A day with your leadership team to settle what you sell, who you sell it to and why they should move.
A value proposition workshop is a day where the people who run a company sit down together and settle, out loud and in front of each other, what the company is for and who it is for.
Teams arrive expecting a writing exercise and find out within the first hour that it is a set of commercial decisions they have been avoiding. Who are we for. Who are we giving up. What do we say when a buyer asks why them rather than the firm they already use. Those questions have been sitting in the business for years, answered differently by different people depending on who was in front of them, and the day is the first time everyone has to answer them in the same sentence.
That is why it takes a day, and why it needs the people who can decide.
We open with your own customers. Before the session I speak to your recent wins and your recent losses, and the day starts with what those buyers said in their own words rather than what the business believes about itself. That first hour is usually uncomfortable, because the reason people bought is rarely the reason the company thinks.
From there the group works through who the buyer is choosing between, including the choice to carry on as they are, which is the one most teams leave out and the one that beats them most often.
Then we write. Not a slogan, a paragraph that survives being read out to a customer. The test through the afternoon is simple enough that anyone in the group can apply it: could a buyer challenge this line in a meeting, and could you defend it with evidence rather than adjectives.
By the end the group has one version of the proposition and can say it without reading it.
You leave with the proposition itself, written down and agreed by the people who can approve it. You leave with the buyer evidence it was built from, which matters more than it sounds, because six months later somebody will want to reopen the argument and the evidence is what closes it.
You also leave with the version your sales team can say on a call, which is a different sentence from the one that goes on the website, built from the same source.
The people who can decide. Chief executive, whoever owns revenue and whoever owns the product. Marketing belongs in the day and cannot own the outcome alone, because a proposition written by marketing and unowned by the chief executive gets quietly ignored the first time a salesperson is under pressure.
Customers are better interviewed beforehand than sat in the session, since people are more candid one to one than in front of a supplier's leadership team.
A day. Half days produce a nice line and no decision, because the argument that has to happen tends to happen after lunch.
Yes, and I do them. A proposition agreed internally describes what the company believes about itself, which is the thing we are trying to correct.
Ask six people in your business to write it down. If the answers differ, what you have is a document rather than a proposition.
The canvas is a tool we sometimes use inside the day. It organises what you already know. The day is for deciding the things you do not yet agree on.
Good. Disagreement in the session is the point, and it is far cheaper than disagreement in front of a buyer.
Yes. One buyer type per session works better than trying to settle everything at once.
Tell me what you sell and who you are trying to reach, and I will tell you whether a day would help.