A one paragraph description of what the company provides to address and resolve the Business Problem. It encompasses not only the core product or service but also the associated processes, support, and benefits that work together to deliver a measurable and meaningful outcome for the customer. A well-defined solution transforms complex challenges into manageable, actionable steps, ensuring that customers experience tangible improvements in their daily lives. By integrating expert guidance, tailored features, and ongoing support, a solution ultimately empowers customers to achieve their desired results with confidence and efficiency.
Core Value Propositions
The three to five unique and compelling benefits that define how our solution addresses the business problem. They highlight why it stands out from other options in the market by addressing specific pain points in a way that’s more relevant, credible, and differentiated from competitive offerings. These value propositions guide marketing messages, product development, and overarching strategic positioning.
Core Value Propositions should be one to two sentences that provide a clear statement of the unique value or benefit that the solution delivers to customers. It should clarify the aspects of the business problem that you are solving, why customers should choose your solution over alternatives and any commitments you are making to customer about how you’ll deliver that solution. (The last point is technically a different thing – Brand Promise – but fewer strategy pieces are better and it’s something you can readily articulate here.)
Core Value Propositions are used in marketing, sales pitches, and product strategy to ensure the company’s messaging is compelling and consistent about the benefits it offers. A well-defined value proposition should be a filter on the right customers – those who need what you excel at delivering. Internally, it focuses the team on meeting that promise: the product and support teams use it as a benchmark for where to excel ensuring that we’re delivering the value we set out to deliver. It also helps disqualify opportunities that don’t align with your strengths. In short, it’s central to positioning in the market and guiding customer-facing decisions.
To start this scope can be limited to the Ideal Customer Profile but, as much as possible, we recommend thinking in a longer term framing for Core Value Propositions. Ideally these are differentiated items you can pursue on the scale of years.
Core Competitive Differentiation
The three to five things that define why the company or offering is unique in the market and superior to alternatives. It highlights the key differentiators that our customers care about. This should help prospects understand the unique value of the solution and why to choose it over competitors.
Competitive differentiation is all about what makes this company stand out from the crowd. The thing that makes it special, unique, better and more effectively solves the business problem at hand. Maybe it’s technology, amazing customer support, the fact that you focus on a super specific niche, or just a really strong brand that people love. The key thing: a buyer has to care about it. Differentiation is easy – lots of things make your company different. Competitive differentiation is the set of things that are different and unique about you the buyer cares about. In a world of same differentiation is how you get people to choose you, stick with you, and, ideally, pay more for your solution.
Note: Core Competitive Differentiation is intended to be high level and relatively timeless. The goal is to understand a few, simple, compelling items that we can build around on a long term basis. In our GTM Strategy we’ll go much deeper on each point here to define why it matters to customers and how it compares to specific competitors.
Development Process:
Launch: Communicate it on your website, sales decks, and internal playbooks. Train the sales, customer success and product team on it to ensure it’s consistently the focus on what we’re delivering.
Business Problem Definition: A clear view of your solution starts with clear understanding of the main problems your target customers face and the criteria they consider when choosing a solution.
Draft Solutions Statement: Define a couple of options for the Solution paragraph in high level bullet point format. Keep it simple and high-level. LLMs can be profoundly helpful in this process. Focus in on the solutions you think are unique and highly compelling in the market
Competitive Differentiators: Analyze your offering versus competitors to pinpoint where you outperform. Ask: “What do we do better or differently that matters to the customer?” This could be certain features, cost savings, speed, quality of support, etc.
Note: We’ll dive more deeply into competitors in building out our GTM Framework. Here we’re really looking at the high level setup of the market and big themes of competitive differentiation we want to define for our solution.
Draft Core Value Proposition: Formulate a one to two sentence bullet list of the key things your solution does that meet the customer’s need in a unique and compelling way. The more specific and tangible you can be (e.g. “Automate your billing process in one click, saving 10+ hours a week”) the more likely your teams are to be able to deliver on the value proposition.
Sanity Test: The key in a good value proposition: it most be compelling to your customer, specifically those current in your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). “Compelling” doesn’t mean “oh, that’s cool.” Compelling means, “I need to buy that today.”
Test and Refine: Validate the value proposition with feedback from friendly customers and advisors with a heavy weighting to customers. The key thing your testing here is “if we delivered this you’d be delighted to pay money for it on an ongoing basis.”