B2B Marketing: You don’t have to be CEO to move the needle with a value proposition

“Make sure we’re not building our dreams, make sure we’re building the customer’s dream.” – Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS.

Our team was conducting a product planning session with our CEO, Flint, and he dropped the above quote on us. So simple, yet so profound. (And if you haven’t met Flint, this is pretty much how he speaks – with many eminently Tweetable sound bytes).

Of course, living up to the above challenge is easier said than done. How do you tie into what your customer really wants? Value proposition.

However, if you’re like me, that answer presents another question – “I’m not the CEO of our company, our value proposition is out of my control. What can I do?” After all, while we were conducting this product planning session, I was well aware that I can’t convince Flint to change the value prop for all of MECLABS (nor should I).

In this case, you need to focus on your control points while tapping into your company’s overall value proposition. Enter, the derivative value proposition.

Flint covered this very topic in his keynote – “Do You Have the Right Value Proposition? How to discover your true value proposition and leverage its full potential in any B2B market” – at the East Coast leg of MarketingSherpa B2B Summit 2011. He lightly touches on derivative value proposition in this keynote excerpt edited together by our A/V Specialist, Luke Thorpe…

–

–

I asked Flint to elaborate further on derivative value propositions, and here’s what he had to say…

“The average marketer hears the concept ‘value proposition’ used over and over again by conference speakers, theorists, and they read it in books. Very few fully understand it and most of them can’t really impact it at the corporate level because they don’t have enough authority.

“But, there is a way that the average marketer can influence something called the derivative value proposition. It puts control back in your hands, and allows you to make a difference, even if you’re not making the top decisions in the C-suite. To do this you need to understand the difference between a core value proposition, a process-level value proposition, and a product-level value proposition.”

To learn more about derivative value propositions, you can attend Flint’s keynote session at the West Coast swing of B2B Summit 2011 in San Francisco, October 24-25.

–

Related Resources:

Optimize your marketing funnel by mapping what works at B2B Summit – San Francisco, October 24-25

B2B Summit 2011: 5 takeaways on social media, lead generation, building a customer-centric approach, and more

B2B Marketing: Value proposition discussion with Dr. Flint McGlaughlin

Converting PPC Traffic: How clarifying value generated 99.4% more conversions on a PPC landing page