Framing and Selling Your Value

By Tim Williams

Your firm’s ability to capture value is dependent on its ability to effectively communicate it. Most professionals devote boundless energy to developing a superior work product but invest precious little time learning how to showcase its true value. Brilliant work doesn’t always sell itself. 

The essential mistake most agencies make is focusing their discussions with prospective clients on “What we do” rather than “What you’ll get.” There’s an extraordinarily important difference between these two approaches. Behavioral scientists refer to it as the “framing effect.” Simply put, this is the idea that people draw different conclusions from equivalent information, depending on how that information is presented. 

Your clients buy solutions, not services

The “What we do” approach features the bullet point list of agency services, which is unfortunately the modus operandi of most professional service firms. Besides being incredibly unimaginative, this approach also does little to differentiate your firm from the multitude of others who promise the exact same services. 

On the other hand, by presenting “What you’ll get,” you’re focusing on what clients are really buying in the first place: solutions to their business problems. One of the most valuable things you and your leadership team can do in the next 90 days is to articulate a specific set of problems that your firm is best suited to solve. 

Your first draft of this list is likely to be fairly long, but if you apply some creative thought and look for common threads, you’ll be able to pare this inventory of client problems down to no more than a dozen or so. Some of the multinational agencies we’ve worked with started with tabulations of 150 and managed to bring them down to less than 10.

Competencies meet client challenges

Client problems are best described in first person — from the client’s point of view — and articulate specific challenges the client organization faces. Here are some examples:

“We need to retain our current customers — and attract new ones — as we launch a major new iteration of our brand.”

“We know there is untapped potential in our customer database, but we don’t know how to unlock it.”

“We have a strong conversation rate, but need to substantially increase the number of qualified leads in order to meet our sales goals.”

Based on these client needs, you can develop a suite of programs designed to address them. Remember, you want to serve up a set of solutions, not a checklist of services. Describe the benefits, not the features. Agencies who feature “copywriting” and “design” are only stating the obvious. When you take your car into the shop, you’re in search of a repaired transmission, not bolt turning and part fitting.

On your website, replace the “Services” section with “Solutions.” Publicis Health, a global healthcare agency, offers a compelling suite of solutions that include “Next Generation Customer Engagement” and “Data Personalization at Scale.” Each of these programs is designed to address the current challenges of pharmaceutical companies who are in search of expertise, not just service providers. 

The ultimate value of “branding”

Remember also that the value you create for clients isn’t just helping them improve their sales. When your agency talks about “branding” (a feature of what you do), the benefit to the client goes way beyond helping them sell more. A potent brand helps create customer preference, and that helps your client maintain a healthy sales price. The stronger the brand, the higher the price. This phenomenon is indisputable; the financial impact of brand equity has been demonstrated numerous times by research and brand consultancies the world over. 

Higher prices mean higher profits for your client. Remember that profit is the ultimate goal -- not sales, not revenues, not growth, but profit. And one thing eclipses all others in the business mix when it comes to profitability: the pricing integrity of the brand.

So the investment companies make in “branding” is not just to sell more, but ultimately to decrease their customers’ price sensitivity. In fact, it could be argued that the default purpose of marketing is not to increase sales but rather to increase profits. More than anything else, profit is a direct result of protecting pricing integrity through powerful brand differentiation.

What you do for your clients is immensely valuable. But to capture value, you must communicate value. This means moving from “What we do” to “What you’ll get” in every conversation, every presentation, and every communication with current and prospective clients.