11 Tips to Building an Unbeatable Market Proposition

Editor's Note: These 11 tips on the market proposition topic are an extract from one of eight topics in Equiteq's highly popular guide 100 Tips for Consulting Firms to Accelerate Value and Profit Growth. The other 89 tips cover seven other important topics for RainToday.com readers, including sales and marketing process, client relationships, and customer loyalty. Click here to download the complete guide.

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The service you offer to your clients should provide them with overwhelmingly more perceived value than the fees they pay. Furthermore, their perception of your value needs to be greater than they see in your competitors. If that equation does not work and perceived value is lower than the cost, then your services will be difficult and costly to sell. Conversely, if your service is high value and unique, then clients will rush to buy it.

While this is not a difficult concept to understand, the implications are profound if it's not paramount in the development of your firm. Too few professional services firms realize the extent to which a poorly crafted market proposition damages sales and the ability to scale a firm. A weak proposition that's indistinguishable from other providers is to sales like pushing string uphill. It makes it hard to get sales meetings, increases sales cycles, reduces conversion rates, pushes up client acquisition costs, reduces fee rates, and makes it hard to sell more services to existing clients. It does more damage to value creation in a firm than almost anything else on your agenda. So, if your sales performance is not where you want it to be, make this your number one priority.