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The Value Chain is basically your processes, inputs, and parts that makes your operation, organisation and brand run and exist. This can be for example your I.T. infrastructure and the people in the team, your finance, marketing, truck drivers and so on.
If you have studied marketing at University, or the C.I.M., you’ll know about this. For those who want a refresher, or want to know more, here’s a link to Wikipedia to see more:
Wikepedia link for Value Chain : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_chain
USP
A Unique Selling Proposition would be on the lines of: The only drink that has a fizz. Usually, brand marketing messages want to offer one single simple message, and it does work well.
The USP can be really powerful, and persuasive. However, the human brain is greedy, and one USP proudly announced from the rooftops by competitors can be broken, unlocked, faded away.
The problem for you if you rely on a USP, is what if your competitor has a few things that go well for it? Your one single thing going for it then falls flat.
Like a game of chess, you have to know how to maneuver around marketing strategies, tactics and branding.
In fact sometimes, marketing will send out drip feed emails based on the same one theme over-and-over again, which is the USP. If you went to marketing school, USP’s are super powerful when you master them, but as I’ve alluded to, here’s how a person in the sales team, and customer success team can help you retain customers, or engage new ones.
Examples of Value Chain: (Please note these are made up examples not used in the job to help you stimulate your own ideas)
Avensure
I joined Avensure when it was a start-up in a small room, before it became a giant today. I sat across from the Founder briefly, who had a vision that told me this company would strive to be the best possible in the industry. However, with no brand recognition, it was hard to compete with huge law firms. Here’s an example of value chain vs USP in an email .
A barrister led employment law service, which includes a barrister and not a solicitor visiting you to ensure you are prepared for winning. To explain the difference, a barrister is paid on reputation on winning cases in court, whereas most solicitors are office based and work outside of court.
NOW: Pensions
I joined just as the company was picking up. I liked the interview on how this product was designed to help the low waged earner, and not just high earners.
Email 1) A single auto enrollment fund. In your research, you will find near enough 99% of people have their pension invested in a default fund. NOW has all our focus on ensuring the default fund performs to it’s maximum, and contains risk, in an investing environment with many choices.
Email 2) A portal where payroll can simply upload payroll data, and in one place manage clients and employee pensions, whether it’s 4,4,5’s to monthly payroll.
Invisalign
I liked how the company was disruptive at the time in the orthodontics market with digital technology, and the charity they sponsor called Operation Smile to help babies with a cleft lip.
Email 1) Patients may find Invisalign a higher price than other products on the market. When they understand the patented technology in the material that they will wear typically for 180 days or more, from the comfort to the ability to move teeth predictably, they will understand the difference. I’m always happy to provide refreshers to help you educate your patients.
Email 2) Introducing the new photo app. Using the latest in machine learning, you can now take a photo of a patient’s dentition, and send this image to our database. The database will check against millions of programmed data, and produce a visual image of where your patients teeth can move to, and how they look from straightening treatment. All done with just a phone photo and a few clicks. Interested to know a bit more?
Customer Success:
Again, your team can send out emails to explain technicals in a simple way. After recently learning the basics of Python, SQL and Tableau, I’ve found it would be useful if someone can explain things to non-technical people, as I was one of those a few years back and sure would have liked to know both the summary and a bit of depth from people from time-to-time on some technical things. This would make a huge difference I’d think to retaining accounts, to help them fall in love with your product and service even more.
Value Chain Summary:
As you can see, if you spend a lot of time understanding the value chain, you can write emails that beat simple USP messages to engage customers.
Other sales people and marketing teams of competitors will really struggle to match how you engage executives after they’ve read their emails. It will be a batch of low value emails along the likes of asking to catch up for a coffee vs your engaging insightful email which has a bit of delight thrown in.
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Okay, see you in the next session.
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Sales Email Tips 