Dan Beresh: [00:00:00] Joe, I wanna talk to you today about value propositions, what they are, how to create a good one, and what are the kinds of things you need to avoid to make sure that you're gonna create something that is gonna align everyone in your global organization and allow you to create really effective marketing and sales materials.

But before we get into that, folks, if it's your first time listening, I'm Dan Beresh. I'm the founder of Fide Creative. I have with me Joe Simone, our creative director. And, and we're Fide. We're the organization that helps complex organizations in the B2B space, like professional services, consulting, enterprise tech, to really simplify their message and then create super high quality marketing deliverables, uh, videos, et cetera, a- and all the way through to sell sheets and everything you need to fill up that pipeline and then make the sales that are gonna grow your business, uh, from the top line down.

So Joe, I'm really excited to, to dig into value propositions with you today in that we've been doing a lot of this work with a number of clients over the, the fall, so I feel like we're in a really good place to talk about it. Let's start right at the top. What is a value proposition? How do you [00:01:00] define this type of work, and why is it valuable?

Joe Simone: Yeah, it's helpful for me, too, just to kinda put myself in the position of what are we actually doing here. And when I look at a value proposition, and, uh, we've been doing a lot of this work recently, it is a crystal clear, which I think is the most important part of the value proposition, a crystal clear, um-  

Dan Beresh: It's like a crystal clear iteration of the- That,  

Joe Simone: I feel like it's a cop-out to say it's the value you provide.

But that's what it is.  

Dan Beresh: We can't even ... Wait, wait, we should just cancel this episode right now. We can't even say what a value proposition is. All right, never hire us for this work, uh, 'cause we don't know what we're talking about. No, I'm k- I'm kidding, I'm kidding. Uh, but right, yeah, it, it is what you are.

Joe Simone: Yeah.  

Dan Beresh: And very different but adjacent to what you do.  

Joe Simone: Yes, and it's also the distinct [00:02:00] value that you provide. It's a, it's a way to help differentiate yourself from your competition. And th- I think there's a multitude of layers there as well because when you look at competition, there's a lot of different people that you're competing with, right?

Like, you have your close proximity competitors who basically do exactly what you do, so how do you differentiate from them? And then there's the easier, yeah, maybe there's a little bit of advice, maybe there's a little bit of implementation that happens here, but we differentiate ourselves a little bit more strongly from those competitors.

But in the player space, they're still considered a competitor. So I think it's important with a value proposition to not only define what it is the value that you provide clearly and succinctly, but also how it makes you different from those competitors.  

Dan Beresh: Yeah, and that's so incredibly difficult for, I'm just gonna go on a limb and say the majority of our clients, the majority of people I've worked with in my career.

Very, very hard to do. And frankly, [00:03:00] it's hard for us to do as well. One of the things that I did, uh, during this process the last few months when we've been working on these value propositions with clients is I said, "Let's do some of this work for ourselves because we are the shoemaker's children. We typically do not do a lot of great marketing, uh, for ourselves, and let's, let's kinda turn the lens on ourselves."

It was an interesting workshop, wasn't it, Joe? Kinda when we talked about, you know, what we are, what we do. Uh, we brought in one of our writers, Allison Copeland, who is a phenomenal, a phenomenal writer and who I hope, by the way, to have on this podcast in a future episode.  

Joe Simone: I think it was interesting, and i- if anything, it it really helped me empathize with our clients when we're trying to pull it out of them.

Trying to do it, pull it out of myself-  

Dan Beresh: You're sitting there thinking-  

Joe Simone: I get it. That's tough.  

Dan Beresh: What? This is a really difficult question. It's so easy to be on our end, really, and ask those questions, and it's so difficult to be in the client's shoes.  

Joe Simone: Yeah, because the value an organization provides is different to everybody who's providing that value.

You know, everyone has a different lens, and it's trying to align all [00:04:00] those lenses into one clear, focused articulation of that value.  

Dan Beresh: And let's not forget that everyone has an ego, and I won't say that I don't have one. And so when it comes to the approval of these types of things, it is often the culmination not only of everyone's ideas and input, all of which is valuable, but also then people start to, you know, get in there and the politics is, uh, I would say heavier than on any type of other work that we do.

Joe Simone: Well, yeah, 'cause this is, like, your go-to-market exclamation, really. So everybody kinda- rightfully so, wants to stake a little bit of claim because they're the ones delivering that value.  

Dan Beresh: 100%, and if you're gonna stand behind a value prop, if you're gonna use it, you better like it. So- You better  

Joe Simone: believe it

Dan Beresh: as a marketer, it's your job to bring disparate stakeholders, all of whom have different opinions and egos, together and say, "Let's create something that we're all at least mostly proud of." You're not gonna- Yeah ... appease everybody. No. But you need [00:05:00] those stakeholders to actually use the work that you do, and so that becomes a real challenge.

Let's g- let's go, let's come back though just to, to this definition though because I think this is a really interesting discussion we're having, and like I think when it comes to what a value proposition is, I, I think it is, it's, it's what you are, right, to your point, and it, it is what value you provide to the specific target audience that you are going after.

And I think it's so important to talk about the fact that a value proposition can be, like it, it can be a 10 or 12 or, or 100 different it- iterations depending on who specifically you're speaking to, right?  

Joe Simone: Yeah. Um, you know, when we write value propositions, we never deliver it to client and say, "Okay, now what I want you to do is copy and paste exactly what we've written, and that's that."

The, it is, it is definitely not that. It is a, a, like a living sentiment that is there to guide how you speak. It is kind of like your true [00:06:00] north.  

Dan Beresh: It's an internal document, yeah.  

Joe Simone: Yeah.  

Dan Beresh: It's not a tagline. Yeah. It is not intended to be put on the front page of your website.  

Joe Simone: No.  

Dan Beresh: It's meant to capture what you do as a business- In a way that rallies people around.

And then kind of, it is, if you think of a, like a chart, I think of it as the center. It's that nucleus, and then you come out from the chart with your kind of, you know, hero campaign video, and your, uh, y- you know, your messaging for your website, and your email campaign, and, and all of the other marketing activities you're gonna do.

Joe Simone: Yeah. It inf- it informs your language is what it does, I would say.  

Dan Beresh: Yeah, exactly. It's really fundamentally, I think, an alignment tool, and that's why it's so difficult to create it is because a lot of the work is the alignment.  

Joe Simone: Yeah.  

Dan Beresh: And unfortunately, or, you know, fortunately, that's the work of the marketer, of the person who has to bring these people together.

Here's an interesting thing that we've seen a couple times. So you think, all right, I work in a large [00:07:00] organization. We need a value proposition for our specific team. You're really excited about doing it. You've got your agency on board. Everyone's stoked. And then you get a stakeholder who says, "I don't think this is valuable.

This is a waste of my time. Why would I participate in this workshop? Why would I give my time for an interview?"  

Joe Simone: Mm-hmm.  

Dan Beresh: What do you say to that kind of person?  

Joe Simone: First of all, I say, "Get over yourself."

I mean, w- what I try and ... I try and frame, like, the benefit for them. It's like, you know, sure, you might see this as a waste of time, but think about, like, the organizational benefit if everyone is going to market aligned. Because, you know, if you're not, you're sending mixed signals to clients, and that's no good.

You wanna present as a unified front. Um, and you know, i- if, if you think it's a waste of time, then you probably have great insight into what to say, because, uh, clearly everything's working for you.  

Dan Beresh: Yeah, in a way, that is the stakeholder [00:08:00] you want.  

Joe Simone: Yeah.  

Dan Beresh: Is that person who says, "No."  

Joe Simone: Clearly you can help inform the rest of the team on how to talk, so please come to our workshop and let's talk about it.

We could really use your insight.  

Dan Beresh: And I think the other thing is to hire an agency that has y- you know, dealt with those kinds of people before and has enough grace and experience and professionalism to understand that that person is gonna, you know, come in and have their own opinions, and everyone else is gonna come in and have their own opinions and, and come out of a workshop having heard everyone equally.

That's a real skill.  

Joe Simone: Yeah.  

Dan Beresh: So what makes a bad value proposition? What should, what should we avoid? Like, let's say, okay, so let's say you decide, all right, I'm gonna make this value proposition, and this is gonna be a great tool. It's gonna align everybody.  

Joe Simone: I think for one, it's, um It's, it's unclear. And by unclear, what can make things unclear is sometimes an over-articulation.

Trying to cram so many things into a value proposition [00:09:00] dilutes the meaning of it. You really wanna hone in on those, like, crystal clear differentiators and those value providers. Um, so short and sweet is great. If it's overly long, overly obtuse, if it's overly jargony, I know we've talked about it a lot, we're not fans of jargon because, Dan, y- I think you have a really good point about this, and I'll, I'll try and paraphrase it, but maybe you can articulate it better.

It's like if you're using language that even one person doesn't understand, you are leaving them out of the conversation and potentially losing a client.  

Dan Beresh: 100%.  

Joe Simone: Right?  

Dan Beresh: H- yeah, it, it, my rule is I ask a client and I ask our internal teams, I ask you, I ask our copywriters, I say, "Is it possible that even one person who reads this in the future would not understand it?"

And if the answer is yes, then it's why are we writing it in this way? Why, why can we not write it in a simpler way? And by [00:10:00] the way, simpler might mean more words.  

Joe Simone: Yeah, it could.  

Dan Beresh: And, and sometimes, you know, my opinion, and, uh, this may be controversial, is that longer is sometimes better if it's clearer, if it's simpler.

Joe Simone: It all comes down to understanding. I would say the way to start is to write it out as simple as possible and see how long that gets you. And then- Kind  

Dan Beresh: of  

Joe Simone: in  

Dan Beresh: a long way, like almost a paragraph. Yeah. Yeah.  

Joe Simone: Just write it all out, write everything down on the page, and then look at that, and there's, there's always a way to say something shorter.

But what you want to avoid is losing that, like, core sentiment that you're getting after. Because sometimes when you reduce, you know, five words down to two, you're losing a lot of nuance there, um, which could be, you know, what actually is your, your key differentiator or your value.  

Dan Beresh: I think we do that a lot internally.

We read what, uh, for example, our copywriting team has written, uh, or we'll go over it together, and we'll say to each other, "Tell me about this as if we were just hanging out. Like, speak really plainly and clearly to [00:11:00] me about it." Mm-hmm. And then the person articulates that, and then I say to myself or you say to yourself, "Is what that person just said articulated in a clear way in what's been written?"

Joe Simone: Mm-hmm. "

Dan Beresh: Or did they just articulate it better verbally? And if they did articulate it better verbally, then how do we incorporate that clarity into what's actually been written?" Because I think we have to come back to the purpose of this, which is an internal alignment document. It's not meant to be sexy.

It's not your website, you know, big headline. Mm-hmm. So yes, using interesting turns of phrase can maybe motivate someone when they're reading it to think, "Oh my God, this is so cool," but that's not the purpose, right?  

Joe Simone: No. And if it is all that sexy language, you can kind of deviate into a territory where they are copy and pasting it, and it's just like, "Well, it's, it's so great.

Let's just use it everywhere." It's, and that's not what it's meant for. It is meant for alignment.  

Dan Beresh: E- exactly. Let's talk a little bit about internal language as well, because you talk about jargon, and I think there's, you know, there's business jargon that everyone uses. There's acronyms that people use, and then there are turns [00:12:00] of phrase or kind of internal, uh, types of, of language that would be, in my opinion, misunderstood by a client.

Mm-hmm. I think this is the number one thing that I see where our clients fall down and where people fall down when it comes to writing this stuff, is not having that outside perspective. Not knowing what you don't know or knowing too much.  

Joe Simone: The curse of knowledge.  

Dan Beresh: Exactly. And I think that's where an agency can come in and really provide a nice sounding board externally and say, "Does this really, does this really make sense?"

I mean, how many conversations have you been in, Joe, where we have clients who are very well-intentioned and say, "Hey, let's, let's, let's say it this way." And we say, "Well totally understand that  

Joe Simone: I approach a lot of these conversations, I gotta check my ego at the door and just come in. Uh, y- you know, I'm not an idiot, but I approach it as I know nothing.

Dan Beresh: Yeah.  

Joe Simone: So explain it to me as if I don't know anything about what you're talking about. And that's not realistic [00:13:00] for, you know, the clients that they're dealing with. Like, they will have a general understanding, but it's at that base layer where I can formulate that simplified understanding that we can build from.

Dan Beresh: My shortcut is people often use the one of, uh, explain it to a five-year-old. Yeah. I don't like that because I think it's, uh, reduces it to kind of childlike or, uh, you know, a sense of entertainment.  

Joe Simone: No five-year-old I've ever met is gonna understand the business concepts that we are trying to articulate.

Dan Beresh: They're, they're off, uh, playing on their iPad after your third word. Yeah. It is the aunt or the grandma at Thanksgiving or- Yeah ... a holiday who says, "What do you do for work?"  

Joe Simone: I say relative at the barbecue that- Yeah ... that, that asks you about the s- the current thing that you're working on. How do you tell them and get them to understand?

Dan Beresh: See, that makes me sad because it's now winter here in Toronto, and I just- ... want it to be summer, and I wanna barbecue, so I don't know if I'm gonna pick that one. You can  

Joe Simone: barbecue in the winter.  

Dan Beresh: I, I feel like the, the, what, the important thing here is to, [00:14:00] the fact that, especially in a B2B landscape, you're speaking to someone who does have a, a, a modicum of knowledge.

It's- A  

Joe Simone: foundation ...  

Dan Beresh: exactly. And so it is that person, that, you know, older adult who has had a career but perhaps in a different sector, in a different era, and that is the person who I think you're trying to convince or, or at least trying to help to understand when it comes to, to the value proposition that you're writing.

Joe Simone: Yeah.  

Dan Beresh: And I think there's often ego built into complexity, meaning you want your value proposition to be extremely complex because you feel your business is extremely complex. And the more- Yeah ... complex you think your business is, the more unique and interesting you think it is. And I'm here to say I think the opposite is true.

I think if you can't explain your business in a simple way, then that is, uh, in itself the beginning of, of a kind of marketing failure. And it, it, it is why people, I think, come to people like us to say, "Give me that ex- outside perspective to..." Yeah. What do you think? Do you disagree? I s- I see it in your face.

Joe Simone: No, I don't. I don't. I completely agree. It's like, [00:15:00] um, just to like add to your point, it's, uh, I, I do see that the, the want to make it overly complex because it feels like the more complex you make it, the more you say, the more you're technically offering, which I don't think is very true. The, the, the clearer you can articulate what it is you offer, the better, uh, in my opinion, just because then you, you're working with a solid understanding of what, like, clients know what to expect.

There's no- Exactly ... there's nothing lost in translation.  

Dan Beresh: And it's important to come back to this idea that the value proposition is p- excuse me, the value proposition is what you are, not what you do. So for example, if it was an engineering consultancy, uh, and your value proposition was to be, you know, "Well, we design blueprints, and we execute on those blueprints to build buildings that are sustainable and that, uh, you know, last a long time and look beautiful," that is what [00:16:00] you do.

Joe Simone: Yeah. Not what you  

Dan Beresh: are. That's not  

Joe Simone: the value that it provides.  

Dan Beresh: Exactly. And to our conversation about your end audience, I think that's so important because that, you know, building the buildings, et cetera, the value of, of doing that is going to be vastly different to someone who is a pedestrian on the street, someone who owns the land, uh, someone who rents a office space in that building.

So it's a matter, I think of at the very beginning, understanding who you're talking to. And we will sometimes create different versions of value propositions for different audiences.  

Joe Simone: Yeah.  

Dan Beresh: Especially for big enterprise clients who speak to a number of different groups or wanna speak internally and externally, get alignment, all that stuff.

Joe Simone: I think the way you speak externally is vastly different from how you speak internally because to your point, it's who you're talking to. What, what's in it for them? What's in it for a client is [00:17:00] very different to what's in it to another internal team that may have to work with your team. So what is the value of working with your team to you, or to them rather?

Dan Beresh: I think these internal value props that we've been working on are really effective. Mm-hmm. I think that it's easy to assume that the value that the client, the end client is gonna get is gonna be, uh, absolutely loved by internal teams. And we're facing this with another client as well, where we're working on an internal communications project where I w- I'm seeing a, a lot of assumptions made a fa- around the fact that if what we're doing is gonna benefit the top line revenue of the business, then all the employees will get on board  

Joe Simone: That's, yeah.

I mean, sure, maybe people with skin in the game-  

Dan Beresh: Yeah, exactly ...  

Joe Simone: will get on board. Yeah. But the people that are just trying to execute and do their day-to-day, I don't really think they care that much. I mean, sure, I, I, I'm sure it's an added benefit, but it's not the main driver for them. [00:18:00]  

Dan Beresh: As an employee in a couple of big organizations, I was occasionally given revenue data because there were some targets that leaders had, had set.

Joe Simone: Mm-hmm.  

Dan Beresh: And my feeling was typically, "Okay." Like- Yeah. Great ... I don't know what that means. I, I don't know if an extra billion dollars in revenue, I don't know what that, what difference is that gonna make for me. And I think that we have to admit that people are selfish- Yes ... ultimately. And, and to some extent it's physiological because we're built to look out for our own needs.

And if my need as a, an analyst or a consultant or a, you know, a l- a low-level, mid-level manager is probably to get promoted and to get a good performance review and, and to kind of enjoy my life at work, right?  

Joe Simone: Yeah, like how not only get promoted, but, like, also maybe ease the burden a little bit. How is this gonna make my job a little bit easier?

'Cause everybody's got 1,000,001 things to do. Can we just make it [00:19:00] a million? That'd be great.  

Dan Beresh: Yeah, exactly. And AI is obviously the buzzword of the day, and if implementing AI is increasing your top-level revenue or allowing you to be more efficient to, you know, do more client projects, that's great. But think of, to your point, that mid-level manager for whom that AI is reducing the need to do this crappy task that they never wanna do in the first place.

Joe Simone: Yeah.  

Dan Beresh: So coming back to the value proposition, that's the benefit for that person- Exactly ... not increased top-line revenue, and that's why I think sometimes it's nice to have that internal value prop as differentiated.  

Joe Simone: Yeah, exactly.  

Dan Beresh: Let's talk about features and benefits for a second 'cause that's a major difficulty that I see with, with our clients.

Mm-hmm. Joe, talk, talk to me about what's a feature, what's a benefit, and why is it important for us to always be talking about benefits?  

Joe Simone: You put me on the spot here because I, I often struggle with it, too. It's tough. A feature is what something does. Think about it from, like, the perspective of an iPod.

What an iPod does is it has a terabyte of storage, right? That's factually [00:20:00] true. In your pocket. In your pocket. But what does that actually mean? It actually means that you can take your music library with you wherever you go, and you have the freedom to listen to it wherever. That freedom of listening to your music wherever, that's the benefit of having a terabyte of storage in your pocket.

Dan Beresh: 100%. We often think about when it comes to, for example, enterprise consulting, single pane of glass.  

Joe Simone: Mm-hmm.  

Dan Beresh: As that's your dashboard. You're gonna see everything from a 30,000-foot view. Let's just incorporate some buzzwords here. Why not? Uh, that may not be the benefit, right? That is a feature- No, that's a feature

is a single pane of glass. The benefit is what? Quicker decision-making, ability to see, uh, even the ability to see real-time data may not be the ultimate benefit. And the way that we typically do this is, yeah, there's one feature that leads to a benefit of that feature, and then that benefit can have other larger scale or, or greater, uh, implication, you know, [00:21:00] benefits.

Joe Simone: It's a cascading effect. So, you know, when we're doing a lot of this value proposition work, we will ask clients, "Okay, name a feature, then list the benefit of that feature." And then when they do that, a lot of the times it could just be another feature, so we ask them to drill deeper. But a lot of the times it is a benefit, and we say, "Okay, but what's the benefit of that benefit?"

Mm-hmm. And you just keep going deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper until, you know, you get to the, the same answer of, you know, I make more money, or I feel better, or If you can go one layer back from that and see what the actual feature benefit is just by drilling, keep drilling through those, those features and benefits, you can land at some really insightful things that you otherwise might have not thought about.

Dan Beresh: 100%.  

Joe Simone: So it's taking those steps- Yeah ... to, to find something interesting.  

Dan Beresh: To find something differentiated that feels- Yeah ... unique to what you're doing. So let me make this real with this example for, you know, let's use the single pane of glass. Uh, [00:22:00] so, uh, let's say we're working with a telco organization. The single pane of glass is your feature.

Your benefit is ability to see real time metrics. The ability, the, the benefit of ability to see real time metrics is ability to make decisions more quickly. The benefit of ability to make decisions more quickly is, uh, the ability to reduce, uh, risk. And the benefit of reducing risk is, uh, longevity and profitability of the organization, let's say.

Joe Simone: Yeah.  

Dan Beresh: So that's kind of what I would call, like, a single string of features all the way through benefits. Now, a lot of benefits are gonna result in longevity and profitability of the organization. So that may not be, I think to your point, Joe, the kind of most interesting thing we wanna glom onto when it comes to writing the value proposition.

Joe Simone: Yeah, you wanna take a step back from that, um, maybe go a layer above. And, you know, to your point, a single pane of glass, you can still examine that same feature and get different benefits. You can go down different benefit chains, so to [00:23:00] speak, s- to, to find really interesting differentiators just from that one feature.

So it's worth exploring over, and over, and over again.  

Dan Beresh: A lot of this work feels, I think, repetitive and sometimes frustrating-  

Joe Simone: Mm-hmm ...  

Dan Beresh: to the folks who are doing it.  

Joe Simone: Yes.  

Dan Beresh: And we saw that - Yes ... when we did it on ourselves, but I think it's, it's a worthwhile exercise.  

Joe Simone: I think it's a worthwhile exercise, and, you know, it's just a matter of framing it for them.

When you see the frustration, when you see the annoyance. I mean, Dan, you've done it to me when we're just kind of talking about this. You'll ask me, "Okay, and then what? And then what? And then what?" And it's in those moments of, you know, it's not grasping for straws, but it's, it's trying to frame it differently that I come up with some really different things, and those are what the differentiators are.

So it's, it's worth feeling the frustration, the annoyance because what you get out of that is something you otherwise wouldn't have landed on.  

Dan Beresh: Absolutely. In a way, it is a creative [00:24:00] ideation and brainstorming exercise. Yeah. And I, I like to frame it that way rather than a reduction exercise- Right ... where there is a single correct answer.

And I think i- if changing your mindset allows you to explore new and different options and not feel like, "Oh, I have to say the exact perfect correct answer," 'cause I think the standard advice would be There's one value proposition for a company or one value proposition for a group, and it is singular and it is either correct or it's not.

And I'm, I'm, I'm here to say don't put your- that much pressure on yourself. I think doing these exercises, especially with senior leaders, getting everyone in the room, you're gonna come up with something really interesting. I think, um, the, the, uh, the one thing I wanna touch on here, Joe, is a little bit about our, our process when we do this with clients.

Joe Simone: Yep.  

Dan Beresh: So just walk me through kinda how does this work from the very beginning of, okay, let's say I'm the client. I say, "Joe, I want Fide to create some value propositions for me." What are the activities that you're [00:25:00] doing with the senior leaders, with the marketing leaders, and, and how do you eventually arrive at those value propositions?

Joe Simone: Uh, are we talking about the workshops that we run?  

Dan Beresh: Yeah, let's talk about- Or  

Joe Simone: before that?  

Dan Beresh: Yeah. No. Let, let ... I mean, let's ... Well, tell me everything. Like, where do we start before the workshops? What are we doing?  

Joe Simone: I think before the workshops it's important to, you know, meet with the marketer that has this initiative and outline, you know, why are we doing this?

And typically it, it, it's the same thing. It's like, you know, we want organizational alignment, we want everyone going out to market. But maybe there's some other things. We just had one where they weren't sure if how they've structured their services made sense. Maybe it's, okay, do we combine them? Do we split them into more?

Um, there's a lot of things to, to take into consideration, so it's, it's kinda getting that framework of what your objectives are before you go into these workshops. And then in the workshop, that's where we get to the meat of it. We get, uh, a bunch of senior leaders in a room who all have skin in the game, who all are [00:26:00] delivering these val- this value.

So how do they see it? And then it's running a bunch of creative exercise to get them thinking differently about what they do. Because they do what they do every day, all day, and, you know, they think they know how to talk about it, and it's getting them to talk about it in a different way that they are not used to.

I don't know how much detail you want me to go into our different workshop steps. Maybe that's the secret sauce, I'm not sure. But we do have- Why don't we  

Dan Beresh: leave that? I'll say that's the secret sauce. You gotta, you gotta pay for that one. That's paywalled.  

Joe Simone: Yeah. We have four or five exercises, um, that we- th- they're not set in stone.

We iterate on them almost after every workshop. We say, "What worked well? What didn't work well? What can we improve?" Um, we run them through these creative workshops and just get them to think differently about how to talk about the value, get them out of their comfort zone. Get, get them all in a room, all out of their comfort zone, and see what sticks.

And once you start [00:27:00] seeing what sticks, and you see all the little squares on the call nodding in agreement, it's great to see them all leave happy because every workshop that we've done ends with, "Wow, I didn't really know what to expect with these exercises. They were out of left field. Never done something like this before, but it really helped us all get on the same page and talk about what we think our true differentiator and value is."

Dan Beresh: Yeah, it's, it's, uh, incredible to see people come in who are, I think, inevitably always skeptical, and maybe that's just the nature of it and the nature sometimes of these marketing or creative exercises.  

Joe Simone: Mm-hmm.  

Dan Beresh: And seeing the... I feel, you know, really validated when we see at the end of the workshops people saying, "Yeah, this was awesome."

So what's, what do we do then, Joe? Well, how do we take it from the end of this workshop where there are all these sticky notes on this digital whiteboard? How do we bring that to life and make it real?  

Joe Simone: Uh, I think it's about, you know, bucketing common themes that you see. It's, it's finding the common thread, [00:28:00] uh, seeing what comes up again, and again, and again.

Maybe there's a really interesting idea, but maybe it only comes out once. If it does and it's really super interesting, maybe it's worth following up with that person and say, "Let's, let's step this out more. What do you mean by, like..." And seeing how you can link it back to that common thread. But that's really what it is, is finding those common thread through the hundreds and hundreds of stickies that we get people to write.

Um, and then- We typically try and put together kind of like a key findings, maybe like eight to 10 bullets of, you know, this is what we're hearing from what was said. Um, just validate. Send it back to the participants. Are we right? Have we missed anything? Did we not miss anything, but there's something else that you want to include?

Let us know. Typically, I would say 99% of the time, it's just a big thumbs up. This is great. And I think even those insights from the workshop are the first step to [00:29:00] providing value to not just the marketers, but, but the people participating in the workshops who are inevitably gonna benefit from these clearly written UVPs and, and boilerplates.

Dan Beresh: I think you do have a sense of, oh my God, I've just taken an hour and a half or two hours out of all of these senior leaders' time, and their time- Mm-hmm ... is so valuable. Like, how expensive was that meeting? Y- completely setting aside the cost of the agency. Yeah. Uh, but that Almost always puts their mind at ease and, and gets that response of, "Oh, wow," like, "This, this was really super worth my time."

I think it's actually your first step to getting, getting their buy-in for future work almost. Y-  

Joe Simone: yeah, it's weird though 'cause it's at the end, and you always get one senior leader saying, "Okay, y- w- yeah, we've just sat here for 90 minutes. Now, now what?" You're like, "Fair. Totally fair." Yeah. "Now let me tell you what we're gonna do."

And I think, like I said, once you send that kind of summary of, "Hey, this is what we're hearing from everybody," that's kind of the [00:30:00] aha moment for, like, oh, yes, this is insightful. This makes sense. We've had the leader of, you know, if you look at the umbrella of, uh, a service that we're, we're doing this work for, the leader come back from those, those, um, key findings and say, "This is unbelievably useful.

This is ... I'm really excited to see what these value propositions become because from what you've gathered here is very insightful. It's not how we typically talk." Um, and it's just, it's this different creative lens that we've pulled from them.  

Dan Beresh: Yeah, that's an interesting thing, not how we typically talk, and I love when we hear that.

Sometimes people think, oh, this isn't similar to the previous things we've done, and so therefore it's not in the right type of language or it's not in the, you know, perfect brand voice. Mm-hmm. And I'm here to say, uh, from my perspective, this is an internal document. It is an alignment document. It is intended to be, uh, y- you know, simple.

And, and by simple I don't mean [00:31:00] we, we brush past the complexity, as we've talked about, but it is easy to understand. And so it doesn't need to be, excuse me, in a perfect language that is meant for a kind of external face and copy. That's your next step. Yes. What we're trying to do right now is give you something that your analyst to your senior VP can read it, and all of them are gonna understand it and all of them can action on it.

Joe Simone: To your point, we're giving you the nucl- the nucleus, and it's your job to expand out from there.  

Dan Beresh: And what an exciting moment, I think, for the people who have these value propositions and now have just a world of possibility of marketing content collateral they can create. And I wanna say sales content as well.

Mm-hmm. The other drum I wanna beat here is I think this is an opportunity to bring sales and marketing together- Yeah ... in the sense that this is how we go to market, whether it's a one-on-one meeting or whether it's a email blast campaign type of thing. I think that, uh, if everyone has that same language that's underpinning the way in which they're speaking about it, that is [00:32:00] where you're gonna start to get a much, much more effective, uh, marketing strategy, especially with a lot of these enterprise companies we work for, for whom, you know, our stakeholders are

You know, the average workshop that we run is what? Australia, it's, uh, uh, other APAC Asian countries, it's middle of Europe, it's UK. There's typically a stakeholder in the US.  

Joe Simone: But I think these workshops, like, it's worth it. It's worth getting this global perspective. That's, that's what you need if you're working with a global organization, you need input from everybody.

It matters, because how you talk about something in Australia might be totally different from how you talk about it in the United States.  

Dan Beresh: We see a lot of this where people are saying, "Do other people in other geographies have the same issue I have?" And almost every single time you just see the nodding, "Yeah, absolutely.

I have this problem." But it took until the workshop for them to come together and to actually talk about it. Yeah. So in that way, the workshop has this secondary benefit of being this wonderful forcing function of bringing these people together, bringing different leaders together, and having them talk about the challenges that they have, [00:33:00] and I think ultimately coming out feeling like way, way stronger and better for it.

Joe Simone: Yeah. I'm curious, like, how often do these people in the workshops, have they ever interacted with each other before? Because they're all serving the same function in their geographies. If they've, if they've never had the chance to one-on-one, or if those chances are few and far between, this is a fantastic opportunity to, to get that alignment.

Dan Beresh: Yeah, and I, I mean, obviously we don't have those answers, but if I was to make a conjecture, I would say every business is just trying to do the very best they can with the resources that they have. Mm-hmm. And the leadership and those decisions the leaders are making, right? And inevitably, in, especially in a large matrix global organization, you cannot organize for everyone to meet all the time.

It's just- Yeah ... never gonna be, it's just, we just l- don't live in a perfect world and, and there aren't 150 hours in the week.  

Joe Simone: It's also herding cats. Like,  

Dan Beresh: it's, it's impossible. 100%. Everyone's got [00:34:00] their own... And the, the higher up you are, the more you are focused, laser focused on exactly, I think, what it is that, that you need to be doing as opposed to having maybe this bit of a broader, um, scope in terms of the, the work and things you're doing.

So you're saying, "Well, I, I care deeply, deeply about the UK, and, um, am I gonna spend a week in Asia Pacific learning how they do that? Well, that would be beautiful and, and wonderful, but I just don't have the, the time." I, I think that's what I see. And, and so this is, this is, this provides that opportunity for them, and- Mm-hmm

and I see it being a huge benefit. Joe, um, this is, this has been great. Uh, we, we've got so much, uh, content here for people to, to listen to. And, and if you're listening right now, I, uh, I, I think I, I wanna wrap it up here, but I think what we should do is it'd be really interesting to, to talk to you a little bit about where to go from here.

How do we take the value proposition? How do we make it real? And maybe we incorporate that into a future episode.  

Joe Simone: Sure. Sounds good. I ... Are we talking about it now, or are we talking about it in a future [00:35:00] episode?  

Dan Beresh: I'm confused. No, I was think- I was thinking, like, you know, 'cause we've done a little bit of work around, um, how

Like, we, we, we were helping one of our clients, you know, with, "Okay, we've given you value propositions. Now how do we- Right ... enable-  

Joe Simone: How do you use it?  

Dan Beresh: Exactly. What, what do you, how do you take a value prop and make, uh, a video script? How do you take a value prop and make a whole campaign? How do you take a value prop and send it to that non-marketing executive who is in a sales function, and then needs to go into a meeting next week, and has no idea how to use his value prop?

Like, how do you enable those people to be successful?  

Joe Simone: I think that that warrants a completely separate episode as well. Absolutely. Yeah. But if I, if I can leave one little piece of, of, of how to is, is what I said kinda at the top is, is is it your North Star? It is the thing that guides what you write. So if you can ensure that that video script s- gets the elements of that UVP sprinkled throughout so that, you know, what we're saying with the script can tie back to that seamlessly, and it all [00:36:00] hangs together, that's, that's how you use it effectively.

And that can apply to beyond video scripts. It can b- apply to emails that you send out. It can, it, it can apply to website copy. It's just, it's, it's your, your truth. Yeah. That's what you're aiming for.  

Dan Beresh: Exactly. I love that. It's your North Star. Folks, thanks very much for listening. I hope you got some value out of this, uh, this episode.

It's been so fun to talk to you about this, Joe, especially 'cause we've been so immersed in it for the last few months.  

Joe Simone: Mm-hmm.  

Dan Beresh: And, uh, yeah, let's make another episode about how to make this real. Until then, this has been the Fide Podcast. Thanks very much for listening.

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