How do you know if you need to redesign your offer?

A new client once asked me to tag along with him at an investor conference where he was going to pitch his business. After 45 minutes or so of running through his pitch deck, he finally asked this audience of savvy investors if they had any questions. 

Immediately a hand shot up.

“What does your company do?”

Here, the leader of the company, standing before 60-80 prospective investors, having all the time in the world, failed to clearly communicate his company’s value to them.

When your prospects come to your website, they’re asking that same question. What do you do? But they won’t stay nearly as long to wait for a clear answer. And they won’t shoot their hand up on your contact page to ask, either. They’ll just leave. Likely forever.

This isn’t an isolated problem. The internet is full of corporate websites full of good intentions, but lacking in clarity. 

Your website needs to deliver a clear, compelling offer to your prospects in order to attract the right customers — and repel the wrong ones. 

The key is to design an offer and describe it in such a way that the right clients can’t help but click the “Contact Us” button, and the wrong clients will walk away already knowing you’re not the choice for them. 

But this kind of compelling clarity is often hard to come by—for three reasons:

1. You have a lot you want to tell them… but if you say too much, your prospect shuts down from the cognitive overload and walks away before exploring further. No one wants to work that hard to understand if a company can help them. Providing clarity is not their job. It’s yours. And an overabundance of information buries clarity.
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2. You often know much more about your offering than the current pressing problem your prospects are facing… so you talk more about yourselves than about them. But, at best, they are mildly interested in you. They’re more interested in themselves — how you can help them. Far too few value statements and websites demonstrate empathy for the client’s challenge, but that’s exactly what the client is looking for. 
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3. You’re not even clear yourself on what the lead value offer is… you do so many things so well that it may be hard to pick your strongest value. But as one marketing pundit once said, it’s better to narrow your market to broaden your appeal. The same is true with your offer. It’s better to focus your message and give it wings to fly, rather than to spray a plethora of options and pray it will land. 

So… how do you know if your offer needs to be redesigned? 

Here’s a few questions to ask yourself to see if your offer is meeting its mark: 

• Do you stumble or spend a lot of words describing how your company can help a prospect with a specific problem or reach a specific goal? 
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• If you have more than one sales rep, ask them (separately) to sell you on the value offer. If they stumble or their answers are not consistent, you have either a training problem or an offer problem.
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• Ask your prospect during a call, “Based on what you know about us today, what do you see as the primary value we might bring to you?” Does their answer fit with the value you want to convey?
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• Are your sales cycle times inordinately long? It may be that qualified prospects don’t yet have a clear compelling value to move them to action, or your pipeline has too many prospects that are not value-qualified, wasting your sales team’s time. They might not know what you are, and enter into a sales discussion and realize you aren’t a good fit – but it may take a LONG time to get there.
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• If you're serving more than one market, do you have a specific value proposition for each market? Or do you have a broad value proposition that you’ve had to water down to make it work across diverse needs? It’s okay to have a broad market proposition where the needs across different industries are identical, but that is more the exception rather than the rule.

If you found those questions to be challenging, you won’t want to waste another minute further confusing your prospects and losing sales. It’s time to redesign your offer and you can use our offer design roadmap as a guide:

1. Identify your ideal market. These are the clients to whom your value can bring the most economic benefit. If there isn’t an economic benefit for them, they’re not going to be willing to pay for your product or service, so your compelling offer needs to address the economic value they will receive for implementing your product or service, whether they stand to make money or to save on current or future costs.
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2. Understand your customer. Don’t just look at firmographic information such as company size, industry, or location. Instead, you need to build a customer profile around what drives them, and understand who benefits the most from the value you are going to bring. This means drilling down to the psychographic profile of the individual role in the company (IT Manager, Sales VP, HR Director, etc.) and really seeking to understand what makes them tick and what frustrating problem they are dealing with that you can help solve. This may mean that you need to step back and engage in a lot of discovery questions within your market, which can take time. 
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   And if you’re engaged in a complex or enterprise sale where there are multiple buyers and/or a larger price point or more complex offering, it’s imperative that you look through the lens of each of the different types of mobilizers and what your offer means for them. In fact, click on over to this article to see if your current offer has value for the three different types of mobilizers involved in a complex sale. 
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3. Craft a compelling offer promise. This isn’t a time-limited discount or BOGO incentive; this is an around-the-clock promise about the value you pledge to bring to a client. What bold promise might you make in order to stand out from the noise and make your offer distinct from the competition? If you struggle to come up with this, you may need to take a step back and reframe your company’s brand promise, and we talk you through why that’s so important here.
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4. Create credibility. Your prospects aren’t going to take your word for the value that you bring; you’ve got to prove it. Start with identifying the most likely and most important sales objections you might expect. Getting input from a skeptic mobilizer type can really help here. Then identify and develop your credibility proofs to counter those potential objections before they even come up. These could be quotes, testimonials, ROI studies… anything that demonstrates that someone else has selected your offer and that it has delivered on its promise. 
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5. Communicate your offer promise on your website. Your website needs to be your home base for your value proposition. If your offer promise isn’t front and center on your site, there’s no reason to even send prospective clients there. Buyers today start on your website, and if you don’t communicate a clear, compelling offer on your website in the right words and with a design that supports that value through ease of use and call to action, you may lose the trust of your prospect. Lose trust, and there’s no way they will take that all-important next step of reaching out to you.

Jump back on your website again. Forget everything you know about your company. Even that  you work there.

Looking at it from a fresh lens, would you wonder, What do they do? 

If so, you know what to do. 

‍If you want our help with offer design, set up a free offer design review with us today. We’ll review your messaging to ensure your offer is clear, compelling, and effective, then we’ll share our results with you, including any areas for improvement. You’ll be able to take action right away — whether you choose to work with us or not.