What are your customers REALLY buying from you ? I don’t mean the products and services that appear on your invoice to them as line items. I mean, what benefits customers expect when they purchase from you.
The best framework I have seen to answer this question is from the book “Value Proposition Design” by Alex Osterwalder of the Business Model Canvas fame. He uses a model that says value proposition of your products and services lies in the gain they are creating or the pain that they are relieving in the context of customer jobs.
Lets break that down.
You start with what customers are trying to get done, be it professionally or in their personal lives. The idea is that people “hire” products and services to get a job done.
Knowledge workers hire software or AI to build workflows, or to do research. Surgeons hire scalpels, Janitors hire soap and paper towels to do their jobs. You get the idea.
Pains describe the obstacles. Or what annoys your customers whether its before, during and after trying to get a job done. Other ways to think about pain is what is the risk in doing the job badly, or not doing it at all.
Gains are the benefits or the outcomes that your customers are ultimately seeking.
And then once you are done filling the canvas out putting yourself in your customer’s shoes … describe how your products and services create value by either addressing customer pains or creating customer gains.
Mind you, this value is different for different customer segments, or even the same customer when they are put in different contexts.
