4/23/2025-Weaponize your value prop (VP)

To excel in sales, you must learn to integrate elements of your scripted VP in all of your customer conversations. Even if you don’t love your company’s VP script, make it work.

Your VP is a utility knife.

It can be used to get meetings.

It can help you effectively open and close meetings.

It can be inserted strategically into any thread to remind buyers of the why.

And, of course, it can help you close business!

If you’re not using your VP in every customer interaction, it might mean you don’t buy into it and/or it’s not packaged right. Either way, you need a utility knife, so you must figure out a way to use it more …and better.

If the thought of practicing your VP isn’t appealing, it might be because you feel your VP isn’t constructed for street use. That happens…not all VPs are ready-made and perfect.

But don’t wait for script revisions from your organization; take matters into your own hands and ask your manager to help you create versions that work for you and your customers.

The risk of not proactively working on your VP is that you’ll continue talking too much about features in your pitch meetings.

Likely, your company’s value proposition is not as strong as you’d like it to be. Consider that for every seller in your org, there’s one unique perspective on what the VP should be.

But that doesn’t mean you should settle.

Indeed, it’s your job to get involved and provide feedback to your manager about how to improve the VP, but hell could freeze over before the org creates another version that’s more to your liking.

Deal with what you have and be responsible for making the current VP work.

Besides, the standard VP – including an elevator pitch plus three bullets that best outline your differentiators – is rarely presented in a linear way to your customers. To excel in sales, you must learn to integrate elements of your scripted VP in the language you speak that is relevant to the conversation.

Force yourself to talk about value even though you don’t like the current VP script. Get as creative as you need when using them with customers. They need to hear it over and over again!

This vintage training video from the UK about benefit selling illustrates the wrong way to do it: all features and no value.

Its tone couldn’t be drier and more outlandish, yet it reinforces the need to tell the customer precisely what’s in it for them.