Fractional Futures

Defining Your Value Proposition

• Paul Mills • Season 1 • Episode 4

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Fractional Futures is the essential podcast for CEOs, investors, and senior marketing executives looking to unlock the power of fractional marketing leadership.
 
Hosted by Paul Mills, Founder at VCMO, and with special guests, we'll share expert insights, provide actionable strategies and explore real-world success stories to help you leverage fractional marketing leadership for maximum impact.


In this episode…

In this episode, Paul Mills and Dan Gwalter discuss how marketers can articulate their value and set themselves apart as fractional leaders. They explore the importance of defining a unique value proposition and tailoring messages to different audiences. They also highlight common mistakes marketers make when building their value proposition. The conversation emphasizes the need to focus on the emotional benefits and understanding the client's pain points. They provide practical tips and tools for marketers to articulate their value effectively.


Special Guest
Dan Gwalter, Founder No-Nonsense Leadership

Dan has kindly offered a complimentary 30 minute consultation to anyone who wants to know more about his fractional executive coaching service. You can book using this link.
 

 Key Takeaways…

  • Defining a unique value proposition is crucial for marketers to set themselves apart as fractional leaders.
  • Marketers should focus on the emotional benefits they provide and understand their client's pain points.
  • Tailoring messages to different audiences is essential for effective communication.
  • Avoid common mistakes like being too generalist or making it all about yourself.
  • Use tools like Graham Robertson's functional and emotional benefits cheat sheet to articulate value effectively.


 Sound Bites

  • "When you transition out of perm, the biggest mindset shift is you are not an employee."
  • "Start off with a smaller product... that enables you to work with clients, demonstrate credibility and authority in your domain whilst building that all important trust."
  • "Makes yeah, it makes perfect sense. And I think you know when I was transitioning into the fractional CMO role, it was very obvious that I needed that I guess low cost but high value thing diagnostic tool that someone can take part in."


Contact VCMO

Thanks for listening & keep podcasting!

Fractional Marketing Leadership | Marketing Transformed.

SPEAKER_02:

Welcome to Fractional Futures, the essential podcast for CEOs, investors, and senior marketing executives looking to unlock the power of fractional marketing leadership. I'm Paul Mills, your guide on this journey, where me and my special guests uncover how this innovative leadership model is reshaping the business landscape. Whether you're a business leader looking to build a competitive advantage, an investor seeking to enhance the value of your portfolio, or a senior marketing executive considering a fractional career, this podcast is for you. We'll share expert insights, provide actionable strategies, and explore real-world success stories to help you leverage fractional marketing leadership for maximum impact. Tune into Fractional Futures and discover how to revolutionize your business and career. Hello, and welcome to this episode of Fractional Futures, where I'm joined by Dan Gualter, an executive coach and founder of No Nonsense Leadership. Hi Dan, how are you? I'm very well, Paul. Are you ready to do this all over again? I sure am. So in in the last episode, um, we explored what marketers need to do to convert their expertise into engagement to attract high-value clients. And I guess in this episode, I want to chat with you about how marketers need to articulate their value and how to set themselves apart as a fractional leader. So in this episode, we'll be talking about defining your unique value proposition, how to communicate that value, and also look at strategies to tailor your message to different audiences. So, Dan, we probably need to be a little bit careful on this one to not teach marketers how to suck eggs. I guess anyone listening or watching to this will think I don't need to listen to this bullet because I'm a senior marketer, I know everything about value propositions and stuff like that. But it's not the case, is it really? Especially when it's your own business and your own services that you're trying to um articulate. But before we jump in, what what are your general observations on this piece?

SPEAKER_01:

I think, I mean, you're absolutely right, it is a it's a dangerous topic from my perspective, and I I don't wish to disenfranchise an entire an entire genre of uh a fractional consultant by any stretch of imagination. But in terms of what I see, um that transition from employee into business owner, into consultant is uh is a strange one. It doesn't happen instantaneously. You don't wake up one day as a business owner. Um so you tend to find that people drag with them a lot of their a lot of their thinking in terms of how they position themselves. And unfortunately, that tends to mean that they accidentally position themselves more on the employee side of the equation than on the advisory consultant side of the equation. And I guess if you if you recognize that the compounding factor is that you've just become a solopreneur, the clue is in the title. You know, you're one person, you don't have a you don't have a team of people that you can bounce ideas off of or that you can validate your thinking. So it can become a little bit of an echo chamber, if you like, in terms of your ideas and how you position yourself without anybody saying, well, actually that's not really working for the market.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, absolutely. And I I've I think over the last year since the launch of PCMO, I I've easily spoken to over a hundred marketers, either in-house marketers that are looking to come into the fractional um portfolio work staff, or um people who are already operating uh as a fractional CMO. And these are people all across the globe. So I've spoken to people in Australia, America, Europe, Middle East. Um my observation speaking to these individuals is that a very high percentage struggle with articulating their value. Um, some told me, you know, certainly the existing fractional marketers, they've told me it's taken a few years to really refine their USP, their UVP. So that's probably a good point to jump in, really. When it comes to you coaching your client Stan on building their value proposition, what what approach should they take to identify their key benefits? How do they differentiate themselves from competitors? And what common mistakes do you see them doing?

SPEAKER_01:

So I think when I look back at the people that I've worked with and the people that I'm working with right now, there are a couple of sentences that that come up time and time again. Yeah, they they've almost become like go-to. The first is nobody buys Swiss Army knives. And what I mean by that is that a fractional market is not a generalist's market. And you know, we we see this, we see this regularly. Um, people come into the consulting market with a a view that they've got 20 years plus experience, they've done hundreds of different things, and all those things are great. So we're gonna talk about all those things, and unfortunately, nobody listens. Um that's that's the first side of the equation. The other side of the equation, and this should resonate with marketeers more than any other discipline that I work with, is that unfortunately it's not about you, and so it doesn't matter what you're producing, it doesn't matter whether it's content for LinkedIn or a website, or whether it's you're talking to clients in the form of written proposals in the form of nurturing emails. That content has to be 90% about the client. Because if I look back at clients from my own fractional consulting business that I've spoken to retrospectively and said, you know, what was the turning point in the in the journey that that made you want to work with me? The most common response is I felt I'm understood, and I felt that you actually listened to understand what was coming on rather than forming an early opinion and trying to bamboozle with you know all the great things that you've done. So when I coach people now and we start to think about that value proposition, yeah, it's it is really important to understand what you are good at. It's much more important to understand what that looks like to century clients, um, and how you're gonna position that for the century clients. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_02:

It absolutely does. And um there's there's a great tool, uh, and I'm gonna give this guy a plug. There's there's a Graeme Robertson, who's the founder of Beloved Brands, he's got a fantastic tool. He calls it his functional and emotional benefits cheat sheet. And this cheat sheet is literally an A4 bit of paper, and it's got 12 words on it. So for any product, any service, um the value you get from a functional perspective is anything like you know, it makes your life more simple, it saves you money, it drives business results. So around these key words, um, there's some other words that say, well, if if let's say the value you offer is driving better business results, how do you do that? Well, I drive business results by helping you achieve higher profits. So straight away, this cheat sheet helps you isolate what that value is, and you can do exactly the same for the emotional benefits as well. It's very easy to define the tangible benefits, the functional benefits, but it's really hard to define what those emotional benefits are. And I think people forget the emotional side of things.

SPEAKER_01:

I think you know, if we look back at the previous episodes where we talked about ICP and niche, the reason I was so passionate about people gaining a detailed understanding of their ICP is because a lot of that lays on the emotional side of the equation. You know, when we talk about what are your ICP's pain points, I think pain points is quite a vanilla term now. What we really mean is, you know, what is actually keeping them awake at night. Because if you can zone into that, and that becomes part of your value proposition, you know, I solve that problem, then you're always going to attract the right type of client. And I think there are there are probably two models that I've used iteratively with pretty much everybody that I've ever worked with. The first is the the XYZ model. So I help person X achieve Y by doing Z, is a fairly standard model now for articulating what you do without it becoming a monologue. Um that's that's great. But if you wanna if you want to put your own spin on that, if I take a tech, if I take a tech world example, um I was working with a guy literally last week, we were working on his on his value proposition on his headline, on his go to market messaging. His argument was I do the technology because you shouldn't have to. And that that to me actually really stood out as a genuinely clever way of positioning what it is that he brings to the equation. So there's lots of ways that you can spice it up. But the key here is that it has to be about them and the problems that they're facing, and most importantly, how you are going to create that transformation into their world, be it be it physically, um, be it value, be it emotion, you know, those transformation statements are super important.

SPEAKER_02:

So, Dan, um, that probably takes us nicely um onto the next topic of communicating your value. When uh I guess a fractional marketer should find this part of the process pretty straightforward. But um, certainly for in-house CMOs that are thinking about moving into the fractional space, um, they've probably spent quite a lot of their time managing Deagle. They might be great at designing a uh a value proposition statement for their brands, but when it comes to your personal brand, it's a different thing. I guess the analogy is a bit like writing your CV. People struggle to put down their expertise in a concise way. And so I guess it's very similar to crafting your value statement. In terms of how you coach your clients, what are the key components of a value positioning or value proposition statement? And what evidence do you need to back this up?

SPEAKER_01:

It's a great question, and I think you're actually right. I think this doesn't actually only apply to marketers. Um everybody struggles with this. I myself included on my first slide, I really struggled with articulating what my value was. Because it's uh it's a very unactual experience to slung your own thumb, as they say. But the key here is, as we said before, it's it's about leaning into the situation and recognising that the person you're speaking to has a set of problems or a set of pains that you understand. And the chances are you actually understand the problems associated with those pains far better than they do. So the way I the way I think about crafting any form of value proposition statement is to use a framework. Find a framework that that fits the bill. And so, as an example, the PAS model tends to tends to work quite well.

SPEAKER_00:

You know, problem as you say solve. Because first and foremost, you want me to see it and read it.

SPEAKER_01:

We are we are now a a generation, if not an inside society, of skim readers. We make thousands of decisions a day as to whether we're going to emotionally invest in reading a piece of material or not. And the pads framework is your really easy way of making sure that the important bit is at the front. The pain that your your ideal customer is is facing is the it's the call out that gets them involved and gets them reading. So if you go through that framework, then the sold section is really your value proposition. And so traditionally, what would that look like? It would be like if you're one of these with these problems and nothing happens, this will be the end result. As luck would have it, I've got 35 years left of experience solving that problem for organizations such as yours, and these are the outcomes. So this is very easy to see how you can flow A, B, and C through ad string.

SPEAKER_00:

You know, you said that you know what kind of evidence that's the other side of the equation that that battles me.

SPEAKER_01:

Most people I speak to have the same set of concerns when it comes to evidencing their experience. You know, I hear phrases like, well, I can't say that because I was employed at the time. You know, it wasn't my client, I was an employee, and I go, well, this is irrelevant. It it actually doesn't matter whether you're an employee, a subcontractor, a subcontractor. If your skill set has created that sort of transformation for a client, for a customer, for a business, for an individual, then it's valid evidence. And so when we think about social proof, it comes in many, many forms. Some of it's the traditional, you know, I did this and it achieved that. Some of it is case study material, so you know, you tell the story of what was the problem when you first arrived, what did you do, what did it mean. And some of it's testimonial or referral type social proof. I think as a good fractional consultant, you have to call that the library, it covers all of those faces. And what do you think, Paul?

SPEAKER_02:

I I had this problem myself because I had 20 years of you know switching roles in in different companies. Um and when when I decided to launch VCMO, uh, I had to kind of reposition myself and I had to decide from all of that experience, what is it that I did really, really well? And for me personally, the common thread was transformation. So that's really the hook that I use when I go to market. Uh and I guess that kind of um for for those individuals, for those executives, don't have to be marketers, it can be any of the sort of the leadership flavours. For those individuals looking to come into this fractional world, some of them are gonna struggle to decide what that one thing is. And I've spoken to some of these individuals where they say, I can do the marketing bit, but I can also do the CRO bit and I can also do the CPO bit, and I don't know which one to focus on. I'm a bit of a jack of all trades, I can turn my hands to anything and everything. Um, but I I kind of struggle with these people, not on a you know, personal level, but I I struggle because from a marketing perspective, being so broad is kind of you're you're gonna shoot yourself in your foot because you're not gonna be focused on where that value lies. You know, if I was to come to you for coaching, how how would you coach me to say, you know, you need to sort of narrow down and focus on what that you know the most prominent value piece is?

SPEAKER_01:

When we start to look at the from the coaching program perspective, quite early on we talk about sales funnels, we talk about how they actually work. And all sorts of problems arise when you when you go to Mark be incredibly broad. First and foremost, very few people actually enter the software funnel because you're not saying anything that you know person. It's it's never the case that somebody reads one piece of content and it enters into your funnel as a result. They normally read you know four, five, ten, twenty pieces of content before they they find themselves in your sales phone or your pipeline. And because of that, if you are if you are too broad, there's a very strong likelihood that your content's gonna jump around between topics, between perspectives. And you're gonna fail to attract anybody. My way of describing this to people, especially marketeers, is is to think about it as a campaign in its own right. So when we do that that ICP and niche exercise, that's that's part one of the journey. These these are the most likely cannabis in terms of industry role, seniority, growth stage account, budget, etc. Once you've identified that niche, it's really about identifying the pillars within that niche that you are the best of the best of the best, in your opinion. A lot of what I do is that helping people on that journey, right? Because limiting beliefs are huge.

SPEAKER_00:

But take it from me, if you cannot position yourself as the best of the best, then the next person will you lose out as a result.

SPEAKER_01:

So we identify the pillars, um, these three topics that you favor, or areas that you are super interested in, super experienced in. I tend to say people that these are the these are the topics that on Friday night are that you still won't start talking about because it each your thing. If you go that route and you can focus for a three-set period of time on one particular pillar, that is the lead to one ICD B. And at that point, you're only you're gonna attract those people. And if that doesn't work, or if you decide that you burnt that out, or you just get bored of doing that particular one, and it's perfectly acceptable to switch, you have to give it a sensible period of time. And the obvious question is, well, how long is sensible? I would say three months, you know, on one particular pillar, in the same way that a marketeer would say, Well, actually, a marketing campaign has to run for a period of time to prove it's standing, to prove it's actually going to work where it is.

SPEAKER_00:

Is that as similar to your experience, Paul?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, no, absolutely. And um with VCMO, we we have kind of three audiences that we we talk to. We talk to directly to marketers, obviously, for this show here. We speak to investors and we speak to owner managers and CEOs. And and so when when we go to market, our campaigns are very much focused. We know the ICP of those three audiences, and we build our campaigns, I guess, in a some systematic way, to talk to those different audiences. Um, so I I think it's very important really to focus your time on those audiences. I and you know, I I use AI quite a lot to help me build those campaigns. Because what I do is I I take my ICP and I tell Chat GPT what that ICP is, what they look like, who they are, what their pain points are, what you know, what keeps them awake at night, what are their objections to buying my service, what are the motivations to buy, or what's going to change in the big wide world that says all of a sudden I need that service. So anyone really can use AI very easily now to program the ICP, putting those various elements of objections, um, motivations and triggers, and see what the um, you know, see what JackGPD comes out with. And if if you can come out with some outputs that are helpful, that will really help influence the the shape of your campaign, it help you craft the right messages to address certain points that you know resonate with your buyer. And because you've identified who your buyer is, you'll be talking to them in a way that resonates with them. Oh yes, that happened to my business last week. I can see the value you offer here. So, yeah, I I really think there's lots of value in crafting really focused long tail campaigns over you know two or three months.

SPEAKER_01:

You hit a different topic there quite elegantly. I see it happen regularly when we do the ICP exercise, it's that PY then decided the wrong person. If I give an example, technology people that are are in the cost reduction market, believing that their ICP is the CTO or the CEO and oh have to challenge you, it actually isn't. The CEO has a has an interest, obviously, and a responsibility that the charge will come down to the CFO who holds the post strings. And so if you think about that in terms of campaigning, in terms of messaging, in terms of language, the language you would use from the CEO on that sort of campaign would be completely different from the language that you would use from the CFO, even if the campaign is exactly the same. That's why I say you know, that ICP piece is probably the most important thing that you're gonna do, because it plays everything down the street.

SPEAKER_02:

I totally agree. I think there's another layer to this onion that you need to sort of get under or unpeel, is whilst you need that messaging specific for your ICP, you also need to tailor that messaging for different industries that you work with as well. So what what we do with VCMO, we're we're sector agnostic. We we can deliver marketing transformation in any sector, whether it's B2B, B2C, B2B to C. Um, but there are different industry, um there's different industry vernacular used, and you need to, I I guess, be aware of that and use that in your campaigns because you've got to speak to the right person anyway. You've got to speak their industry language and you've got to address their pain points. And so that there's multiple layers that you need to get right, um, which you know that's why marketing is such an art form and a science, because there's a lot of layers that you need to peel and get right to do to deliver effective marketing.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I think I guess this advice is relevant for marketers as it is for any other of the sort of C-suite roles, is that in my experience, if you are completely sector agnostic or industry agnostic, you still want to do your homework before you get into conversations with OC. Because creating that natural conversational flow will require you to have a level of understanding, a level of experience as to what that industry has been through and how it works, where it is. So, as a financial services is an example, a lot of the things that we have to do inside financial services are as a direct result of various regulations that come out over the years. And if you've got natural experience of those happening as they happen, then you've got a much higher likelihood of success in that industry. But you haven't got it and you haven't learned it. You're gonna come on sub pretty quick in terms of the conversations, in terms of how that feels, how credible you actually sound to the client.

SPEAKER_02:

Absolutely. Dan, thank you. Um that's probably a good point to um to close this show. So if you've been listening or or watching this episode, um I hope you found some value from the discussion and take what you've learnt into the next part of your fractional marketing career. In our next episode, um, we'll be discussing how fractional marketers need to build trust to secure and retain long-term clients. So look out for that in about a week's time. Um, Dan, thank you again. Uh, that's been a great, great uh conversation there. Really look forward to accompanying you on the next episode.

SPEAKER_00:

Cheers Paul. I'll speak to you on the next show.

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Paul Mills

Host
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Dan Gwalter

Guest