The new RocATD ‘Consultant and Coach SIG’ met at ER-Select offices for the first time. The topic for discussion was 'Articulating Our Value Proposition to Our Clients.'

During this session, participants shared current challenges including:

Lack of advertising budget (non-for-profits)

Solo--preneurs emphasized the challenge and opportunity cost of needing to spend time on sales and marketing, while also getting all the work done that we already sold.

Everyone in attendance feels the pain of ‘feast or famine’ levels of work in combination with the need to plan time for sales efforts.

When articulating our value proposition, we need to live in the world of our client. We need to make our offer compelling to the business by articulating it in terms of impact on the business. We used a ‘business wheel’ diagram to help make connections from our work to business goals.

Of course, putting your value proposition in business terms assumes you know the business problem you’re solving. In other words, you might do the process of strategic planning, but the business problem you’re solving is a lack of alignment around business goals which, if remedied, would lead to greater productivity and, hopefully, to higher revenue.

We need to understand what business problem we’re solving, and who in the business feels the pain of that problem. It’s entirely possible that HR or the C-Suite aren’t the ones feeling this pain. We might need to drill down into the organization to find the impact and pain of that problem, but once we do, we can use it to convince the budget holders that the problem is real and is having very real effects on the business.

Here are some useful questions to consider (and to have short, compelling answers to):

• What do you do?
• What business problem do you solve?
• What is the impact of that problem?
• Who is feeling the pain?
• What is your differentiator among the competition?
• What services are you displacing? (In other words, what’s happening today without you help? What is the current negative impact of the pain your client is facing?)

All in all, it was a very successful first meeting! I’m sure I speak for everyone in attendance when I say that we are excited to have many more SIG meetings as good as this first one.

A special ‘Thank you!’ goes out to ER-Select (host) and Michelle Campanella (SIG leader) for making this SIG meeting so successful.