By now you should have collected your ideas for an ambitious value proposition that reflects the value you want to offer your clients and you can realistically get to.

Now it's time to refine it and start using it.

The first thing to look at is whether you can strengthen your value proposition by making it a bit more specific.

Do you deliver this value best for a specific group of people? Is there some additional benefit they get from you they don't get from others? Or do you do it in a way that removes a problem they normally have?

For example, if you were a sales trainer and you decide your value proposition was going to be all about helping people get more corporate sales, some of the ways you might strengthen that could be:

• More corporate clients for software startups (if that's who you could focus on)
• More corporate sales without pushy, aggressive sales techniques (if that's what many of your folks find uncomfortable)
• More corporate sales while building visibility and authority (assuming that's valuable to them)
• Double your corporate sales in 30 days (assuming you can do it!)

The more specific your value proposition, the stronger it feels to the people looking for that value.

Next, you're going to turn it into words you can use in different situations, for example:

• On your website home page
• On your “about us” page
• On your Linkedin profile
• In your introduction when you meet people face to face
• The way someone will introduce you to do a presentation

Each of these formats will need a slightly different type of wording.

For your website home page, Peep Laja of ConversionXL (who's done a lot of testing on this) recommends:

• An attention-grabbing headline that explains the value you bring in one sentence
• A sub-headline or 2-3 sentence paragraph that gives more details of who this is for and why this is valuable
• 3 bullet points listing the key benefits or features of your service
• A visual that reinforces your message (e.g. if you do highly engaging strategy workshops – us an image of you facilitating a highly engaged group of people in a workshop)

On your home page, I recommend using wording with the focus on your clients rather than on you. So for our sales trainer, it would be something like “Get more corporate clients without pushy, aggressive sales techniques”. ie it's them who gets the clients.

Whereas on your About page or in a personal introduction you'd word it more to be about you: “I help software startups get more corporate clients without pushy, aggressive sales techniques”. The focus is on you doing the helping.

Once you've got something you can use, test it.

That might be going out into the real world (when we're allowed to again) and seeing how people react.

Or it might be testing two different versions on your home page to see which results in more enquiries (if you get enough traffic for it to be statistically significant of course).

Or you could get feedback from trusted colleagues to see what they think (assuming they know your target clients well enough to reflect them). 

And even the act of saying it out loud gives you clues as to how well it comes across and allows you to improve it.

A brilliant value proposition sets the foundation for all your marketing. And I hope in these last few emails I've given you some useful ideas on how to create yours.