Three steps to unique value

- In a world that is overwhelmed with noise our biggest challenge as B2B marketers is to stand out and be different. But it's not just enough to stand out. We have to stand out in a way that matters to buyers. And that's by providing value. And to truly stand out we want to build our message on unique value. Value that only we can deliver, not our competitors. To do this, we much go through a three-step process that starts with features and capabilities, moves to benefits and ends with unique value. These three steps are inventory, translate, and filter. Let's take a look at each of them. Step one, we start with an inventory of our key features and capabilities. Features are tangible specific things we can point to in our product or service. The car has front side airbags, it has antilock brakes, it has collision avoidance sensors and alarms. Capabilities can be slightly higher level than features. For example, self driving on the freeway would be a capability that would be delivered by a whole slew of features. Step two, once we have our inventory of features and capabilities we begin to translate them into benefits that the features can deliver. All of our safety features in our car might deliver a benefit of the safest highway driving experience, or something like that. Step three, we now have a set of business benefits for our product or service, and we have to filter them to create value statements. We use two filters. First we ask the key question, does the customer care? Care meaning that they will exchange their time or money to get this benefit. Once we pass through that filter we can then ask if the competitor can deliver this value. Our goal of this filtering is to find three to five unique value statements. Business benefits that customers care about and that we deliver better than our competition. When we successfully find these value statements we're well on our way to truly differentiated messaging. Then we must support each of these unique value statements with proof points and back them up with our capabilities and features. Remember, customers buy value. They don't buy features and capabilities. And some benefits, they just might not care about. Customers are the judge and jury of value in the marketplace. So we complete our case all we want, but if the customer doesn't value it we lose. No matter how innovative, how cool, or how unique our features are. Translating our features and capabilities into value statements that the customer will buy is by far the most important step in building successful B2B messaging and positioning.