Ripe for the Picking: Value Propositions Are Key to Marketing Effectiveness

You cannot harvest fruit from a vine that isn’t producing. This seems so obvious, but it is a fact that is often overlooked by organizations as they strive desperately to deliver growth.

The most important question that marketers ask isn’t “how can we increase our pipeline of leads?” or “how is this campaign performing?”. The better question might be “why do customers value our offering?”.

A foundational element of a marketing strategy is a win/loss analysis. Typically conducted with interviews with those who were given an offer it asks them to describe their decision process. This analysis of the qualitative data can highlight details about the problem the customer/prospect faced, how they found and selected alternatives, and why they choose your offering or not.

Product-led growth companies speak of finding “product-market fit” as a key milestone in their evolution. It describes when a company’s target customers are buying, using, and telling others about the company’s products or services in numbers large enough to sustain the company’s growth and profitability projections.

Achieving this elusive indication of customer value is something that investors are looking at intently and the whole organization is aiming at. Product-market fit is, in some circles, considered the new break-even, where the leadership and investors feel like they have a solid foundation on which to scale.

As no single metric is accepted for product-market fit, some have used things like market share, growth rate, churn rate, or even press mentions as clumsy proxies. Sadly, most of these are output metrics that do not give you any insight as to WHY customers are finding value. Win/loss analysis can supplement some of these other measures of business progress to ensure you understand (and indeed fall in love with) the customer’s problem, not just your solution.

It is only with an understanding of the true value proposition and differentiation of your offering that you can create winning go-to-market motions through advertising, sales outreach, and partner ecosystems. In haste and under pressure for results, sometimes these steps are skipped, and companies rush to invest in promotions and put messaging in the market. It is like trying to pick the grapes before they are ripe or even before the vine has been planted.

For those who fear that what we propose would lead to long market development cycles or wasted time spent on internal wrangling, be assured that the process can move quickly and insights adopted as soon as unearthed in a steady stream of experiments which serve not only to validate learnings, but also generate results. Then you only invest in the things that are performing well and are replicating your success.

With experience across different market types, the CMO Syndicate can help you uncover the insights and create and execute a strategic marketing plan.

About The CMO Syndicate

The CMO Syndicate is a diverse group of world-class Chief Marketing Officers who rapidly solve growth and profit problems for CEOs, VCs, CMOs, and PE firms. As global CMOs from the world’s top companies, The CMO Syndicate is not a traditional marketing consulting agency, and we are not typical marketing or growth consultants. We are growth experts and operators who actually do the work on a part-time or project basis as outsourced fractional and interim CMOs.