One important thing that I want to note is that the superior value proposition is the tool you can use to increase your business’s potential energy. When I think much deeper about this tool, I can say that this is probably one of the most important tools that can help you build your business. Customer Value Propositions (CVPs) are concise descriptions of how a business will create superior value for its target customers.

When a startup business succeeds in building a superior value proposition, it has a better chance of surviving in the market. Also, it will probably become the market leader in its business field.

Now it’s time to put all the gears in the process to work for your business and increase and transform at the same time your business’s potential energy. The development of a CVP helps force decisions on difficult choices concerning market competition and customer targeting.

Why Do You Need to Build a Superior Value Proposition?

I will continue with my model of explanation with the business potential energy.

The business potential energy is stored in your business, and you can convert it into kinetic energy.

On the other side, the business kinetic energy is the energy that will bring increased profitability for the businesses. I have already explained the ten crucial elements with great business potential energy. I have extracted only one piece of the puzzles that have business potential energy. But what is interesting here are two elements from that list: prices and cash that directly correlate with a superior value proposition.

When you sell your products or services for a higher price that will cover all your costs and bring a higher profit for you, then you will have a better cash flow. Value-based pricing sets prices based on how much customers value a product.

With cash in your hands, you can increase your business potential energy on other business elements as your knowledge, products and services, marketing, sales team, and so on. If you don’t have cash, your business potential energy will be lower. Production costs are often more controllable than the price market provides.

Related: How to Create Your Own Coffee Brand: A Step-by-Step Guide & Increase Your Brand Potential: How to Measure and Strategies

How can you increase your price?

But, you cannot increase your price before you build a superior value proposition about you as an entrepreneur, your business, and your total offer. I will talk about YOU, YOUR BUSINESS, and YOUR PRODUCTS AND SERVICES as elements that can help you build a superior value proposition.

You need to understand that a superior value proposition can help you sell your products for more money without losing your current customers.

The process of increasing your business potential energy is to start to build more and more superior value propositions. Only in such a way will you charge more and more money. If you have more money, you can invest more to improve the business potential of your other business elements.

What is the Superior Value Proposition?

Let’s start with the word superior. Wikipedia defines superior as:

Something which is higher in a hierarchical structure of any kind.

This means that when we talk about superior, we mean something positioned higher in relation to something else.

Superior business means that it has a higher position than its competitors on the market. Superior product or service means that it has a higher position in the market than competitors’ products or services. A superior entrepreneur means having a higher position in the marketplace than competitors’ entrepreneurs.

The superior can be the measure for better quality, better look and feel, better image, better sales team, and so on.

Let’s continue with the second word – the value.

In the Oxford Dictionary:

Value is simply the worth of something in terms of money or other goods that can be exchanged for that something.

It is now much clearer. This value will allow you to sell your products or services for more money. However, if you add the word superior to the word value, the superior subject is the value. Furthermore, there is value for you, your business, and your products and services. It is interesting to note that your entrepreneurial value and your business value can increase the value of your products and services.

Related: How to Add Value to Your Products and Services

Now, what is a superior value?

Superior value is the worth of an entrepreneur, a business, and products and services that can rank higher than the worth of competitors’ entrepreneurs, businesses, and products and services.

For the proposition, I will also use the Oxford Dictionary, where it is defined as:

1. A thing that is proposed, a suggestion.
2. The statement that expresses judgment or an opinion.

As you can see, a superior value is proposed or suggested. Also, there is the judgment or opinion of your current or potential customers about that superior value. The word proposition tells us that it’s all about spreading. It’s not important to have superior value if we cannot spread the word about our superiority. And now:

Superior Value Proposition is sending the message to your audiences that they will recognize you as a business that has a value that is higher than that of your competitors.

Now you know that when you build your superior value, you can spread that value to your current and potential customers. So, you can charge more for your products and services. In such a way, you can make more profit from the whole process.

Steps You Need to Take To Build a Superior Value Proposition

Now is the right time to learn something more about building superior value. As you already know, the superior value will convert your business potential energy stored in your business into something that will bring prosperity on a long road.

But, building superior value increases your business potential energy that will be recognizable to your current and potential customers. Here are three elements that construct this whole process:

People 

You need people who will recognize a superior value. These people must be in your mind constantly when you build your superior value because they are the heart of your customer-centric culture and will reward you for your efforts. Inside this element, we have two different people.

The first is your current customers, because we want to encourage them to repeat business with you and pay you more because of your value. Here, you must create superior customer experiences. This means you create customer-centered organization.

The second persons are your potential customers. These are those who don’t buy from you, but you want to attract them with your superior value.

Customer Value Funnel

To better see how your potential customers are transformed into purchasers, you can create a customer value funnel (or sales funnel).

The customer value funnel is a simple way to understand how your business attracts and guides potential customers through different stages until they become loyal buyers who see great value in the product or service. Think of it like a funnel because many people start at the top, but only some move down each stage toward becoming loyal customers.

Here is a simple explanation of the stages of a funnel:

1. Awareness: This is the top of the funnel where potential customers first learn about your business, product, or service. The goal here is to grab their attention and make them aware that you exist.
2. Interest: Once aware, some people become interested in what you offer. They want to learn more about how your product or service can help solve their problems or meet their needs.
3. Consideration: At this stage, potential customers compare your offering with competitors. They evaluate benefits, prices, and features to decide if your product or service is the right fit.
4. Purchase: This is the stage where interested customers decide to buy from you. Your superior value proposition plays a crucial role here by convincing them that your offering is worth the price.
5. Retention: After purchase, the focus shifts to keeping customers happy and engaged so they continue buying from you and possibly buy more.
6. Advocacy: The final stage is when loyal customers become advocates who recommend your business to others, spreading positive word of mouth and helping attract new customers.

Also, customer journey mapping will help you better understand the path each potential customer must go through in order to become a satisfied customer.

When you understand and optimize each stage of the funnel, you can create superior value propositions that attract the right customers, guide them smoothly through their customer journey, and build lasting relationships.

Improvement

The second element is an improvement. You want to improve all your current values to become superior to your competition. This means that you cannot forget your current values, but it is more important to improve them. Only in such a way you can ensure continuous customer loyalty.

New values

The third element is finding new values that are important for your business, which will attract more attention from your current and potential customers and help you stay with your value-based pricing strategy. Some companies develop a customer value strategy.

Simply, customer value strategy is a strategic roadmap for values that you still don’t have, or you don’t use them as part of your superior value.

I want to tell you that you can implement some standardized steps and do your work, but I can’t. The reality is different. There are steps for implementation, but they are not standardized. One business can quickly build superior value, and another slowly. One will perform four steps. Another will perform six steps. You cannot find a standard. It’s better to follow your business and your customers. Where is your business, and where are your customers? There will need to be your superior values.

Also, effective customer-focused marketing strategies lead to higher customer loyalty and improved customer experiences and satisfaction.

I will present some of the basic steps that you can perform to build your superior value. But this is not a one-time process that you will perform and finish and never repeat. If you want to become number one on the market and always stay in that position, you must repeat the process from time to time to improve your current superior value.

But let’s start!

Step #1: What are the biggest market problems?

You must start with the market problems and ask yourselves the following questions:

• What is the purpose of your business?
• What type of market problems are you solving or want to solve?
• How are you solving or will you solve those problems?

Yes, this step is all about problems in the market where your business operates or where you want to operate.

Your task in this step is to brainstorm all possible problems that exist or can exist on the market. What will people love to see in the problem-solving process? Think about what brings real value to your customers and what doesn’t bring value.

After you finish this step, you will list the possible factors that can bring you superior value. Here are some of the possible factors that you can consider in building a superior value proposition:

1. Quality of the products or services
2. Perceived value
3. A brand that will be superior to the brand of your competitors
4. Experience
5. Customer support
6. Customer experience management is critical to creating loyal customer relationships.
7. Deliverability
8. Warranty
9. Bonuses
10. Payments
11. Business reputation
12. Additional service.

More factors can be used here, but this is only an example and a starting point for your brainstorming process.

One of the mistakes that entrepreneurs usually make is focusing only on the products or services and their quality. But, as you can see, there are ten more things in this example list of fundamental factors that are not the only factors. There can be 20, 30, or 50 factors depending on the business type and market where your business operates.

Another mistake, especially in this step, is focusing only on the values you currently offer to your customers. Brainstorm every possible value that you can offer to your customers. In this step, the influence of each value factor is not important. It is more important to find as many factors as possible, and in the following steps, you will analyze them.

Step 2: What is the Superior Value of Your Competitors

This step will add additional value factors that you didn’t include in your list from the previous step, but your competitors use them.

Sometimes entrepreneurs can go directly to this step. They will copy the proven strategies and tactics that competitors use and improve them. In such a process, they will build a superior value proposition.

But, it is more powerful for the uniqueness of your superior value to brainstorm and include your value factors in the list. If you want to have a superior value that competitors can’t copy, you must perform the first step. Benchmarking best practices from successful companies can enhance customer-centric marketing strategies.

Simple tasks for this step will look like this:

• Find the most important competitors. Focus on the most important competitors that are better than you now, or that are close to you. Focus on competitors that already have superior value.
• Analyze their superior value. Think about what they offer, where they are better than you, and so on.
• Update your list from the previous step. At the end, update your list from previous steps with the factors you discovered through this step.

At the end of this step, you will list all factors that can increase your overall value to the existing and potential customers.

Step 3: Analyze All Factors from the Previous Two Steps

This step is about analyzing the factors you identified in the previous two steps. This analysis will allow you to choose the most important factors to build your superior value. Furthermore, you will see what can be improved, what your current and potential customers want, and how much they want something, what your competitors offer, what you don’t offer that your competitors offer, and so on.

All of these factors you can put in one table that will have columns:

1. Value Factor. These are all previously brainstormed factors that we can use to build our superior value.
2. Influence of the factor on your superior value creation? Simply ask yourself this question: How much influence on your superior value creation can that specific factor have? Make ranges, for example, from 1 to 5 or from 1 to 10.
3. Influence on recognizing. Recognition is the level at which current and potential customers can see the value. Make ranges, for example, from 1 to 5 or from 1 to 10.
4. Do you offer that value? Simply answer with Yes or No.
5. Did your competitor offer that value?
6. What is your current offer about each factor?
7. How can you improve your current offer?

Give the priority of the factors from the second and third. This means that you must choose to implement first the factors that have a higher ranking in the second and third columns.

Step 4: Implement Values

This step is a simple implementation and improvement of all values brainstormed and analyzed in the previous three steps. But again, don’t forget to start with the most important and most valuable factors for your business. Make a plan and start working.

Step 5: Repeat the Whole Process

The beauty of this process is in repeating the whole steps from time to time. This will continuously improve your superior value proposition and customer engagement and give you a competitive advantage.

Now we have implemented the crucial steps in building your superior value. We have the value that you can spread to our current customers and our potential customers.

Improve Marketing Operations – Spreading the Word

This is one of the most critical steps in building a superior value proposition. This is because without spreading the word about your superior value, your efforts to build superior value will be for nothing. You can build superior value, but if your current customers and potential customers don’t know about that, they will not pay you more for your products or services. The same is true for your potential customers who will not come to buy from your business.

Here, our purpose is to find ways to spread out messages for your superior value to your current and potential customers. In such a way, you can make the difference between you and your competitors visible to the market. There are many ways to do this, and there are no limits to your creativity when it comes to spreading the message about your superior value. When you have the superior value, you must use every possible way to spread that message.

Remember, companies that put people first in their decision-making improve customer experiences and drive long-term business growth.

You can read that a value proposition is a written statement about a business’s core values. But, I think that the value proposition is not only written material. This can be audio material or word of mouth. Furthermore, you can spread superior value in the form of video material that will have pictures, written words, and audio words.

As you can see, the most crucial part when it comes to the proposition part of building your superior value proposition is to enhance market performance by developing the following things:

• The content of the messages,
• The form of the messages and
• Distribution channel of the messages.

The Content of Messages

The content of the messages of superior value depends on the form of the messages. If you want to spread the message through some written materials, it must be short, in one to two sentences, where you will communicate the most critical parts of your superior value. As you can see, you want to use personalized marketing based on the stage where your potential customers or customers are.

When I say the most important parts, I don’t think about the most important parts for you, but the most critical parts for your current and potential customers. Because of that, we expressed customer value, not only value.

When you use another format, for example, a YouTube video, you will have 10 minutes to show your superior value to your current and potential customers.

However, something that is most important and you must cover  in your messages is the following:

Problem.

Describe the problems that your customers have. These are the problems you have already defined when building superior value (first and second steps). Furthermore, it is crucial to include problems that have the most considerable influence on your customers. This means that you will talk about the biggest problems that your current and potential customers have. These are the problems that they passionately want to solve.

For example, you can have customer value in services that provide speed, service, selection, solutions, and sociability, which create exceptional value for customers.

Solution.

You will need to say something about your solutions to their problems. You are here to solve their problems. Tell how you can solve their problems or how many times you have solved such a problem.

Customer Value.

This is an essential part of the content of your message. In this part, you must describe the customer value of this solution from the customer’s perspective, not from your perspective.

Think about all three elements and play with the words. Make as many alternatives as possible of your exceptional value propositions. You can use them later in different formats through different media for distribution.

The Form of the Message

When we talk about the form of the messages, my suggestion is to use each possible message that you can use. Don’t limit only to written messages. I also want to note that you can use messages without a form, which is a matter of the subject here. These are messages that are spread from your customers as word-of-mouth messages. You cannot do anything here, but if you have superior value, these messages can become the most powerful and the best spreading method for your superior value. You need to find ways to motivate your customers to become distributors in your campaign about a superior value.

The form of the message you can use can be like this:

Written form.

These are messages that you can use in your marketing materials, like business cards, brochures, flyers, and any printed medium that you use. But, also written form of the messages you can spread with different social media such as Twitter or Facebook.

Audio form of messages.

These are messages that you can record and spread with different distribution media such as the radio, CD, the internet, etc.

Video format.

These are messages that can be recorded and spread as TV ads, YouTube videos, etc.

Distribution Channels

Some of the distribution channels of the messages have already been noted in the previous paragraphs. There are too many possibilities that you must use to spread your message about your superior value.

Distribution channels are all possible means that can distribute your message. You can use the post office to send your letters with written messages, or you can use a phone to call current or potential customers. You can use email to send electronic messages or a blog to write about your superior values.

As you can see, the possibilities are unlimited. Use your creativity and send messages. Let’s see some of the distribution channels that you can use for this purpose:

• You can use traditional marketing tools as a letter, phone, fax, business cards, brochure, flyers, and so on.
• You can use video social media to send your message – YouTube, TikTok, Facebook Video, Instagram… Every day on these different channels, different types of video materials. If the video has value for users of these channels, then it can be distributed to the millions of people. Furthermore, here are social networks as X (previous Twitter) and Facebook, where you can easily distribute every type of message to the millions of people there. Use your business blog and write about your superior value from time to time, or explore different ways to market your business.

Don’t focus only on one distribution channel. When you use different options, your message will reach more potential customers. Also, it is essential to use ordinary, everyday, or informal language on social media channels when you spread your message.

When it comes to message distribution channels, you can define several marketing metrics and measure the impact the messages have on different channels. Using these marketing metrics, you will continuously improve marketing operations.

What Are The Benefits Of Your Efforts?

Let’s break down possible benefits that you can experience from your superior value:

1. Your Superior Value Proposition Will Bring You The Possibility to Increase the Prices

One of the most significant benefits is that you can increase your prices and not lose your current customers because of that. If your current customers believe that your products or services are valuable for the money they will spend on them, this is expected. But you cannot increase your prices from the start by 50% or 100%. This increase will be small, for example, from 5% to 10%.

So, you can increase, not reduce prices, as a bad strategy.

By increasing your prices and without losing current customers, you will have a larger profit margin and larger profit for your company.

Let’s see some examples.

If you currently sell 1,000.00 pieces of your product at a price of $100.00, you will have an income of $100,000.00. If your current profit margin is 10%, then the profit will be $10,000.00.

However, after you get the improvements by creating superior value, you will increase your price by 5%, and now you can sell the products for $105.00. This is a small increase in price, and with the same sales volume, you will have $105,000.00 in income. In such a case, your profit will be $15,000.00. As you can see, you increase your profit by 50% by increasing the prices by only 5%. This is the butterfly effect.

2. With Superior Value, You Will Increase Your Average Sales

A second benefit that you can get from your superior value is that you will increase your average sale from one customer in most cases. Every business needs to have a higher average spend per customer. It means that your customers will spend more money at the same time. They will repeat their purchasing from your business more frequently, and that is the real evidence that you provide real value to them.

Let’s continue with our example. Now, you increase the average sales from one customer by only 5%. Previously, you had 500 customers that spent $200.00 for $100,000.00 income. With a 5% increase in average sales, they will spend $210.00, and your income will be $105,000.00. This will bring you $15,000.00 in profit, a 50% increase in profit with only a 5% increase in the average sales.

But what is essential is that this second benefit is added, or better said, multiplied by previously increasing prices. With this increase, you will sell 1050 pieces of your product with an increased price of $105.00, which means $110,250.00 income. Now, your profit will be $20,250.00.

3. You Will Increase the Number of Potential Customers

The third benefit of building superior value for your business is achieving an increased number of potential customers. More people will hear about your value and will become your potential customers. This, as you already know, will bring higher business potential energy for your business.

Potential customers are customers who can become real customers when they start to purchase from your business. If you have more potential customers, you can expect to increase the number of your current customers who already make purchases from you.

For example, if your conversion rate (according to your sales funnel) from potential to real customers is 10%, and your potential customers are 5000 people, you will have 500 customers for your business. If you have more potential customers, for example, instead of 5000, you will have 5500. With the same conversion rate of 10%, you will have 550 customers. Now, if they spend $220.50 on average (according to previous benefits), your income will be $121,275.00.

But, to get the real benefits of this third benefit, you must convert these potential customers into real customers – buyers. This is the fourth benefit.

4. You Will Increase Your Conversation Rate

The fourth benefit of your superior value is that you will get an increased conversion rate from potential customers into real customers – buyers. Your superior value will convert more potential customers into buyers. The real message that they will receive about your value will build a strong desire to buy into them. Because of that, the probability of their conversion will be much higher.

Let’s continue with an example.

If you reach 1,000.00 potential customers in the analyzed period with a conversion rate of 2%, that will mean an additional 20 customers for your business in that period of time. Let’s say that your superior value improves the number of potential customers by 5% and also improves the conversion rate by 5%. Now, you will have 1,050.00 potential customers with a conversion rate of 2.1%. These are an additional 22 customers in the analyzed period.

But what is essential is that this cycle of adding new customers will increase from period to period. For example, in the next period of time, you will have 24 additional customers and so on. This is the exponential growth of your customer base, and with other benefits, you will get great results for your business.

The numbers in the examples were given only as an example. They can vary, and they are different for all benefits in reality. These are benefits that you can have as some tangible results. However, there are also benefits that you cannot see in money. The most crucial benefit from superior value is increased business potential energy, making all other benefits real.