Clarity in communicating how you create value for your ideal customers is vital in attracting the right visitors to your Website and in sales conversations with buyers. Today buyers are close to 80% of the way through a buying process before contacting a salesperson and probably know as much as you do about your competitive product segment and have little time for product salespeople.
If you really want to connect with buyers and differentiate your offerings, then you need to move beyond simple feature/function/benefit messaging models.
Bob Schmonsees Cause-Level-Value model was a revelation when I learned about it 8 years ago and nothing has bettered it since. Once capabilities have been mapped to the causes of buyers' problems, conversation and competitive differentiation become a much simpler task. The book Challenger Customer, is excellent and introduces a similar concept that CEB calls "Commercial Insight", which focuses on identifying the cause of the buyer's problems. This process is not easy and requires focused intellectual effort from a team of subject matter experts but when completed provides a new vocabulary for sales and marketing that will resonate with buyers.
Cause-Level Value Model video
The messaging alignment process creates structured content within the same platform used to deploy the messaging and it starts with the development of a buyer persona that shapes your Value Proposition in a Messaging Alignment workshop.
The outputs of the workshop are;
The process creates reusable content components and information products that drive Website content creation and SEO, as well as form the basis for sales collateral and sales conversations.