Your Employees Have No Clue What Your Company Does

Here’s a test. Ask five to 20 of your employees to explain what your company’s customer value proposition is. How many different answers do you guess you’ll get? Answer: somewhere between five and 20. This is, of course, in addition to the response, “What the heck do you mean by a value proposition?”

This is slightly exaggerated to illustrate a point. But, in the many years with which we have advised on and written about customer-driven strategies, there has been a common pattern: massive inconsistency in people’s ability to clearly articulate their company’s value proposition. To test this in your own organization, do what we do with our own firm and with the firms we advise by asking the questions below to a sample of five to 20 employees. These questions form the core of describing your value to a customer. Whether you call it a value proposition, a brand promise, a mantra, a USP (unique selling proposition), or any other consulting euphemism, guru term, or blogger moniker, the guts of being able to clearly describe what you do boils down to answering these three important questions:

1. What product or service is your company selling?
2. Who is your target customer for this product or service?
3. What makes your offering unique and different?

Sometimes the answers are 180 degrees counter to one another even among people working on the same team. Your employees have no clue what you do, or they have a damn hard time explaining it. Either way, it is a problem.

Not enough value propositions start with authentic meaning and purpose. With purpose comes belief, and with belief comes an easier ability to articulate the customer pitch. In one of my most recent blogs, my partner Mats Lederhausen described the need to begin with a purpose bigger than the product. The goal is not to have employees mindlessly memorize the answers to the questions above like a multiplication table. People need to feel that the customer proposition is true and intuitively believe in it. I remember a meeting in a prior company with my partner Dick Harrington who said, “We are not simply a database of medical data. We are in the business of saving lives; that is our purpose.” It resonated with everyone there and I bet few have forgotten that moment.

With a clear purpose as the starting point, these four points will further clarify your message to customers, align your team’s goals with it, and improve your team’s ability to articulate it.

1. Clarity, consistency, and frequency of the customer message points from the top.
2. Forums for others’ to articulate the value proposition. We have done exercises in which we listen to our own elevator pitch from fellow employees. At times we’ve even video-taped these for learning.
3. Get people from different divisions to go through the exercise of answering the questions described above. Share with the group the biggest disconnects and try to resolve them. Half of the battle is understanding that you have a problem.
4. Make sure the articulation is consistent across all marketing collateral to allow on-going evolution. Whenever the message is edited, apply the change across all channels. Understand which materials customers see most frequently and periodically check consistency across all materials.

Articulating a message that management, employees, and customers all understand is one of the most critical priorities for any effective organization, from an entrepreneurial upstart to a Fortune 500 company. The value proposition is the connection between product development and selling. If your own people do not believe in it and cannot consistently articulate it, what are the chances that customers will get it?