires special effort. Great new products, even when they are priced right, don’t sell themselves. Marketing needs to promote them, and sales needs to sell them.

Telling a compelling value story is well within every company’s ability and means.

In this post, I want to expand on this topic drawn from some of my own experience and also ideas borrowed from Madhavan Ramanujam’s book, Monetizing Innovation.

Step 1: Develop Crystal Clear Benefit Statements

• A company that excels at value communications articulates its products’ benefits in meaningful terms to customers.
• This is not about describing product features. A feature belongs to the product; a benefit belongs to the customer.
• Value is a measure of the benefit to the customer. Communicate benefits, not features.
• When you create a value message, you should determine the customer purchasing criteria and how your product or service might perform on those criteria compared to existing alternatives.

A feature belongs to the product; a benefit belongs to the customer. Value is a measure of the benefit to the customer. Communicate benefits, not features.

Madhavan in his book proposes matrix of competitive advantages to capture such information in a 2 × 2 matrix also called MOCA.

On the Y-axis , you list the relative importance of your innovation’s benefits to customers.

On the X-axis, you rate your innovation’s performance against the competition — not as you see it, but as your customers see it.

• COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE: The benefits your product delivers that are most important to customers and that competitors can’t match (top right quadrant) are the ones to emphasize in your sales and marketing messages.

The benefits your product delivers that are most important to customers and that competitors can’t match (top right quadrant) are the ones to emphasize in your sales and marketing messages.

• OVER-PERFORMING: For the ones in the lower right quadrant — benefits you are better at delivering than competitors but which are less important to customers — you are trying to convince customers these benefits are more important than they might realize. However, if you can’t prove it, don’t emphasize them in your value communication.
• COMPETITIVE DISADVANTAGE: The factors in the top left quadrant represent your competitive disadvantages, and you should prepare arguments to defend them.

Using this matrix, creating value communications will become more structured. It will also become easier to get all the innovation team members (R&D, product, sales, and marketing) on the same page.

Some more tips in crafting benefit statements:

• When communicating the benefit statements, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking your features are the same thing as the benefits to your customers. They aren’t.
• Customers are hardly interested in how you created your innovation or how much you spent on it. What’s fascinating for you is not necessarily fascinating to your customers. And a message along the lines of “the product is good because it has seven patents” is pretty meaningless as well. Your customers couldn’t care less.
• Passion can get in the way of communicating value. This happens when product and marketing professionals try to jam every feature and benefit statement into marketing and sales communications. Encourage the innovation cross-functional team to practice restraint and communicate only what matters most to customers.

Step 2: Make your benefit statement segment specific

Your customers are different.The same value messages are not likely to work for all of your customer segments. You should tailor your value messages to the needs of each segment.

For example, Marketing software maker Adobe, for example, does a great job of describing the right plan for the right segment using the right value message.

For Adobe’s Individuals segment, the messaging includes “getting entire collection of the creative apps” . For the Business segment, Adobe’s messaging is “simple license management” and “easy deployment”.

Step 3: Measure the impact and refine your value messages

You should check and recheck the viability of your marketing and sales messages. “Specifically, you need to measure customer perceptions of the value you are communicating. You should be prepared to refine your messaging if customers don’t believe the value is clear and compelling. A way to do this is to run a MOCA analysis as described in step 2 on a regular basis. If the messages you are communicating are too far afield from the messages that matter most to customers, you need a new strategy.