#59 – Unpacking the Power of Value Propositions (Part 2)

When I go down to personalization, now I'm looking at that person, at an individual, and I'm trying to forget about all the other hundred thousand visitors or million visitors who are coming to my website and say, you know what? Here is the best solution for you, Simba, who is coming to my website. This is very powerful. Only if, and only if. 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 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, while 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 your 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, We are officially live. Another week, another LinkedIn Live, another CRO Live Hour. Simba, how's life? Asked you a question before we get started, and I'm like, don't answer. We'll get to it in a second. But before we get into that, how has it been?

Yeah, that's a good question. Life has been good. It's been okay. And I'm trying to move, like, a lot. As in, like, walk. Like, I've committed to working like 10,000 steps for the next 30 days every day. So right now I'm on day six, and that's the thing that I do first thing in the morning, I just go out and start walking in a nearby park, listening to some podcasts. That part, it's been good. Also being.

Hold on, hold on, hold on. So many questions about that.

Yeah, yeah.

First off, how's the weather? Is it nice and easy to walk? Because that's what I'm struggling with in Chicago.

I think it's been okay in the past few days. It's been cool, not hot, but also not cold, just like in between. But it started raining, like on from Monday, so it's been raining every day since Monday.

How are you managing rain? Are you just walking still or. No, when it's raining, you're not walking.

Sometimes it rains for a few hours and then it stops. So I usually go out in the morning. Today it was really raining. It started raining around 12pm my time. By then I would have done because I go out around 8am in the morning and then I'll be done by 9:39,45, somewhere there.

Oh, that's an hour walk, man. That's a commitment.

Yeah. 10,000 steps is not like also you have to be intentional, you know, like working very fast and trying to make sure that by a certain minute you have hit like certain number of steps because it might actually like take up to two hours. You just have to be intentional in just walking as fast as you can and stuff.

So yeah, okay. 10,000 steps is a lot. I think the most I do is like half an hour. I don't even know how many steps. Which brings me to the second question. How are you measuring the steps?

I have a watch and I also have like some different applications like on my phone. So I'll be just like trying to see. Of course like the numbers, they don't, they vary. But I rely on my watch the most.

Okay. It's funny, I forgot the name of the watch I was using. There was a period when I'm just sitting on my desk from 8am to 5 and they're like, you've walked 3,000 steps? I'm like, no, I move my hand as if I'm walking 3,000 steps. That's pretty cool though. I love that. I love that. Okay, so that's walking, which is excellent. What else has been going on?

Also like as a first time dad, my son turned five months yesterday. It's been five months. So it's been like an interesting like journey. I don't know like really how to express it or how to say it out. I often had a lot of people saying like when you have a kid there is certain like that kind of love that you have towards someone that comes out like instantly. I didn't know about that kind of feeling. But so far it's been good. Enjoying like every ride, getting like enough sleep because he doesn't wake up that much the same. At least if we put him, if he goes to sleep around, let's just say maybe 9pm Maybe he will wake up like maybe twice or thrice of which it's not like that much of a problem or that we don't have to. It's not as stressing, I guess the first two months, I would say.

Well, you answered. The question I meant to ask you is like, how is your sleep? Sleep is rough with new kids.

How many hours do you usually sleep?

Oh, sad, man. According to. I used to measure my sleep yesterday. I slept seven hours. But in all honesty, I wake up several times during the night. Just. I reached a point in my life where sleeping on one side hurts and then you sleep to the other side is not comfortable. And then, and I was talking to somebody and I'm like, oh, surely there's a product that solves that problem. And he's like, nope, getting old. There's no products like welcome to old age. So I'm like, oh, well, it is what it is. So for those of you who can relate to this, you know, you understand what I'm talking about. For those who don't, enjoy your sleep while you can.

Yeah, that's good advice.

There you go. So, okay, let's talk CRO. Let's talk conversion rate optimization. What are we talking about today?

So today it's like a of a bleed off from the previous episode. We spoke about value proposition and the thing like with value proposition, it's like a humongous topic and you can't really talk and exhaust it in one episode. So we had to come back again, like with a few questions about value proposition. And hopefully you'll give us like the answers today.

Let's try. I'll try and do my best. That's all I can promise.

Okay, cool. I was also thinking of having like some icebreaker questions, but I didn't manage to come up with one in time. But next week I'll do that.

Okay.

Yeah.

Last time it was just like, what's the first thing that comes to your mind? And I'm like, oh, wow. Okay, okay. But go for it. Plus stock value prop.

Okay, cool. So the first question that I have is, with the rise of personalization and customization in marketing, how can businesses tailor their value proposition to resonate with diverse customer segments while maintaining a coherent brand identity?

So the way I like to think about it is that your business, your solution that you have, whether it's a product or service, the same product solves different problems for different market segments. So I'm talking about segments in this case, not a personalized solution. But I think the same concept would apply to some extent when you go more granular. The business solution that you offer for. Let's say you're B2B for companies that are 2 to 10 employees is the same solution, but is used in a different way for companies that are 500 to 1,000 or more than a thousand employees. And it's just always fascinating when you look at how different companies, how different end users end up using your solution and the benefits that they get out of that solution. Same product, just different ways, different angles that you look at this product, you're looking at it from this side or you're looking at it from that side. And based on that, the minute you understand that you can customize your messaging based on the person that you are talking in front of now for the site is a little bit difficult. Correct? Because you have a website, it's designed for any visitor who comes to the website. And now you need to figure out how do I customize that solution so the messaging that I have resonates well with those visitors. Or if you're sending, let's say an email campaign, or if you are sending a mass mailer campaign, just regular paper, traditional mail paper that you're sending, the catalog. How do I customize my messaging? So it resonates with most people. And this is fascinating because what you can do if you do deep analysis, and this starts by interviewing your customers and having lengthy chats with them and segmenting those and grouping them into different groups, okay? Plus say your B2B. This segment of the market looks at our products and why they're deciding to use our product because of 10 different reasons. You look at different segments in the market and you say it's different. Another 10 other reasons. And a third segment might have their own other 10 reasons. The minute you do that, you take one segment and you say, okay, so I've interviewed maybe like 30 companies within that segment and I've gotten from them a whole bunch of reasons why they use our product and what they are trying to accomplish with our product and what triggered them to actually hire our product, product or service. What I love to do is very rudimentary, old style word cloud. Take all those answers and throw them in a word cloud and look for consistent patterns. Look for words that your customers, your end user uses. To me, that is a gold mine in marketing. Okay, so this segment, now I've done some of my analysis. I wordsmithed it, I reorganized it, I categorized it. I recognize those are the top three concerns that 70% of our customers are always repeating. And then it gets less. Though this couple of concerns only maybe 30% of our customers are repeating. And then we have some concerns that maybe 10% of our customers are repeating. Now you get an ordered and prioritized list of concerns that people have. Based on that, you want to look at your product and you say, okay, this is why this segment uses my product. Here's the prioritized list. Now with the craft, a value proposition. If I'm, if I do offer what they're looking for to really meet the demands of those customers, to really use the words that they have used to describe their problem and the way they use our solution to say, you know what, yeah, this value proposition actually resonates well with me. As a matter of fact, the words that they are using this value proposition are the same words. I described my problem to my buddy yesterday. That is a very powerful value proposition. Now, this is only for a single segment. I go and I do the same exercise. For a second segment, I go and I do it for a third segment.

Correct.

And I have different prioritized lists. If you are lucky, and most of the time you are lucky, you will see that there is an intersection between those messages. Sometimes people use the same words, sometimes they don't. But you can say, you know what? This is all within the same sphere. So those are the common elements that everybody is going to see. But then we have a very customized list for different segments. Correct. Maybe the first three reasons are very particular to segment one, the next three reasons are very particular to segment two, and another three reasons that are very particular to segment three. But we also have maybe seven other reasons why that all of the segments use. That's great. Correct. And now I have actual messaging that I can use for different types of companies. Let's layer that with something else. Because that's the beauty of marketing is like layer, layer on layer. And it's important that you don't lose focus. Correct. As you're doing that. Because sometimes as we're adding more layers, you forget the bigger goal where you're heading the North Star. And to me, you layer that in two different ways. One is personalization at an individual level. Number two, maybe personalization, but not an individual level, but at a higher, at the company level. The easier one, by the way, is at the company level where you start thinking to yourself, okay, I just need to figure out if this visitor who is coming to my website, what segment they belong to. Are they in group one, group two, group three? And based on, on if I'm successful in identifying the group or the target market segment that they are part of, then I'll show them the appropriate messaging for that segment. There are different Ways that you do this in conversion rate optimization, you do that through self identification, where you're specifically asking somebody to identify themselves, what are you looking to accomplish today? And you give them options that self identification or need identification, two different ways that you can do that, where people raise their hand and they say, this is the problem that I come to you to solve. We work with a retailer, they sell beautifully designed pajamas, female pajamas. I always give them as an example. And it's fascinating because different groups of customers, different age groups use their product in different ways. Sometimes it's to stand out so they look unique and they look different. Sometimes they like them because of the material, sometimes they like to use them because of they have some allergies. And those are all made from natural material. So like not. They don't cause any skin irritation or anything like that. Different groups that are coming buying the same product for different reasons. And if somebody raises their hand and they say, this is what I'm looking for, guess what? Right away you focus your messaging to meet the demand of that group. We worked a while back with Barkbox. Barkbox is a subscription service for dog food. Now, dog food is a very fascinating category. It's a billion dollar industry. It's a multi billion dollar industry. Thousands of brands out there basically all catering to dogs and dog owners. But in reality, if we're being very honest and frank about it, they're not really catering to the dogs as much as they're catering to the dog owners. Because dogs, the consumer of the product, don't have a say in the products really. It's the dog owner and the emotional need that he or she has that is fulfilled by a particular product. Now how do you angle that some dog owners are really concerned about health? Well, I care about my dog and I want to make sure that they are getting healthy food. And some people I have seen spend so much time analyzing the ingredients of what are you putting in the dog food. Different group comes at it completely differently. They don't really look a lot at the natural ingredients and whatnot. They're looking for something new for their dog that comes in every month. And the excitement that the dog has one product packaged in a way and offered in a way that meet different demands. So again, if somebody raises their hand and they said this is the concern or this is who I am, you're able to give them that specific messaging that meets their group demands or needs. If we go a level deeper into personalization, that's what can get really fascinating. Correct? Because you have personalization and then you have maybe testing. I'm trying to find a general solution that works for most of my website visitors, works with statistical significance, where I know that's based on data, that the results that I'm getting are accurate and I can actually use them to make a data informed decision. When I go down to personalization, now I'm looking at a person, at an individual, and I'm trying to forget about all the other hundred thousand visitors or million visitors who are coming to my website and say, you know what? Here is the best solution for you, Simba, who is coming to my website. This is very powerful. Only if, and only if I'm able to identify what matters to Simba. If I show you something personalized but you look at it and you're like, oh, could I really care less? This does not relate to me, does not resonate with me. The personalization fails tremendously. Now there's a ton of personalization software out there. There's lots of improvements in personalization software. Is it there yet? Not there yet. Unfortunately, that's the reality. I was talking to a VP of E Commerce and he was telling me about all the different solutions that he had tried. And he said, you know what? He's like, shame on me. He's like, keep on falling for the pitch. I'm like, what? He's like, keep on falling for the pitch. It just sounds really cool. But he is yet to be impressed by a solution where he says personalization is really works really well for his visitors. So that's one opinion. We worked with a personalization software that ebay uses, which is extremely powerful. And it was done specifically for the apparel portion. This software is fascinating because you go to a product page, they show you similar products and they pull those similar products from influencers. Or showing you how somebody, a particular influencer on Instagram wears the product. Very simple. Okay, so I looked at a couple of the influencers. When I'm looking at the product, I'm seeing how they wear the product. Here's what gets fascinating by looking. I presented you with seven different influencers. They're all wearing the same product, but maybe in different settings. And I can look and see which one of those influencers you clicked on correct. And you look at their products. Based on three clicks, I have an 85% chance of identifying your personal style. And now I'm presenting you category pages and I'm presenting you with product recommendations based on your personal style. And it works for 85% of the visitors. Imagine that only by three clicks and how you highlight and which ones are you flipping through? Because they pull the feed and they're able to monitor, hey, look at that person. He's spending so much time looking at this one particular influencer. So we can say which style our visitor likes, even just to mention taking it one level to the next level, where they say, what's okay. So we have all this data for people navigating across so many different retailers, apparel retailers across the globe. They can actually predict with 90% confidence what trends are going to appear in the next six months. It's very powerful. I'm not talking about current trends, I'm talking about the trends in the next six months. Now, when we first tested this and it was for a large retailer in Europe, we're like, is it real? So we have merchandising guys come and they looked at the data and they said, you know what? We're not going to spend money because the solution is very expensive, but we will watch. So they took the data and they said, hey, let's wait for six months. It didn't take six months. Within four months they're like, oh, gosh, we would not have imagined because there was a couple of the colors that the AI had sent. This is going to be popular. And just the merchandisers did not believe them. And then four months later, they're like, oh, gosh, we wish we had placed orders for some of this stuff because there was so much demand for it. So it's fascinating how you can use human behavior, human psychology, to predict the best options you can present to somebody and how you position your product and the values that your product offers. Where the visitor says, yes, I want to buy this product.

That makes a lot of sense. Last week, one of the questions that I asked you was, does the value proposition change over time? Of course it changes. Right? Because the cleanse, the customer demand, they also like more of the ship. They change. As you're explaining the exercise of segmenting the customers probably based on the weather, location or number of employees or the industry, that's probably to be.

Yes.

Yeah, that's for B2B. So you try to look like. For patterns, right. That between all those companies seems like it's within the same sphere. But does it also suppose that it's not really straightforward to find the patterns? Does that mean you can have different, I don't want to say value propositions, but different messagings for different segments? And how do you then maybe implement them, considering that, like you have one website, how do you put everything in One website.

No, I definitely think you have one value proposition, but it's expressed a message differently based on the customer segment you have to do. Because one messaging works for one group, another messaging for another group. And the first messaging that worked really well for group one does not resonate, as a matter of fact, might turn people off from group two. Going back to the apparel example, I'm selling really colorful, beautiful pajamas. I'm selling them to either ladies, woman age 21 until 30, and I'm selling them for ladies age 40 to 50. Two completely different groups. They're looking for two different things. And what you use with group one, you use different messaging that you use from group two. And guess what, if you try and mix them, you're going to end up with confusion, you're not going to end up with sales, and you don't want that. So you want to think very carefully about the messaging that you use for different groups. Again, to me, self identification can tell you consumer behavior. If somebody had to place an order from you, somebody placed an order consistently enough about their demographics, you can say, you know what, with some analysis. And it's not easy analysis, by the way, it's one thing to collect the data. People lots of times confuse data collection with data analysis. Two different domains. One is easy, one is complicated, sophisticated, requires a lot of time. Most people stop at data collections and then they look at the data and they don't know what to do with it. And they present what I would call very simplistic analysis of the data. What you need is you need to dig through the data, look for common patterns. And you probably, by the way, the use of AI there is very powerful. Correct. But AI is as good as the inputs. The more inputs you provide to the AI, the better the analysis will be. If you're just providing 2, 3, 5, 10 different data points, you're not going to end up with good analysis. I was pulling results from almost 200 different clients, AP experiments and inputting them. The experiment complexity, with the lift, with how long it took us to implement an experiment, and the results were absolutely amazing. Then I said to myself, I'm like, okay, so this is from 200 clients. Each client had about 60, 70 experiments. So it's a fairly large data set. I said, you know what, let's slash that into 10 clients as opposed to a hundred, and let's see where that gives us. And the AI came back and said, I don't have anything conclusive. The data is all over the place. How do you do that on your Website again, self identification, need identification, visitor behavior on the website. There's so many different ways that you can do that, that. But it's a multi layered, complicated problem. Your first challenge is to figure out the different groups and the patterns within those different groups and what appeals to those different groups. And then you make assumptions and then you figure out how am I going to implement those assumptions on my website and how I'm going to validate those assumptions. And then again have a round of testing and analysis and you come back and you say, yeah, this worked really well. Guess what? We tested this messaging for this group. We thought it works really well. It did not. We thought that this type of images and layout works well for this type of group and it did not. So you need to validate constant validation of your assumptions.

Yeah, that makes sense. Also like listening to what you're saying, I think it's a bit, not really easy, but I think it's actually like really doable to create a value proposition. Let's say like maybe for a B2B company that sells like one service maybe to different industries, it's easy like to create a value proposition around that service that you're offering. But how about like for a business that has like multiple products. Right. Like maybe let's just say like an E commerce website. Yes. Which is like a marketplace to different companies. So how do you then try to create a value proposition that covers different products, different companies?

So I always like to make the distinction between two different things and lots of times I see people confuse them. At least in my book I distinguish between them. There is the value proposition or uvp unique value proposition at the company level. Here is why you should buy from us. You will get your order delivered within 4 hours. Correct. You can have 180 days. Return policy is like the product that's going to last for 30 years or lifetime unlimited replacements for the product. Because I'm like, oh wow, that's a company that stands behind this product. As opposed to buying something that is, God, man, it broke down within a week or it's tore within like a few days. That is at a company level, unique value proposition. I distinguish between that and at the product level, unique selling points. Why am I buying this particular product? Think about an Amazon. Today, maybe a year ago I decided to put some houseplants. My experience with houseplants has not been great. You can't really see it in the camera over here, but the two that I have are like dying. So I'm like, you know what? Okay, could not Figure out a simple problem of watering. I know Amazon, I'm very familiar with Amazon. Everybody's familiar with Amazon. I know their unique value proposition. But now I need to buy something to measure am I watering those plants enough or not? That was the question that I have. Now Amazon offers about 200 products that do the same thing and they are all about in the same price range. Anywhere between $7 to $11. Not expensive products. What is the most important thing to me? I'm like, okay, so there is something about Amazon. How fast am I going to get this item correct if I place the order that has to do with Amazon. Now I'm looking at the products and I'm evaluating 200, 250 different products. The most important thing to me after buying the first one and not thinking through it is the accuracy. How accurate is this product? Now mind you, my first product was for $12, has 65,000 reviews on it. People loved it, 4.7 stars. I was like, oh, I thought I was buying great products until I started using it. And I'm like this show, I just watered the plants. I watered it to the point that water is coming down from the plants into the catch area so I know it's over watered. And thing that I use, I don't know what they call it, humidity measurement tool is showing me that the plant is dry. I'm like okay, that killed that one product for me. Thank God I'm still within the return period. I start thinking about accuracy. That becomes the unique selling proposition that I care the most about. Now mind you, it looks like none of those products are accurate because I navigate from one product to the next, one product to the next to see if they focus on the accuracy piece. No one mentions it because at least my assumption that none of them are accurate. So what do I do? I go to the customer review section. That's the nice thing about the Amazon where sometimes if you don't have usps, you can look at the customer reviews and I search for accuracy. Lo and behold, you consistently with every product, people saying oh, it's not accurate, it's not accurate, it's not accurate. And I'm like, oh, I guess that's if I would want to start an e commerce website. That is one product I'd love to offer. But I digressed unique USPS unique selling points for the products and those USPs. Just how you do a unique value proposition for the company. Now you want to think about USPS at a product level. What is very unique about this product? Why would I choose this product amongst 250 other products? I was joking with my brother in law recently where we're talking about water, bottled water. There's about a thousand different brands selling water in the U.S. water is water. I'm sorry. Okay. And some brands, by the way, truly believe that their water tastes better than other water or other brands of water. Guess what? Fundamentally water should not have any taste. If it has taste, then you might not be selling water. But okay, but you can spend a dollar at a bottle of water. You can spend $5 or Voss, for example, can they can charge you up to $80 per bottle in some areas of Las Vegas at that point in time. By the way, your usb, your unique selling point is not the water itself. I can't imagine a good reason to spend $80 on a bottle of water. Guess what? It's about the social status that drinking this $80 bottle of water gives you. Correct. It's a boss. There's something very fancy about this. But and here's the other thing. The same bottle of Boss that costs $80 in some areas costs maybe $15 in other areas. That difference between 15 to 80 for the same item is somebody like knowing how to market the context of selling V.

Yeah, that makes sense. But just to be clear before, like I move on to the next question. Are you saying that the value proposition should be like at a company level and then for the products it has to be the USPs then if that's it, what then do you say about like, people who also say that like a value proposition has to also to be unique, like at a company level?

I think we talked about that value proposition. Start with finding a value proposition whether it's unique or not. That's a separate problem. I like to separate the two. Correct. The more you can come up with a truly unique value proposition, the better off your business is. But coming up with a unique value proposition is extremely difficult. It's not an easy feat. It's going to require a lot of work. And you think that you might have a unique value proposition. But first, is it of value to your customer? Do you actually offer it? Is it a value for your customers and is it unique? Those are the three different tests that we have to go through before we say yes, we found the right answer. I focus a lot on the first two because even the first two, do we offer it? Do customers value it? Lots of times people fail at that. They think, oh, we have unique. I'm like, no, no, no, we'll get to the unique piece. But let's think about the first two elements and try and come up with something that resonates well with our customers. Product level, like I said.

Yes.

You hit the nail on its head. I'm looking for USPs now there are lucky companies where they offer maybe one product and a couple of other things. This is all baked together. So now the USP and the UVP are very closely tied with each other. We worked with DEC which offers a truck organizers for the truck beds. So if you own a truck, a Ford 150 and then you typically throw stuff in the back of the truck and things are just flying all over the place. DECT is great product for that. It's a single product that they offer. They're very focused on that single product. Guess what? Now the unique value proposition and the USB are very closely tied. Same thing with Teach Skincare for men. Monthly subscription. Correct. It's all about skin care for men. There's sub products under that, you have usps under that. But it's all mixed together because they're not the Amazon or the ebay where there are millions of products and then the job is really hard at that point in time.

Yeah, that's good. Let's say someone who has been following like this conversation like from the previous episode and they're trying like to create like their own value proposition. Focusing on the elements that we spoke about in the previous episode. Are there like any metrics that they can use to measure the effectiveness of the value proposition once it's out there?

There are several ways to measure the effectiveness of your value proposition. Some of those in all honesty are money driven metrics. And good value proposition should do two things to your money in the bank because it will make it easier for people to depart ways with their hard earned cash. Are we getting the right value? What we're asking for, what we're asking to charge, are we getting that for our product? That's an important question because you might offer something of value and people actually value it, but you're asking for a thousand bucks. Guess what? The value that I put on this product is a hundred bucks. And at a thousand, yes, it's valuable, but not valuable enough for me. The problem that is solving for me is not a thousand dollar problem, it's a hundred bucks problem. Correct. So that's what goes into pricing and its impact on the value proposition and the particular segment that you are going after. But you can see are we getting the money that we are asking for? That's Number one, are our sales cycles really short as a result of our value proposition? Regardless, some industries the sales cycles and them are long. Let's say you sell solar equipment for houses to generate electricity. Sales cycle there is like three months. Maybe you offer something unique and then the sales cycle shrunk from three months to two months. Oh, we've done really well. Or that it went from three months to six months. Maybe this did not really resonate well with our customers. I have a friend who runs SEO software for e commerce websites. It's an enterprise SEO package where they say, listen, we're not going to charge you a penny. We come, we install the software on your website and then we are able to measure how much additional traffic we're generating and we charge you a percentage of sales. VPs of marketing usually love that. And VPs of e commerce, there's lots of challenges around it. I'm not paying any money. I'm getting more visitors to my website. I only pay for the additional traffic. That's great. It takes them almost 40 months to close a deal. It takes forever. Correct. Is by design that way.

Correct.

They need to validate your company. They need to measure a lot of things. If I would think it's an easy sell. But it really is not an easy sell. A while back we decided at INVESP to say, you know what, we're not going to force people to sign a 6 months or 12 months commitments with us when if they want to come and start working with invesp. Our work is good enough. Clients are staying with us 39 months. Why lock them in a contract if somebody decides they want to walk away? Two things. One is, although we've had long contracts with them, we told them, yeah, you can walk away. So we never actually held them to the contract language and lots of times that contract language held people back. So we're like, you know what we're going to get month to month. It's very easy, very straightforward. The question in my mind, did that make our sales cycles easier? Okay, we've made a change. We took on a lot of risk. I would have thought it did, but it had no impact on our sales cycles. People who came and hired us knew the value that we provide and the fact that we told them month to month did not really matter to them. So again, there was a value proposition. We tried to measure it and we didn't see an impact on sales or like, okay, maybe it's not of value. So you look at the money. Number two, you have to really Measure two things. One is the customer reaction to the value proposition. People who converted, people who bought from you, and interview a sample of those just to see if your value proposition resonated well with them. That's very important. If it's resonated, if that's something that they mentioned without you prompting them, great. But you need to know how to conduct those interviews. And the third one is your brand recognition against your value proposition. And in order for you to do that, you need to do some customer research. Different kind of customer research. Correct. Because it's not about the people who bought from you, but it's about the space that you occupy in the realm of potential customers who might become your customers or customers of one of your competitors. How do they identify your brand? And are they identifying with a clear value proposition that resonate? That is the value proposition that you said. You raised your hand and you said, this is my value proposition. Those are three different ways that go from dollar in the bank to existing customers who converted to the larger market space that you're going after.

Yeah, you really went in deep with that one. Because for me, like, I was actually, like, thinking of the metrics like average revenue per visitor lead to customer conversion rate, AOV retention rate, and even churn rate. Because they can also tell, right. If, like, your value proposition is good. But I like also the stories that you are throwing in there. Like, they make a lot of sense.

Hey, at any time, man, there's one thing I do is tell stories. I think all of these, whether it's retention rate, AOV conversion rate, all of these, at the end, if they're all ticking in the right direction, they translate into money in the bank. Really? That also is reflective of a value proposition that you're able to communicate really well. Because sometimes you have a value proposition, it's very clear, it's very powerful. You show it to customers and they absolutely love it. But when people are buying and you're interviewing them, they don't mention it. And when you try and dig deeper, they don't mention it. Guess what? You don't have a value proposition problem. In that case, you have a problem of communicating the value proposition, which is a whole other problem. We have the most amazing value proposition. No one knows about it. So we have the most amazing value proposition that no one knows about, no one cares for. So we gotta fix that.

Okay, so I have one more question. How do the principles of creating and communicating value propositions differ between B2B and B2C markets?

In all honesty, they don't. Differ a lot in one segment. I'm looking at companies and I'm looking at attributes. Correct. Of those companies. But at the end, you're not selling to a B2B or you're not selling in a B2B space, you're selling to other humans. This, the grouping that you're going to create is going to be a little bit different. Oh, I'm going after companies that are like 51 to 100 employees. Okay, great. Who do you sell there? I'm selling to the co founder. I'm selling to the CEO. Great. And what are the other attributes? He doesn't have a marketing team, he has a dev team. He has all of these help you to identify the target that you are going after and then you want to tailor your messaging based on the attributes of that CEO. In the case of B2B. In the case of B2C, guess what? I'm selling to females age 20 to 29 and this is how much money they make and this is the attributes that they care about my product and this is why they use my product. The categorization process looks a little bit different, but we've done enough of those categorization that after a while you just know how to do it correct. But at the end, at the very end, when you're trying to think about your value proposition, guess what question you're asking. What problems is my product solving for that particular user segments problems might look a little bit different, but really it's different even from one industry to the next. But you ask the question, what problems is my product solving? What problems is my service solving? Whether it's within a business context or a personal context. And at the end, when I'm selling, I'm selling to a human. Forget about all the big aura that we have from B2B versus B2C? It's the same thing at the end. And as a matter of fact, I think if you come at it this way, whether you are a marketer or you are a salesperson, it makes your life tremendously easier. I always joke about when we first started Divest. For the first few years, I came from consulting and I came working for a consulting company like a successful consulting company. And I wanted everybody to think that envesp is a big company. It wasn't. It was just me and Ayat, that's it, two people working. Eventually we got an office, but it was only two of us. And then we saw hiring people. And then Ayat looked at me and she says, you look at your Emails and your messaging and your signature and our website. And you would think that we are like a Fortune 500 company. And guess what? That was not the value proposition that people are looking for. They're actually looking for higher than iads. The experts in experimentation, conversion, rate optimization. The complete opposite. Correct. There's what I wanted and there's what the market wanted. And the minute I had to admit to myself, I'm like, oh, you gotta not take yourself too seriously, man. You made mistakes. You're small, and that's the advantage. That's the reason people hire you. That was a major change for us. And our sales, almost like an envelope, went 6x the next year that we made that decision.

That's good. Those are the questions that I had for you. Do you think that we have exhausted the topic of value proposition? I think so. How about you?

Yeah, we can still continue talking about examples and whatnot, but I think for now, let's pick something else and see if people have any more questions about value proposition or if you have a value proposition that you'd like us to analyze at some point, throw it our way in the comments and we'll be glad to do that. But I think that's enough for value prop.

Yeah, I think we're done.

Okay, sounds good. Thank you, Simba. Thank you everyone for listening. And I always ask this, if you know somebody who might benefit from CRO Live hour, please share it with them. We would appreciate that. And until next time, happy testing.

Sure. Sa.