Stop Blaming the Value Prop.
Start Fixing the Process.
Not enough marketing leaders realize this: your value proposition usually isn’t the problem — your process for building it is.
Most organizations approach value propositions from the inside out. They begin with what they want to communicate, then wonder why customers don’t connect. The message feels misaligned because it is. And when different teams create their own versions — marketing with a framework, sales with a pitch, leadership with talking points — the result is confusion instead of clarity.
We recently helped a healthcare client break out of that pattern by flipping the process entirely.
We went straight to their customers to understand how they described their problems, priorities, and decision criteria. Not to validate what the company already believed—but to understand what truly mattered in the customer’s world.
A strong value proposition must answer three questions with precision:
Who we are — the credibility, identity, and position in the market
What we do — the core offerings and capabilities
Why it matters — the tangible impact on customer outcomesAnything less produces noise.
The fastest way to kill a value proposition is to let it become copy written by committee. Instead, we distilled the customer insights into a single, coherent narrative — not a stitched-together collection of internal preferences.
The impact was immediate: marketing and sales integrated the new messaging seamlessly. Customers said it finally sounded like the company understood their world. Engagement improved across channels.
The organizations that excel at value propositions don’t start with what they want to say.
They start with what their customers need to hear — and build from there.
