• Product? Check!
• Pricing? Check!
• Placement? Check!
• Positioning? Check!
• Value Prop?

You have something you’re offering—a product, service or combination—and you’ve identified your ideal market or markets. But do you know why they should care—why and how they would see the value in your offering?

Whether you’re selling a new type of smart phone, a revolutionary airplane or a powerful new software application, the “tightness” or completeness of your value proposition is the single most important component of go-to-market readiness for you to shape and control.

Yet, how many companies fail to do just that?

By value proposition, I don’t mean just the concept of what you’re offering and to whom, but the carefully chosen words describing that offer as well. These words support your lead generation; advertising and marketing materials and they are the words your sales teams have to understand in order to connect powerfully with their clients and prospects.

Why does this matter so much? It matters because there are just too many words in circulation! As Dawn Hudson, Senior VP of Marketing for Pepsi put it, “The average American receives more than 3,000 marketing messages a day.”

One way or another, marketing messages have unavoidably crept into almost every second of everyone’s day and are part of almost all your activities. Messaging is overwhelming us from every angle in the worlds of business and consumers alike. To top it off, you need to create and deliver your own messages to your markets.

Yes, messaging is everywhere: yours and your competitors.

How will your company’s voice stand out in this overwhelming chorus of messages? Introducing new products and services to new markets can be like jumping on a moving train: it’s hard to do and can result in injury, dismemberment or death—to your bottom line. Racing to keep up with the speed of business, industry change, globalization and unending waves of new technology, companies face an increasingly complex, competitive environment. On today’s fast-paced business railway, a novel idea by itself is not enough to let you board the train. Speed and message execution (getting the structure and nuance of messaging right) are just as important, if not far more so.

Success hinges not only on the inherent quality of the product or service (the so-called “better mousetrap”), but also the ability to move swiftly, integrate resources and execute go-to-market tasks effectively and efficiently with a coherent and compelling message platform. Companies such as Microsoft, GE and IBM can and do allocate massive resources to achieve ever-growing financial and market-share objectives. For younger and smaller companies, the challenges are many times greater and the stakes are much higher as survival often depends on your current marketing and sales programs.

Often, newer companies find that resource constraints—an outright lack of budget or skilled resources in corporate marketing, sales, product management and operations and, most likely, a lack of integration among those areas—hinder their efforts to grow sales and add customers.

The latter challenge, the integration of effort, is where even market leaders stumble, as technology analyst firm Gartner, Inc. noted in their assessment of the state of the high-tech industry just a few years ago: “Despite all the effort IT providers [information technology vendors] dedicate to go-to-market strategies and initiatives, the results often fall short of expectations. In fact, these initiatives often conflict with one another.”

The bottom line for companies selling business products and services is this: create a message platform that effectively communicates your offerings and enables coordinated efforts to reach target markets and achieve revenue and market-share targets.

© 2008 -2010 Jose Palomino – excerpted from Value Prop: Creating Powerful I³ Value Propositions to Enter an Win New Markets, Cody Rock Press, Philadelphia, PA