I left you on a bit of a cliffhanger last email – sorry – just not enough room in a single email!

So we'd got up to rating the different areas of value we provide to clients and how different they were to what our competitors offered. All based on feedback from clients and our own assessment of our strengths and weaknesses.

And I said there was one key step you need to do before deciding on your value proposition.

And that's to take a step back from all this data on the value you currently provide and how different you currently are…

…and think about what you want it to be.

And not only is this a crucial step, it's immensely liberating.

(Thanks again to Sean D'Souza's book The Brain Audit for this idea).

You don't have to worry if you're not quite bringing enough value or if you're different enough and how you'll somehow wordsmith that into sounding great.

You decide the value you want to deliver and the difference you want to have.

Now obviously you have to ground it in reality. Build it on the strengths you've already identified rather than conjuring it out of thin air.

But just look at where you are and think about where you could be in 3 months or 6 months time if you really put your mind to it.

And then make that your value proposition. Something ambitious and truly valuable.

To give you a practical example, I've been thinking about the value proposition for my website in the last week or so. It's essentially the same process.

What I've heard time and time again from clients is that the blog posts and tutorials on my site are really practical and more in-depth than they've seen elsewhere.

And they're more “real world” – they're things a typical consultant who's not focused 100% on marketing can actually do.

They also like the human side of me being honest with what's worked and not worked for me – there's a degree of trust there because I don't pretend to be some all-knowing guru.

And when I benchmarked my site against other sites that cover marketing for consultants what I saw was that a lot of my articles (in particular the “ultimate guides” and my value-based marketing guide) were indeed much more in-depth and comprehensive that the shorter blog posts I see on other sites.

And those posts are where the majority of my website traffic comes from too.

So I found myself thinking “Could my site realistically become the ‘go to' reference site for marketing for consultants (or coaches or trainers)?”.

The place you would go to for in-depth, practical guides to the major topics.

And the conclusion I came to was that yes, it could.

It's ambitious.

I'd have a lot of work to do to go from a handful of really in-depth articles on topics I just happened to get inspired to write about to much more comprehensive coverage.

But I could get there over time.

Going back to our two key value proposition criteria, it would be immensely valuable to potential clients and it would be a huge differentiator.

The value would stand out a mile. No need for clever wordsmithing.

Most likely it would do very well in Google search too.

Perhaps most important of all, the more I thought about it, the more excited I got about the idea.

It was something that would really be valued. And something I could get my teeth into.

In addition to all the logical stuff about value propositions, that's something you want too.

Something that gets you excited.

I don't think you can get that from just playing around and evaluating your existing strengths and offers.

I think you need to come up with something that's a stretch for you that you can work towards.

Then you have a value proposition that's both powerful in terms of its ability to attract clients and in its ability to motivate you to action.

Does your value proposition do that yet?