The Value Proposition Canvas

Create the value your customers want

Are you clear about who your customers are, how they behave and how well your offer fits their needs? My experience - including with my own customers and prospects - is that we often make assumptions that just aren’t true about our customers and their behaviours. It doesn’t mean that we won’t sell any of our services or products, we just may not achieve the sales we believed were possible.

That presents a challenge with often limited resources. If you invest in marketing and promotional activity to sell an offer that doesn’t fit, doesn’t meet needs, then you are wasting some of your time, money and energy. Fundamentally, you might be risking your future because there isn’t sufficient need in the market for your products and services to make a viable and sustainable business.

What can you do about it?

One way of approaching this is to capture your thinking using the Value Proposition Canvas (VPC). Why? Going through an exercise like this is helpful in making sense of all that you know about your customers, identify the assumptions that you have made and provides a methodology for better understanding their needs and how you might meet them.

With a better understanding of your customers needs and how they behave you are better able to design products and services they want. The VPC works well in conjunction with the Business Model Canvas and other strategic management and execution tools and processes to help you understand how value is created in your business. This helps you manage your business more effectively, make better more effective decisions.

So, you can use the Value Proposition Canvas to improve existing value propositions and invent new ones too. It’s also a great way of creating a shared language of value creation within your team and for the whole business as you grow. Once implemented, then you can continuously invent and improve value propositions that meet different and changing customer profiles; profiles that never stop evolving.

I’ve been working with the VPC for a number of years, training people to use it to better understand how their offers fit with customer needs and bring confidence to the decisions they make. While it is a standalone tool, it enhances the value of the business model canvas and is at the heart of developing a scalable, sustainable business model.

The Value Proposition Canvas can be further explored and templates downloaded on the Strategyzer.com website

Value Proposition Canvas

The Value Proposition Canvas

Create the value your customers want

What can you do about it?

Enter the competition