The Value Story Builder
Develop a Value-adding framework, online and fast
WHAT THIS TOOL DOES
Helps you build perceived value into your brand so you don’t have to keep accepting lower prices.
HOW YOU CAN BENEFIT FROM IT
- Provides a researched list of thirty-three issues people care about that you can use as value-based pricing opportunities.
- Helps you think about what really matters to your clients. Then links your value-based pricing solutions to the emotional benefits you wish to associate with your brand.
- Develop value-based pricing messages using a structured approach inspired by brand persuasion specialists.
- Helps link each of your value-based pricing ideas to one or more client segments.
- Provides an easy way to develop your value-based messaging ideas and review them as you put all the bits together.
HAVE YOU EVER STRUGGLED TO GET THE PRICE YOU WANT? OR TO GET THE SALE? HOW ABOUT HOLDING ONTO YOUR EXISTING CLIENT BASE?
- These all rely on a client’s perceptions of the value you offer.
- If you cannot prove value, you will be paid a lower amount. This applies to products, services, and brands.
- But, it’s more than just talking about features and functional benefits.
- Can the client connect with the benefit you’re talking about at an emotional level? Does it matter? Do they even care? Or are you just another supplier that will give them the lowest price?
- If you can get this right, you could get to charge more.
- So, how do you know what to say? And how do you say it?
THE VALUE STORY BUILDER HELPS YOU GROW THE PERCEPTION OF VALUE.
So that you can justify your price or charge more.
This means your brand has an easier time getting and keeping clients.
And can do this with more pricing power.
The Value Story Builder helps you create a string of clues. To show how doing business with your brand reduces various types of risk.
- These clues highlight your client’s concerns about a variety of perceived risks. Then you get to show your solutions to those concerns.
- These may be concerns that they are currently facing that you can address for them. Or, concerns about doing business with your organization, your category, or your industry.
- It takes the concern, which has an emotional basis around perceived loss. Then it helps you show how you lower that risk. It also helps you show the emotional and financial benefits of the solution you provide.
- All in a framework you can transfer to your brand’s communications. Even if it’s a new business proposal.
- So that the trail of clues you leave behind will create a positive emotional connection. So that you can elevate the perceived value of your brand.
This means your brand has an easier time getting and keeping clients. And can do this with more pricing power.
PROVIDES A RESEARCHED LIST OF THIRTY-THREE ISSUES PEOPLE CARE ABOUT THAT YOU CAN USE AS VALUE-BASED PRICING OPPORTUNITIES.
This means you can focus your time on building a comprehensive list of value-based pricing messages that are more relevant, at a deeper level, for faster results.
HELPS YOU THINK ABOUT WHAT REALLY MATTERS TO YOUR CLIENTS. THEN LINKS YOUR VALUE-BASED PRICING SOLUTIONS TO THE EMOTIONAL BENEFITS YOU WISH TO ASSOCIATE WITH YOUR BRAND.
This means an opportunity to build perceived product value, service value, brand value, uniqueness, and pricing power in areas that your competitors may not have considered.
DEVELOP VALUE-BASED PRICING MESSAGES USING A STRUCTURED APPROACH INSPIRED BY BRAND PERSUASION SPECIALISTS.
This means you have less work to do when using the output for building a value-based pricing framework for all your communications.
HELPS LINK EACH OF YOUR VALUE-BASED PRICING IDEAS TO ONE OR MORE CLIENT SEGMENTS.
This means that you have more confidence in targeting the right people with your value-based pricing messages.
A value-based pricing strategy also means you can grow your market by packaging the right benefits each segment desires at different price points.
PROVIDES AN EASY WAY TO DEVELOP YOUR VALUE-BASED MESSAGING IDEAS AND REVIEW THEM AS YOU PUT ALL THE BITS TOGETHER.
This means you can work around your schedule while being reassured that what you are working on makes sense.
Two different approaches help you rank each idea. So you can think about the value of each idea. This means you can start communicating your most powerful value-based ideas first.
NEW BUSINESS PROPOSALS AND PRICE REVIEWS
- Create a structure using value-based pricing to show how you add value in ways that will matter.
- Add in the proof.
- Work on the best messaging to sell it.
SPONSORED ADS
- Focus on topics you know could get a response from your prospective clients.
- Communicate through value-adding solutions. These are developed at an emotional level with value-based pricing in mind.
- Helps you be more relevant so you can get more interest in your ads.
UNPAID POSTS
- Constantly show how you are adding value when prospects and clients read your posts.
- A value-based pricing strategy provides a useful way to have sufficient relevant content ideas.
- Build on the more powerful value adds you might be using in sponsored posts to keep demonstrating value.
VIDEO CONTENT
- Demonstrate how you can address specific concerns to add value.
- Helps give you ideas to be regarded as a solution provider.
- A value-based pricing approach is useful here. It enables you to plan how to build perceived value amongst your followers on an ongoing basis.
- Develop a variety of ideas to create email messaging.
- Allows you to get closer to a sale by showing how you keep adding value. A great way to support a value-based pricing strategy using a drip marketing approach.
- Allows you to have a higher client retention rate by reminding clients of how you keep adding value.
WEBSITE CONTENT
- Address issues of concern that impact on perceived value.
- Go beyond the standard features and functional benefits approach to messaging.
- Useful to develop relevant messages when prospects compare you to competitors on your website.
LIVE STREAMING TOPICS / WEBINARS
- Achieve a higher webinar sign-up rate by being able to make an appeal at an emotional level.
- It allows you to think about a variety of issues so that you can plan responses in advance.
- Create the perception of someone who adds value in a credible way.
WHITEPAPERS
- Show the benefits and rationale for how you could implement a solution.
- Helps you through the thought process of content for a complex document.
- Spend less time to build the perception of value where it matters.
DEFINE THE OPTIONS YOU PREFER BEFORE STARTING
- Add in the name of the product or service for you wish to define a variety of value-adds.
- Other relevant details help you find your information when editing previously submitted data.
CHOOSE FROM A DETAILED LIST OF CONCERNS YOU COULD ADDRESS WITH VALUE-ADDED FEATURES
- Go through the list of what concerns people most. Then choose the concern you wish to address with a value-adding solution.
- These may be concerns they are currently facing that you can address and add value.
- They may be concerns they have about doing business with your organization, your category, or your industry.
EXPLAIN THE DIRECTION YOU WILL BE TAKING
- Show how the concern would apply to your business practices or the challenges the client faces.
- Helps you confirm you understand the challenge fully.
- Helps to show empathy when creating your messaging.
EXPLAIN THE SOLUTION YOU COULD APPLY
- What form would your solution take?
- Makes you consider how to connect the challenge with your proposed solution.
- Use this to structure the wording you will use to explain the value your solution provides.
FOCUS ON THE CORE OF YOUR SOLUTION
- Summarize your solution in simple terms.
- This is important when developing headlines that attract attention.
- As Leonardo Da Vinci said, “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
BACK UP YOUR CLAIMS TO GROW YOUR CREDIBILITY
- Show the aspects of your business that will add value.
- There may be more than one reason. It may even be a process.
- You are providing “proof points” to show the basis for value-creation.
CHOOSE THE RANGE OF EMOTIONS YOU WOULD WANT TO INSPIRE
- An emotional benefit outweighs a functional benefit.
- This is essential when it comes to being seen as being different from competitors.
- Linking an emotional outcome to an offer in your messaging can make it easier to sell.
PRODUCTS OR SERVICES THAT COULD ADDRESS THIS SPECIFIC CLIENT CONCERN TO ADD VALUE
- Associate the client’s concern with the products or services that could assist with the value-adding solution.
- Useful when filtering through the final output to associate specific concerns and value adds with specific products or services. Makes it easier to develop a product or service-specific communication.
- Also useful when developing portfolio strategies to show how your products and services can be used synergistically to add value. This is to provide a unique solution that your competitors may not be able to offer.
CLIENT SEGMENTS LIKELY TO BENEFIT FROM THIS VALUE-ADD
- Associate the concern with client segments that would benefit from the value-adding solution.
- Useful when filtering through the final output to associate specific concerns and value adds with specific client segments. Makes it easier to develop segment-based communications with associated value-added solutions.
- Also useful when developing a bundle of value-based offerings at different price points. This would assist in identifying client segments that may be interested in specific bundles.
RATE THE APPEAL OF THE VALUE-ADD YOU ARE PROPOSING
- You will come up with a variety of ideas. Some will be better than others. Some will have more appeal than others.
- You will probably have an idea of what’s great and what’s not as good.
- You can rank opportunities so you know what to focus on first.
KEEP TRACK OF THE VALUE-ADDED
- Some value-adding ideas can be linked to a number. But, you may not be too sure of your accuracy.
- There’s space to capture your minimum, most likely and maximum value estimates for each value-adding solution.
- Each of the minimum, most likely and maximum value estimates will be added up in case you wish to create an overall total.
CHOOSE THE COMMUNICATIONS CHANNELS YOU WILL USE
- Check off the channels you are using to communicate this.
- This helps identify the messaging in place.
- It also helps you identify gaps you need to work on.
SAVE YOUR WORK
- Save your draft in case you need to do this over more than one session.
- Depending on how you work, this can help you record your high-level ideas first, and then fill in the detail later.
VIEW YOUR RESULTS INSTANTLY
- Once you have submitted your input, you can view your thinking before exporting the data.
- This helps you identify where to do edits before you hit the Export button.
EXPORT YOUR RESULTS
- Export your result so you can view it and share it.
- Exports into CSV format that’s readable in a variety of spreadsheet apps.
- If you need to add in more information after exporting, you can easily do so as long as you still have access.
- We have worked on over 70 global and local B2C and B2B brands over a period of over 20 years. Clients have included Fortune 500 companies across a variety of industries.
- Areas of expertise include communications strategy, brand strategy, research, and analytics. We have written strategies or have been consulted to understand how a client’s communications strategy might benefit from a change in direction to support a specific pricing strategy.
- This experience has been invaluable in terms of understanding what is likely to work. Equally importantly, it has helped us identify what is likely to fail.
- When consulting with them in the areas of brand development, sales development, and loyalty development, perceived value versus price was always an issue. We had to find ways to show how our clients’ value-added solutions exceeded the price they were charging.
- We researched the topic and combined it with our own experience to define 33 concerns that people typically have. These may be concerns that clients are currently facing where your solution can add value. Alternatively, they may be concerns clients have about doing business with your organization, your category, or your industry. In this case, you can show how you add value by managing these concerns.
- Each of the 33 areas where you could build value includes 4 examples. That will help you get started to customize this for your own situation.
- Then we take you through a process of a few questions for each value-building opportunity. Designed by a strategist, it assists you to think through how value is created in ways that matter to clients. There are also checklists included making this process faster and more comprehensive.
WILL THIS DO MY ENTIRE JOB FOR ME?
No. You still need to customize your thinking for your specific situation.
But, it does do a lot of the heavy lifting for you to make this customization process easier.
IS THIS APPROACH REALISTIC?
After developing communications strategies for over 20 years, we wish we could have had this tool at the outset to show how we could add value. Several insights were developed over this period:
- A good framework is essential to develop many ideas and do it faster.
- Most of our clients found it easy to customize for their situation. But they needed a practical process to work within areas where they lacked expertise.
There are over 120 examples to draw inspiration from. Each example was drawn from experience when consulting with our clients (You can see a list of a few of the industries we have consulted to over the last 20 years at the bottom of the page.)
IS THE LIST OF CONCERNS COMPREHENSIVE?
Much effort has gone into developing this list.
Anything can be improved upon over time. But we are certain that this will give you ideas for many opportunities to show you can add value.
The Value Story Builder shares a common thinking platform with The Brand Trust Builder. This is because adding value and building trust are related.
WHAT DO I DO WITH THE RESULTS ONCE I HAVE THEM?
We are strong believers in executing an idea.
Until an idea is executed, it remains just that – an idea.
To this end, we have created a framework containing the essentials we know you need to build a strong case.
You can then export this information and either work with it yourself, or pass it onto the people in your team. We know that they would appreciate the information rather than spend hours trying to develop it.
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