By Kelly Lawrence, Founder & CEO, Lawrence Innovation

As we cheer the incoming new year and embrace new hopes for a brighter future, organizations often kick-off the financial year with a series of internal meetings. While alignment is both good and necessary, this year, I challenge you and your teams to remember your customers and make them your number one focus. Remember our customers? But, Kelly, we work with customers every day, it’s not like we can forget them. And yet, a lack of value proposition continues to be cited as a top reason for lack of growth by a multitude of respected business experts and publications from Seth Godin to Forbes.

“A value proposition is a promise of value to be delivered, communicated, and acknowledged. It is also a belief from the customer about how value will be delivered, experienced and acquired. A value proposition can apply to an entire organization, or parts thereof, or customer accounts, or products or services.” - Wikipedia

More simply put, a good value proposition is the lifeblood of your business. It is critical to accelerating sustainable, long-term growth. Achieving a good value proposition requires organizations to understand customer unmet needs.

A recent study by The AIM Institute, explored 24 growth drivers with 540 business-to-business (B2B) professionals with more than 10,000 years of combined management experience. Participants ranged from small businesses to Fortune 100s and interesting, there was no difference in the findings based on company size. Universally, the study found the biggest growth driver every business needs to improve is understanding customer unmet needs.

It’s easy to see a good value proposition. Here are a few note-worthy examples. They’re often inspiring and make you want to take action. They explain how the product/service/company will solve a problem that is highly relevant to the customer and how the customer will be better off for it. In B2B, value propositions include quantified benefits such as ROI or cost savings. Yet, somehow crafting a good value proposition can be extremely difficult.

How do we know if we are sufficiently communicating value proposition? During my days of working on strategic new business development for Berkshire Hathaway’s Lubrizol, our CEO Eric Schnur used to play the role of the customer and ask “So what?” I’ve appreciated these two simple words more and more over the years. They forced me to distance my brain from my beloved idea and really look to see if it made sense to our customers. In using “So what?” as a check for effective communication of value proposition, there is an assumption that the problem being addressed is an unmet need that customers want to be solved. For example, if I tell you my flight services can get you from your house to your downtown office in just 20 minutes savings you time and the planet, that sounds great until you say, “but I work from my home office.” If there’s no need, there’s no value proposition no matter how good the quantification.

We can answer “what’s in it for me” and “so what” until the cows come home, but if the problem we are solving is not a true unmet need of the customer, it won’t matter. If every company small and large needs to get better at discovering customer unmet needs, how much time, effort and money are we wasting in trying to persuade customers to buy products and services that don’t solve real problems - that lack a validated value proposition?

So, back to my point that it is time to remember our customers. What unmet needs are you solving for your customers? How are you communicating your value proposition to your customers? These are tough questions and questions each of us must answer if we are to improve our value proposition and improve business success rates. 2020 showed us that disruption happens. Change is inevitable. We don’t have a crystal ball to tell us what this new normal will be. But we do know that success in 2021 and beyond will come from helping our customers.