#58 – Unpacking the Power of Value Propositions (Part 1)

I remember prior to starting invesba, I was working for a consulting company out of Chicago and we did E Commerce implementation. We did them for a specific platform. Back then it was called Sterling Commerce. Initially it was Convergence Sterling Commerce. And they got acquired. We were one of many other companies that implementation service. There was nothing unique about us. My name is Kalislade and I love to talk about conversion rate optimization.

I'm Simba and I love asking questions about conversion optimization.

This is CRO Live hour, a show all about a B testing, experimentation and conversion rate optimization.

Each episode, Khaled amazes me, answering some of the difficult CRO questions, dropping insights like, it's no big deal.

Well, pretty much every episode will take on a new set of conversion rate optimization questions that are not easy. We will talk strategies, we'll talk process, and we will talk tactics. Simba will be bringing all the questions.

Oh, man, I bring tough questions like, do a B testing results fade over time? How do you go from low to high, testing velocity? How do you measure the success of a conversion funnel? And how do you align your CRO program with a growth strategy? Yeah, Khalid, these are very, very tough questions.

Yes, they are. But we always answer them here. And if you love conversion optimization like we do, and certainly like Simba does, subscribe to the CRO Live Hour podcast today, wherever you listen to your podcasts. Another week, another CRO Live Hour episode number. You know, Simba is going to do two things for me. One, by next week, I'm not going to hold an episode until he tells me how many CRO lives we've held. Not on the podcast, LinkedIn. And then he's going to help me write the LinkedIn post for those CRO lives. So. Promise?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm committing to that.

Okay. Simba, how's your week?

Man, my week has been good. Still trying to juggle a couple of things. Otherwise, no complaints. I'm happy. I'm learning every time, like, I go to LinkedIn and look at some of the campaigns that we are running. Like, my heart will be, like, beating at bit because something has to happen here because, like, I have to come back to you, like, with some results.

So, yeah, it's interesting because I actually do the opposite. By the way, I like what you're doing. I'm like, okay, you know what? Stay out of Simba's hair. Just let him do his thing. I look at the credit card and be like, oh, Simba, please, let's see some results. But it's an interesting experiment that we're running and the year started strong. So I'm happy, man.

It's good that like we've managed to build a good marketing ecosystem where we have like different channels. But I feel like one thing that I have to work on is the attribution because that we still have some of the leads, like good quality lead which are coming through and sometimes that we are not really sure where they are coming from. There are certain channels that we know, okay, because it's a direct straight line. But for some other channel it's good that they are coming in. But you just have to know that.

We continue spending tens of thousands of dollars on those channels or just drop them. I wish I have an answer. So here's something that I would say that most paid channel agencies, paid agencies like, you know, pay per click or paid search or paid Social would not say. In the case of E Commerce, it's easy to do that attribution. In the case of lead gen, which is the case with invesp, it's a lot harder to figure out that attribution and that's what we're struggling with. And publicly, if it's really A, B2C and there's lots of volume, you can also figure that out. But if it's more complex sale, enterprise type sale, more difficult and the leads are not flowing as much, it's a lot different when, hey, I'm generating 3,000 leads a month versus oh, I'm generating a hundred leads a month. Attribution becomes a very difficult problem. It doesn't matter. I've talked to so many different people and they're like, oh yeah, we can figure it out. And then we pay them. And two months later or three months later, I'm like, hey, what's going on? They're like, yeah, it's a little hard. I'm like, yeah, I thought so. So I think that's where you are at.

Yeah, yeah. Today, as we promised last week, we're going to be talking about value propositions. But before we get into that, I feel like some few icebreakers. Right. I just want to throw one word to you. I'll say like a word, okay. And then you tell me like what comes into your mind, but in one way. Okay, yeah, yeah. For instance, like I can say like maybe fit by then you might say one word that comes into mind. Okay.

Fitbuy Right away, I think A, B, testing, but that's me. Or maybe development.

I knew you were going to say that. I'll just give you like five words. Then you Also, give me like five words that come into mind.

Okay. Okay.

We'll start off his investment.

Okay. Okay. This is gonna be a little strange, but I was gonna say Ayat. It's like everyone's like, what? Like, she runs the show. So.

Yeah, that's a good one. I didn't see that coming. I thought you were going to say CRO. Yeah. Okay. CRO. Improvements, value propositions.

Oh, it's horrible. Campbell, you're doing this fluff.

Yeah, that's a good one. That's a good one. Then the last one would be E commerce money. Nice.

Which makes me, by the way. Okay. Just based on this makes me wonder. I've always wondered this. It's just I don't have the bandwidth. I'm like, man, we know so much about E commerce. That's about fake buy. I'm like, we should have done our own e commerce website. We just don't have the time. So if somebody, one way or another, and here's a unique value proposition, I will pay a lot of money for this. And when I say a lot of money, I do mean a lot of money. If you can figure out how to add 12 more hours to every day, I will pay you a ton of money. And that will be a very unique value proposition. There you go.

Yeah, yeah, that would be good. Okay, cool. You got them. Like, those are interesting. And I'll make sure that I got like a tip just to put like on social media based on, like those one with things that you. Okay. Today we'll be talking about value propositions. We have about five questions. So the first question that I have is, how do you define a value proposition? And what elements do you believe are essential for a compelling value proposition?

So, value proposition. And it's funny that you asked me the question about value proposition and what's the associated word that comes to my mind? And right away I said fluff. Because really, lots of times when I ask somebody about their value proposition, their answer is, well, let me tell you about my unique value proposition. Right away I'm like, unique value proposition. Okay, that's fine. So I have many issues with that. Put that aside for a second. But the value proposition is the value that you provide that customers actually see from using your product or service. Now, there's two elements to that. One element is that you're actually able to provide that value. So it's like, oh, here is something that we do. And it's not enough that you are offering that value, but your customers, your end user, whether you're an e commerce website, you're a SaaS website, you're a lead gen type website. That customer needs to actually say, you know what? Yes, this is valuable. It is valuable enough for me to pull up my wallet and give you money for that value. There is an exchange of value. I take that value from you and I give you dollars for that value. It's interesting to me. So we work with many different clients. There is one particular client that hired us a while back. They've been with us now for almost two. And different clients come to you for different reasons. Most clients that come and hire invest. They hire us because they say we want to either increase the conversion rates. That's something that we hear. And if they're more sophisticated, they'll say, hey, we want to make more money in our accounts. Sometimes they'll say, hey, we want to improve the user experience. There are different values that our clients at INVESP get out of our service, of our experimentation programs. Money in the bank, improved conversion rates. Lately, what we've been seeing, especially with larger companies, they say, you know what, we have all these features, we have a large development team, but we don't want to roll out a feature to our end users until we test it that it's actually valuable. That's a completely different use case than the typical use case that we put out for people. So as we go through this process of analyzing our different clients and what they're looking for, we notice, and it's fascinating, we notice that different companies based on their size, look to hire an CRO agency for different reasons. Smaller companies that are between 10 to 11 employees, they're simply saying, hey, we are struggling with our conversion rates and we have a problem there. Okay, so that's not a very sophisticated answer. And it's interesting, by the way, to me, as the company size increases their value that they're looking to get out of hiring us is different. You look at companies that are 11 to 50 and then they start talking about an experimentation program. Hey, we want to run high velocity experimentation programs. We to figure out how to structure the program. We looking for the insights and the learnings from the program, very focused on the actual service. One, the first one is trying to solve a problem that's really difficult to solve and we can talk about why that's the case. Number two, they're talking about the actual program itself. We want to run testing, we want to run high velocity testing. We want to establish a process, we want to establish a system. You go to companies larger than 50 employees and you see a shift to say that, hey, we are trying to understand the customer journey. We are trying to make changes on our website to enhance the user experience on our website. One service offers different values to different customer segments or client segments in the marketplace and what's important for us as somebody who provides that service. And this applies to anything that you do, whether, by the way, you are an employee of a company, a freelancer, you run an agency, you run an E commerce website, you run a SaaS platform, you run lead gen type website is you need to understand your end customer and you need to say, you know what? Based on this customer, this is the value that 80% of my customers get out of hiring my service. So it's different messaging. You're doing almost the same works almost. Not exactly, but you're angling it in a different way because that end customer needs to see value. Where we say, yeah, we'll give money for that service. Now, I started this whole thing because I was telling you about the company that's been with us now for a couple of years, where they had a completely. They had a completely different reason for why they decided to come and hire and Vesp. In this particular case, they came in and they said, hey, typically you come in and you have a conversion optimization team. You have the CRO and you have the designer, and you have the developer, and you have the product manager and the QA resource and IYAD gets involved. Guess what? We don't need all of that. We'll pay you the same amount for hiring all of these people. All we need is we need to spend time with Khalid every week to have a conversation for about an hour. Now, initially, and I'll be very frank, I was flattered. And then as they were paying, I'm like, are they getting value? Because on a typical project, we're putting 60, 70 hours, you know, and people pay whatever they pay. Now imagine I am putting about, I would say, 10 hours a month working with that particular client. And it's mostly not doing actual implementation, but guiding them through asking questions, saying, oh, here's a different perspective. And I was talking to our project manager and she's like, yeah, are they getting value out of this? And I'm like, I don't know. I hope they keep. They'd been a client for a while, they're paying a ton of money. And I told our sales guy, I'm like, hey, maybe you should have a conversation with them just to make sure that we're actually providing value. And he Did. He came back to me, he said, yeah, they're having. Actually, they think that they're underpaying. And I'm like, wow, the value that I put on my time and on my knowledge is a lot different than the value they put on my time and on my knowledge. And it's interesting. Correct again. It goes around. The value proposition. Here's what is unique about what we offer. I'll just add another example. When we started Invesp, 16 years, we spent so much time thinking about, what's the value that we offer? And then we went to the next question to say, okay, the value that we offer is an experimentation program that's run at a high velocity. We at some point said, and then this is back in 2008, 2009, we said, okay, it's funny, back then there was only five other CRO agencies, North America. That's it. And we're like, how do we distinguish ourselves from the other four competitors? Not thinking way ahead into the future? 20 years later, that's, oh, we're going to actually have thousands of competitors. Okay, that's fine. Back then we said, you know what, I'm a software developer. We can systemize. We can build a system where we have a large data bank. Mind you, back in 2008, 2009, we did not have a large data bank. Nowadays, we do 35,000 AB experiments. Every experiment has at least two, three variations. With so many hypothesis, we truly have a data bank of things that work and did not work and very deep analysis. So we rolled that out to the market, and that worked really well for us for a while. I would say it worked until 2014. We say, hey, we have the system. We're unique. And then at some point we start noticing that people are not really valuing the system because everybody's making the same claim, you know, I was like, oh, yeah, we have a system. We've done so many conversion rate optimization experiments, A, B, test experiments. And then we start saying, well, we made back then, like 20,000 experiments. And somebody else would say, oh, we've done 10,000 experiments. And you get lost in the details. From 2014 to 2020, we changed our value proposition tremendously. And that was fascinating because the value proposition became, guess what? You get to work with Khalid and iads. That became the value proposition. No one else can copy that. And why does that matter? Because guess what? They've been in the industry before it was called conversion rate optimization. Before it was called experimentation. That worked out really well for us. And since it had resonated with the markets, but there's always a downfall to that. Guess what then. The whole practice is built around Khalid and Ayat. It's great when you're small, but when you start growing and you're at 40 employees, it's no longer Khalid Khad, and Ayat cannot be in every call. So now we need to change that value proposition. And that's the reason I go back to, okay, we need to figure out the different market segments and what value they get and why not only are we offering that value, but why we are the best option of all the different options to actually be hired and have that exchange. Now, mind you, I see other CRO agencies that come in with one proposition for anybody, large and small, regardless of their concerns. No, we tailor our value, and we mix that with the fact that Saad and Ayat are there, and we mix that with the team and the team makeup, and we tailor that with how we deal with the client. So our value proposition is a mix of all of those things.

Yeah, that's good. Before, like, we move on to the next question, I just want us to dig, like, a little deeper, especially on the elements of value proposition. Just like, for the sake of someone that will be trying to improve their value proposition, as you are explaining, I also realized, or I picked, that some of the elements which should be included in a value proposition itself is the value. It has to be clear. It has to be unique. Are there, like, any other elements to add? Those, like, in terms of maybe two, three words, so that, like, maybe someone might be taking that skin?

Yeah. So let me actually go back to something that you've said. Unique value proposition is a tough one. Sometimes you are blessed to be in a certain situation, luck happens, and you truly offer a unique value proposition. Not everybody in the world is an Uber. Not everybody in the world is an Amazon. Correct. It's tough to find something unique. So I would start usually by saying, okay, what are the values that we're offering? And why are those things actually of value to my end customer? You list as many as you can, and we can talk about ways that you can find those values that you're offering. You can think about the immediate thing that you're doing. You can think about, okay, what is the social impact? What is the emotional impact of what you're offering? And then you find the value. Now, you might find something unique, but you really have to. You have to ask yourself the tough question, is this really unique? Because lots of times people say, yeah, this is unique about us. And their competitors are making the same claim. So you're going in a circle. You're using fluff. That's the reason how we started when we said, unique value proposition, where somebody sells me, oh, this is very unique. Oh, you cannot imagine the amount of spam email that I get every day. Or people are claiming that, oh, this is of unique value. No one else offers that. And I'm like, dude, I just got 10 other emails today making the same claim. Uniqueness is a tough one. And sometimes I would argue that you just have to admit that there's something not very unique about what you're offered. You want to add that unique element. But sometimes you have to understand between you and yourself, between you and your team, that there's nothing unique about what we offer. So, okay, the uniqueness becomes how we are able to angle our service in a certain way. I remember prior to starting invesbi, I was working for a consulting company out of Chicago, and we did E Commerce implementation. We did them for a specific platform. Back then it was called Sterling Commerce. Initially, it was Convergence Sterling Commerce. And they got acquired. We were one of many other companies offering that implementation service. There was nothing unique about us. What became very unique, especially that we were professional services, the team, because the team had more and more experience. And we thought, hey, there's something unique about us. Because there was like 60, 70 engineers who are really, absolutely good. And that was how we angled our service. Eventually we got acquired by a company that was doing the same work. And instead of the 70 engineers that we had, and we're so proud of that, they had over a thousand engineers. So, you know, if somebody was unique, they were more unique than us. If somebody had done more projects, they've done a lot more project than us. So to me, find the value. If you are lucky to find something unique, focus on that. Something unique. Make sure that the value is actually valuable to your customers and that the uniqueness of what you offer is actually meaningful to your end customer. Because you might have something unique about you, but your customer says, it doesn't really matter, I don't really care. That's not an evaluation criteria for me. And then you need to think about the value and the different levels that your customer views that value, whether it's the functional aspects of the value. I am buying a product. I got the product.

Correct.

We just bought something for. We go on Amazon. You want to buy a product. My son goes to school, he wants to take hot lunch with him, and we go and we search and there's all these canisters and there's like hundreds, maybe thousands of them on Amazon. I'm like, oh, what's unique? Which one is the right one? They all look like they are the same, but okay, so we're going to put that aside for a second. The value that I bought is not in the canister itself, but even more than that and how my son feels correct when I tell him, oh, today is actually, I have something hot for you and his happiness. Today I was on a client call and in the morning we had prepared hot lunch for him. He's leaving. I'm sitting on a client call. He's like, ba, ba, ba, ba. I'm like, yeah. And he's like, thank you. And he came down, gave me a hug because of the hot lunch I put. We bought the thing for $10. Oh, that hug just made my day. In the middle of a client call, I had to, like, introduce my little one to my clients, which they absolutely love. Okay, we talked about value, we talked about uniqueness. What are some of the other elements you think we should add to a value prop?

I think one of the important ones is to be clear because sometimes, like, you might have the value, but if, like, your customers do not understand it, you might not be able to make them buy. And one other thing that I like when you're explaining is how you brought down, like, the value into social, emotional, and functional. Because, like, for most people, they just focus on, okay, I'm selling you like this thing. It only does the focus, like on the functional. So how then do you get maybe to dig, try to look for other social and emotional aspect? Do you define them as a brand or there's something that you have to do in order like to find the assets.

There are two ways to do it. Most brands, what they do is they define them and then they'll test them out in the markets. And we've done that. When we first started the company, we. We had an untested service and we said, oh, let's just put it out there. A better approach now. Been around for a while. We interview every prospect that comes to us. We interview every customer we talk to who ends up signing up with us. And we have the concerns on why did they hire us, why did they choose to even have that initial conversation with us? It is a goldmine correct of data. Because that helps you understand that, oh, I've always thought they've hired me because of X, Y, Z. And sometimes you find out that, yes, they did hire us because they want to improve their conversion rates. That's fine. Guess what? That is about 15% of our clients that we work with. The other 85%, they don't even mention that value that we initially started the company with. They have other values that you mentioned. I went through the exercise of pulling about 120 different customer statements about the service and what they like and whatnot. I created a word clot for them, classified them, group them, slice and dice the data. And it's just so powerful when you get those insights from the horse's mouth, right? Oh, here's actually why they hire us and here's what they like. And this is the actual value that they are getting out of working with us. We're working with a VP of E Commerce. It's a large. They do about $350 million annual sales. So it's a very large organization. They've been a client now for about three years. And he wanted us to present some of our findings to his boss because they're about to migrate from one platform to the next. Sometimes we like to focus on two aspects. One is the learnings. Correct. Here's what we've learned about your customers. And then the other aspect was, oh, here's how much money we made you. We have lots of documentation. It's fascinating because he told me, he looked at us, he said, khaled, I love this, but when you talk to my CEO because we are migrating to a different platform, I want you to focus on what can we learn about user behavior in order for us to take those learnings and build new functionality in the new platform. So again, I had two values that I was coming to the table with because he knows us really well. He's been working with us for a long time. He says, yeah, this is great for me as a VP of E Commerce, VP of marketing for my CEO is different. And this is how you're going to stay working with us. So it's helpful when you hear that, because if I had just presented him in front of the CEO, I would have presented that with standard information. Now, armed with that data, guess what? I have different messaging when I have that conversation with the CEO.

Yeah, I'm also thinking that, like, maybe instead of saying one of the elements should be value, maybe just to replace the word value, you might use like relevance because it should be relevant.

Let me ask you this. Do you think you can actually have value in the eyes of your customer if it's not relevant? I don't know. Maybe the chicken and the egg. Because to Me as an end consumer, it must be relevant because you might say, oh, this is so valuable. And I think to myself, no, not really. Not for my specific situation. I get calls I got just pitched earlier with a project management software. They're like, oh, so much better than what you're using currently using Trello and you're using ClickUp. This is so much better. That might be valuable for a specific market segment, but the information was so irrelevant to me and it's of no value to me whatsoever. They're like, but this is so much better. I'm like, listen, yes, you might provide value. I don't know whether you provide value or not. Yes, we have struggles with each of those platforms, but just again, I have to be willing to take that value and say it's valuable enough for me to pay money for it. Correct. And I'm like, oh, just the pain of thinking of switching from one platform project management software to another. That pain is not high enough in order for me to consider the value that you provide. Now I'm saying this right now in what, February 2024, you might have a conversation with me at the end of the year and you say, what do you think? I'm like, oh, this is such a problem, we need to fix it. The pain is high enough that I want that value and I'm willing to give money away to get that exchange of value.

Yeah, speaking about the elements of a value proposition. Right, we've talked about that. How about like the elements on a website that can amplify a value proposition at some point. Like what I remember, like the first time when I joined Invest, I used to think that like a value proposition is the main headline that you find on the homepage. That's the value. That's what I used to think. But let's talk about like the elements on the website that amplify a value proposition.

Every element that you have on a page and from page to the next, you should express the value proposition that you have. So it starts. Yes, it starts with the headline because that's the first thing that a visitor sees. But sometimes you have to understand that your value proposition many times starts before you actually before that visitor actually gets to the website. I remember a while back we had an E commerce company, Soul Society. I can mention that because they acquired and I remember their VP of marketing reaching out and saying, hey, we would like to hire you guys. And one of the things we do is we do an analysis of the website and we're looking through the analytics and the Metrics and it was fine. But something, there was something with such a high bounce rate for organic traffic that just threw me off, just did not sit well with me. You look at the site and okay, it looks like nice pictures, nice everything. It just doesn't explain high bounce rate because high bounce rate tells me that somebody comes in and then they pull out. I did some search and just writes below the website there's all these reviews, hundreds of reviews are just bad mouthing the website and the service and the products. And I'm like, oh, hold on. Yeah, you might have nice value proposition, but your battle around the value that you provide your customers, you've lost it before. Somebody gets to your website value proposition starts with the copy that you use. So that's the headline, the actual supporting sub headlines, the actual copy that you use on the website, the images, the overall site design, all of these needs to be congruent. That's the element that we use, congruency. They're all sending consistent message to your visitors to say, here is the value that you will get. And this is important. So one of the companies that's been a client for a long time and often I can mention them, Printfresh has been working with us for a very long time. And Printfresh has very distinct designs for the pajamas that they sell. And the minute you land on their website, you can see how unique they are. They're different. Now they have a whole bunch of copycats.

Correct.

That are trying to copy Printfresh but they don't offer the same unique designs. That's Amy, who's the co founder comes up with. They don't offer the same quality product that Printfresh offers. So that is something. Every element on the page, every image, every copy that we use, every email we send out, they all communicate something about the brand and why you should buy from that brand. I'll just mention this because I had a rule about probably heard me say this on how much I spend on a pair of pants, on a shirt. I'm sorry, I'll splurge on a suit. Although I haven't worn a suit forever. But then I decided, oh, I need to buy T shirts now, mind you, okay, there's not being cheap, but I don't spend more than 10, $15 on a T shirt, especially a tee. You know, it's not something fancy. I go on Reddit and I'm reading, I'm like, oh, what are some of the top T shirts? And everybody mentions cuts as a brand. I'm like, okay, there's something about something that one of the people who had bought Cuts, he said, I've had it for four years, it's still the same color. It did not shrink. It did not initially. If you had asked me about buying a T shirt, I would have told you I don't pay attention to anything. It's just T shirt is a T shirt, okay? I'm not going to buy something really cheap. Also, I'm not going to spend a fortune. And Cuts is an expensive T shirt. It's like $50. Some people say, oh, $50, that's cheap. Okay. Within the budget constraints that I always put myself on, buying clothes now is more than I anticipated to pay. So I look at the website, I'm like, $50 too much. And then I was at the Retail Fest event in San Diego recently. I go to the gift shop. That's another rule that I have for myself. You don't buy from gift shops, basically because you're overpaying. You don't buy from airports, you don't buy from gift shops. Again, you probably paying like 30, 40% more. And I see the Cuts T shirt, I look at it and I'm like, oh, the material is actually pretty nice. And guess what? They are selling for the same price that I found on the web. No matter how much discounts I looked for, I couldn't find one. I ended up paying $50 for a T shirt, $53. Again, it's kind of a journey. Correct. Of me discovering the value that this T shirt has. And it will be interesting to ask me in two years from now whether I still see that value and whether I would recommend the product or not.

That's good. Let's talk about some of the common misconceptions or pitfalls when it comes to developing a value proposition. Are there like any that you can think of?

Oh, so many that I can think of. Some of the mistakes that people do when they're creating value proposition, first they create it in an echo chamber. Correct. Two founders sitting together, a bunch of friends sitting together, a team sitting together. And they say, oh, here's the value that we offer. One of the fastest way to fail is not actually going out and talking to your customers and making sure that the value that you offer, something that your customer values, you might think, oh, this is the value that we offer. And your customer thinks to themselves, oh, really? No, not important. Number two, is there enough large market segment that is willing to say, we will pay for this value that you offer? Yes, it is valuable and it is important for us to actually depart with our money. Correct. And like give money for that value that you're offering. Not everyone is willing to spend $150 on a pair of pajamas. Correct. But there is enough people who are willing to do that that you say, you know what? Yes, that is enough, large enough segment in order for me to have a business that value, whether it's going to continue to be consistent in the marketplace for a while. Because sometimes you have these fads that come and go. Correct. It's important to recognize that. Think about newspapers. If you are in the newspaper business, you're struggling. Yes, you are offering value, but guess what? There are other alternatives that people get their news from and you're in a declining business. So I would think twice about that space and whether it makes sense to continue my business there or do I need to find other mediums? Yes, you are providing information, but in a different medium, in a different format. Talk to your customers, make sure that they are seeing actual value from this. Make sure that you are communicating that value in a way that is meaningful. And make sure that they are willing to pull out their wallet and pay for that value that you are offering. And understand. And maybe I'll finish with this. Understand the circumstances that would push somebody, would trigger somebody to say, I am willing to pay for this service. We get snow quite a bit in Chicago. I did not buy a snowblower, a snow removal machine, because we're not getting snow a lot in the last couple of years. This year we got a nice snowstorm and I didn't have somebody to clear the snow from my driveway. And oh gosh, I was willing so much to pay for a snow removal person to come because at some point everybody's slipping when they come on the driveway. I was willing to buy a machine, but that was like about a month ago. Nowadays, if you come and you tell me, hey, I can provide you with snow removal service or can sell you a snow machine or blower, I'm like, no, I'm not willing to do that. Winter is done. Correct. So I was willing to pay $500 a month and a half ago for that. Because when you have few people slip on your driveway, it's just no good and cause you more trouble. Nowadays, I'm not even willing to pay 50 bucks for it.

So that also makes a lot of sense. What do you think about boosters to improve value proposition? I'll explain because, like, I was going through like one of the articles we have on value proposition on the blog I do think it was written by Ayatollah and she speaks about boosters that you can use to improve value proposition. Like where it's like free next day shipping. Free shipping, cancel unit, customizable, free trial, guaranteed saves. Join easy. What do you think of those? Do you think they can still make a visitor become a customer?

Yeah. Again, it depends on the value that somebody sees from a particular service or a particular product. Let's take an example such as free shipping. It used to be very unique. 15, 20 years ago. Correct. When you got free shipping. Because everybody was paying for shipping. Guess what? Amazon comes with Amazon Prime. We expect free shipping. Not only do we expect free shipping, we expect items to be there within 24 hours. So what was unique in a particular time, in a particular circumstance is no longer unique. It became part of the expectation. I was talking to somebody yesterday and we're talking about experimentation. I told them, hey, as you run an experiment, you have success and you deploy it on your website. And let's say it increases your conversion rates by 10%. Guess what? You're not going to have that 10% increase year over year, month over month. And they're like, why not? And I gave him that same exact example. Free shipping used to be unique. At some point is no longer unique. As you release a new feature, people get used to it and becomes part of the expectations. And the minute something becomes part of the expectations, it's no longer valuable to people because. What are you talking about? You're giving me free shipping. Now you might have a very unique product. Correct. And people can get it anywhere. And you have a monopoly on that product. And guess what? Free shipping becomes really valuable where you're like, okay, I do appreciate free shipping. So in one context, free shipping is where you talk. I expect that. In another context, yeah, thank you for offering me free shipping. There is a whole bunch of clothing brands in the UK and we work with few of them and they don't have any stores that sell those brands here in the US So if you order, the cost of shipping is high. Actually, there's cost for customs as well. It's just horrendous. Correct. And this is the way they built their business. You tell them it's always better to figure out how to do like a distribution center in the US and they're like, no, we like the fact that it's scarce. We like the fact that not everybody has access to our products. And we like the fact that we will charge somebody $600 for a sweater. I don't Share with them the budgets that I put for myself on buying different items. But I love the business philosophy that they go with where they're like, oh, no, this is the way we do business. A company like that, if they offer free shipping, guess what? For their target markets, that's willing to pay $600 for a sweater. Yes, you're paying a ton of money, but, like, Instead of paying $30 for shipping, now you're getting for free. People appreciate that. Correct.

Again.

Those modifiers, those specific characteristics that I had mentioned, I think will apply in some instances. And goes back to putting on your Sherlock Holmes hats, pulling out your magnifying glass and really understanding the situation. Situation of your business and your customers.

Yeah, that makes sense. I still have two questions. I'm not sure, like, about your time.

I have five minutes. I love the fact with this new thing, the minute you raise your hand, like, you have like, all these balloons come out. So let's take one more question.

Okay. The question is, as consumer preferences evolve over time, how should businesses continuously evolve their value proposition to remain relevant and competitive in the marketplace?

This is very similar to what we said, correct, about consumer expectation. You constantly have to evaluate your value proposition and its messaging and the value that your customer views out of your business. I give an example. Investment, how we changed our value proposition over the years.

So how often should you change your value proposition? Is it like after every quarter? Just go and review it. You should be speaking to customers like every week or how often do you do that?

So I wouldn't change it every quarter because the exercise of coming up with a value proposition is very painful. But you should have your pulse on the market to understand how frequently you need to change it. Now, at the same time, you need to understand that there are some consumers where you're just not a good fit for and they're looking for value that you do not offer, you're not interested in offering. We do this quite a bit. I'd say we do it on quarterly basis. When people come into FIGPI or they come into investment, they decide to go with one of our competitors. Now, there are instances where we say, you know what? Yeah, they were not a good fit for us. The value that they are looking for is not the value that we're interested in offering. It's fine somebody else would offer that value. Basecamp is a kind of a portal. Project management software is popular and they have thousands of subscribers. But Basecamp had made a business philosophy decision that they are a good fit for companies up to a certain Size. If you are a Couple thousand people, 10,000 people, Basecamp might not be the best tool. And they've consciously made that decision where if somebody's really too big, they might say, you know what? Yeah, we're not really focused. We're not offering all the features that you want. We're not a good fit. But in the instances where you think you are a good fit for a company, your product is really the best product you believe is the best product to provide the service that they're looking for, to provide the features that they're looking for, and those customers walk away from you, then you want to ask yourself, why didn't they walk away from you? They might have walked away because you were not able to communicate the value clearly. You might have communicated the value clearly, but not in a way that resonated with them. Or it might be the case that they're looking for a completely different value you already offered, but you'd not even focus on it completely. So you need to kind of figure out, okay, do we need to adjust the messaging or do we need to change? Think about different value proposition. Usually the exercise to come up with a value proposition and even if you want to go down as deep as unique value proposition is a painful exercise. And you need to look at what you have in terms of offers, then you need to think about, okay, how do I actually adjust those offers to match what I'm telling my customers? We at some point used to say that, hey, we have more data points than anybody else because we have tens of thousands of AB experiments, which was the case. But guess what? The insights that we pulled from those experiments, I was like, there is like 15 page document that we produce. 20 page document. I'm like, they're insightful, but we can take it to the next level. Because if that's what people are valuing, that's the reason they come to us. Whether it's FITBI or invest. How do we go to the next level? Because we're doubling down on the fact that we have more experiments under our belt than anybody else. But, okay, so you have that value. People are coming to you because of that value. How do you dig deeper and make sure that people say, no one else would offer such insights for us?

Yeah, I think there's a lot to unpack on by the proposition, and we might need maybe to have a part two. Because, like, also one thing that I was picking when you were speaking is when you're explaining is one value can also be messaged in different ways. So it shows like you can play like with an ab, you can a B test ways to message like a value proposition of. That's interesting.

Yeah. And you saw that with the emails that we send out and look at different value proposition. And it's funny because for one size company there's this one value proposition. For a second different type of company, that initial value proposition that we go in with is probably sometimes not mentioned at all or if it's mentioned in the passing. So you gotta test that value proposition. And one value proposition that resonates really well with one type of customer may or may not resonate well with another type of customer. Customer service constant optimization process around the value proposition. How you present that value proposition to your end customer.

Yeah, so that makes sense. Those are the questions that we have. We might need to have a part two on value proposition.

Hey, I'm always up for talking about value proposition. Thank you, Simba. Thank you everybody for listening. Before you tell me anything else to add because I have nothing else to add. Thank you everyone for listening and until next time, happy testing.