Structuring Your Unique Value Proposition
Understanding your value makes winning easier and more predictable. Your unique value proposition should combine functional, economic, and emotional value into one sharp competitive advantage that shows prospects exactly why you're the obvious choice.
Understanding and clearly communicating the value you provide is essential to succeeding in scaling a company. When you understand the value only your offering brings to the table, winning becomes easier, faster, and simpler. Growth becomes more constant and predictable.
Winning becomes easier, faster, and simpler
Once you can narrow down your competitive advantage, your daily sales work and decision-making are simplified because you know exactly where to focus and which opportunities to prioritise. Your external and internal communication improves, including how you help each other and play to win as a team. You can implement a clear and consistent way to measure progress across your team.
Where Does Your Competitive Advantage Come From?
Your competitive advantage comes from a combination of factors that competitors cannot easily replicate. A big part of this is called the Unique Value Proposition. Before we explore how to structure a compelling UVP, we need to understand what makes one work in the first place.
What is a Unique Value Proposition?
Your Unique Value Proposition is the overarching promise of the specific, measurable outcomes a customer achieves by partnering with you.
A strong UVP focuses on the value exchange. What the customer sacrifices (pays to you) must be less than what they gain (the value you provide). It moves beyond the "What" (features) and the "How" (process) to anchor firmly in the "So What?" (outcomes). While a USP focuses on your uniqueness in the market relative to competitors, a UVP focuses on your indispensability to the customer relative to their status quo.
Not everything qualifies as a UVP. Vague aspirational statements like "we empower businesses to grow" or "unlocking your potential" are not UVPs because they lack a concrete promise. A UVP is not a mission statement; it is a commitment to a result. If a customer cannot visualise how their life or balance sheet changes after reading your value proposition, you haven't yet identified the value.
What Makes a Good Unique Value Proposition?
A genuine UVP has four characteristics:
- It is outcome-oriented. It doesn't describe what you do or talk about the features you have. It describes what the customer gets. Think about "secure zero downtime" rather than "providing 24/7 monitoring".
- It is segment-specific. A value proposition that tries to appeal to everyone appeals to no one. It must resonate with the high-priority "job to be done" of a specific customer segment, reflecting their language and the metrics for success they use.
- It is crystal clear. A prospect should understand the primary benefit of your solution without needing a technical deep-dive. Complexity is the enemy of perceived value. Avoid vague words like “innovative” or “best-in-class.”
- It is quantifiable. It anchors the promise in reality. Ideally, it is a hard metric, like saving $50k/year (or increasing Y, reducing Z risk...). A strong UVP helps the buyer build a mental business case for the purchase.
These four characteristics ensure your value proposition is unique and not just words. For a UVP to be truly compelling, it must be substantiated by the three dimensions of value outlined next.
Three Dimensions of Value Proposition
Your unique value proposition should sit at the intersection of functional, economic, and emotional value. The trick is to have one sharp UVP that's backed by all three, not three separate value propositions.
Functional Value
Functional value is what your solution does and the job it gets done. Anchor your UVP in a very specific job to be done, not a broad claim. Make the outcome measurable in terms of speed, accuracy, coverage, or reliability. Tie the uniqueness to a structural advantage, whether that's architecture, data, workflow, or domain expertise. Functional value is not about your product's features, but it is the closest you should get to discussing them.
Functional value is what your solution does and the job it gets done.
Consider a security platform. The functional promise might be to detect cloud threats in minutes rather than hours. The value becomes more specific: scanning purpose-built for cloud-native workloads, giving full visibility in under five minutes. This is a functional edge that (in this example, we presume) competitors struggle to replicate because of how you have built the product.
Economic Value
Economic value is how your solution affects money through costs, revenues, risks, or productivity. Translate your functional value into palpable financial outcomes, such as savings, avoided losses, or additional revenue. Make the numbers credible using benchmarks, customer data, and success stories.
Economic value is how your solution impacts money through cost, revenue, risk, or productivity.
Using the same security platform example, the economic promise might be reducing incident response costs by 40% and avoiding multi-million-dollar regulatory fines.
Emotional Value
Emotional value is how your solution makes the buyer and users feel. This usually means making them feel safe, confident, recognised, and in control. Behind every enterprise purchase sits a person with personal stakes in the decision. They want to know they've made the right choice, that they're in good hands, and that this decision will make them look smart rather than expose them to risk. When the value you provide makes someone feel confident in their choice, you remove one of the barriers to closing.
Emotional value is how your solution makes the buyer and users feel.
Start from the personal stakes of your champion, whether that's a VP of Engineering or a RevOps lead. Express how you change their emotional state: from anxious to in control, from exposed to protected. Use language they'd use in a corridor conversation. Phrases like "I'm not the bottleneck anymore," or "I look like the one who fixed this" resonate because they're authentic. For the security platform above, the emotional promise might be that the buyer sleeps at night knowing there are no blind spots in their cloud.
Build a Unique Value Proposition with Three Dimensions
Use this structure to combine functional, economic, and emotional value. With a bit of polishing, you can articulate your UVP.
Here's how this works in practice, using the security example from all three dimensions:
For security teams at fast-moving tech companies, we deliver complete infrastructure visibility, so they can reduce incident response costs by 40% and not worry about any blind spots because of our cloud-native architecture.
To use it as a tag line, feel free to polish it.
For VP Sales at Series B SaaS companies running complex sales cycles, we're the only revenue intelligence platform that surfaces hidden pipeline risks seven days before they impact your forecast. This gives you time to course-correct, improving forecast accuracy by 35% and eliminating last-minute scrambles. You stop feeling blindsided by deals slipping and start feeling in control of your number because our AI was trained on 10,000+ B2B SaaS deals at your exact stage, while generic tools use broad enterprise data that misses your patterns.
Above hits all three dimensions. The functional value is surfacing risks seven days early through AI trained on relevant data. The economic value is 35% better forecast accuracy and fewer late-stage surprises. The emotional value is moving from blindsided to in control, which matters deeply to someone whose job depends on hitting the number quarter after quarter.
The structural reason competitors can't copy this is the specific dataset. Generic revenue intelligence platforms train on all enterprise deals. This platform has focused its learning on the exact stage and motion at which these buyers operate. That specificity creates defensibility.
Why a Strong Unique Value Proposition Is Important?
When your UVP includes all three value dimensions, several things happen. Sales conversations shift from feature comparisons to discussions of business impact. Your team can articulate value consistently because the framework is clear. Buyers can justify premium pricing because they understand the economic return and feel confident in their decision.
Most importantly, you stop competing on price because you're the specialist, not a commodity. You're solving a problem in a way that no one else can credibly claim to match.
Understanding your value makes winning easier, faster, and simpler. When your unique value proposition sits at the intersection of what you do, what it means financially, and how it makes buyers feel, you transform from another vendor into the obvious choice.
