Your Customer Value Proposition

Finding your best value proposition is as vital as your USP (Unique Selling Point) and elevator pitch. It's almost like your elevator pitch I suppose, just longer :)

What does it mean? From Wikipedia it means: "a customer value proposition (CVP) consists of the sum total of benefits which a vendor promises a customer will receive in return for the customer's associated payment (or other value-transfer)."

‍This in turn means you need to sum up all of what you have to offer your client/customer and make buying your product or service more worthwhile and value for money. Think about why you would approach a business in the high street and use them over another business or maybe an online company and measure what your pre-requisites would be to purchase something from them.

These could be for instance - a brokers for insurance. Do they have sufficient staff to answer my queries, do they look attentive when I enter the shop, do they give me eye contact or seem unsure of what they are saying? Do they bamboozle me with jargon? Do they give me alternatives (in this case, different excesses to lower the price). Do I feel satisfied that my query has been answered by the time I leave?

We are all small businesses and there is so much competition out there, we need to get our first and most of the time ONLY impression right. Whilst walking around this week check yourself and see why you continue to go back to shops and offices and understand why these businesses have become your "favourite". Convenience obviously plays a role, but there is the range of products and services, prices and responsiveness that you're measuring without even realising it.

Now that you are thinking like this, look at your own business and see what you offer and if you make it easy to see what your CVP is? If not, what do you need to improve in order to make it clearer?

Once you have established what you need to change, then work out how to change it and trial ways of measuring customer satisfaction from making these changes?

It is vital for all small business to be flexible and move with the times. Make sure you are regularly updating your customer profile. What I mean by this, is you may have a product that you have been selling at a market but a new market has moved into the area and your clientele are now frequenting that market or perhaps they have all moved over to a more convenient method of purchasing your product by going to a Facebook Shop.

By ensuring you update your customer profile you are also opening yourself to better and more up-to-date methods of working and measuring your business. Look to your local training initiatives in your area like your local LEO, who will have new training regimes and talks on changes in purchasing or updates on financial information for your business. Embracing these changes will mean you mean you have more than just your product or services to talk about on your social media platforms which can change up your conversation there also!