How We Create Great Business Propositions: A Case Study

The Challenge

The difficulty is that, from the inside of a business, it can be really difficult to diagnose what’s wrong. Your teams understand the business, sales conversations seem to be going fine, and your products and services are great. So what’s the issue?

Well, when you get a third-party perspective, you’ll start to see things a little differently. We’ve seen websites where the same company is described three different ways depending on the page. Sales teams positioning things one way, marketing another. Messaging that leans heavily on features and process, but never quite explains why it matters.

And these aren’t the only things that can affect the way you communicate:

• Civica had a vast product portfolio that had been built via acquisition. Every new product added brought its own tone of voice. Things were not consistent at all, and they needed help bringing everything under the same tonal umbrella. 
• Parking Facilities were undergoing a significant rebrand to help improve their reputation and demonstrate that they were taking change seriously. 
• Procure Education are an ambitious start-up who wanted to disrupt the school procurement ecosystem. They knew what they wanted to say, but weren’t sure how to say it in the right way. 
• Leukaemia Care required not one, but 4 unique propositions as part of their rebrand; one that speaks to each of their unique audiences and resonates uniquely. 

All of this is complex enough, but now brands have another wrinkle to consider: Business propositions must be clear enough for AI search engines to understand and recommend.

More and more, people are turning to LLMs like ChatGPT for answers. Your business proposition needs to be clear, accessible and ready to be used by both AI and humans. 

All of the above culminate in one key challenge businesses have with their propositions: You’re not communicating your value in the best possible way. 

The Solution

A good proposition needs to be representative of both the business and the people who keep it running. 

And if we want what we do to truly resonate with your audience, we have to start with a conversation. 

We talk to your leadership, sales and delivery teams; basically, any stakeholder who understands either the business or your target audience very well. 

Taking these learnings (often in the form of thousands of words of notes), we distil everything down into a tight, 150–250-word proposition. Something structured enough to guide decision making, but natural enough that teams will want to use it.

It needs to:

• Define the problems you solve for your audience. 
• Articulate how you solve these problems. 
• Introduce your product/service in an easily understood manner (for both humans and AI). 

Once this is in place, it becomes an internal reference for your teams to use across website copy, sales decks, campaign messaging; anything at all. If everyone’s using it as a basis for how they communicate, you start to see a unified message being presented, no matter the touchpoint. 

The Results

The best part of having a new business proposition is how quickly you start to see it changing how people communicate. 

• You’ll hear it in snippets of sales calls, sometimes word-for-word, sometimes adapted.
• You’ll see it in marketing comms, across your website, emails, etc. 
• You’ll even hear it internally when people are trying to explain the business to someone new. 

But this only happens when you do things right. If you make a convenient, easy-to-use proposition, people will use it. 

A good proposition will also expose other issues:

• Gaps in your offering become more obvious when you’ve got a clear way of describing what you do. 
• Weak points in existing messaging stand out. 
• Sales content that was never going to land and needs to be amended. 

Finally, the biggest difference (the thing you’re really here for) is how a refined proposition makes selling your products/services so, so much easier. 

Prospects get to a point of understanding quicker, which changes the shape of the conversation. You spend less time setting the scene and more time discussing whether it’s a fit. That’s where it starts to have a commercial impact, because fewer conversations stall early on.

It’s not about polishing language for the sake of it.

It’s about giving the business something solid enough that everything else can move a bit faster, and with a bit more intent behind it.