Proposition Management – For Sales Growth

As organisations grow and mature, added complexity, competing demands for resources and legacy infrastructure can gradually erode and dilute the core proposition. Leading to an incoherent strategy where critical business functions-product, sales, marketing, pricing are not working in harmony to optimise performance.

Our solution

Our Proposition Management service takes a holistic approach, enabling you to re-align your business strategy around propositions with clearly articulated value statements relevant to your target customers.

We’ve developed a blueprint approach to evaluate the potential for existing and new proposition constructs, in conjunction with go-to-market strategies, to scale and optimise sales conversation, upsell and retention rates.

James Kershaw
Partner, Voice of the Customer

Challenges you may be facing

  • Business silos (multiple product teams, marketing, sales, pricing) impede a cohesive value proposition.
  • Poor and or decreasing sales performance to new prospects.
  • Poor and or decreasing cross-sell penetration rates with existing customers.
  • Legacy systems and processes add complexity to proposition design.
  • Under-used or dormant feature sets add unnecessary operating costs.
  • Poor customer satisfaction ratings/ NPS scores relative to the market.

  • Inconsistent sales and marketing messaging/constrained distribution.

Benefits we can bring

  • Improvement in critical business performance – new business sales, cross-sell rates.
  • Coherent proposition strategy (product, pricing, sales, marketing) driving growth in existing and new segments.
  • Competitive advantage in the marketplace.
  • Improved customer engagement, satisfaction and advocacy levels.
  • Aligned functional objectives (scorecards) focused on customer-led outcomes.

  • Adopted needs-based selling culture, with clear proposition ‘bundles’ mapped to end consumer needs and use cases.

  • Ability to set business objectives/ forecasts based on a clear delivery roadmap.
  • Reduced customer attrition rates.

What we do

Our proven methodology enables us to assess and design proposition constructs that resonate with specific customer needs (by market/segment), to optimise sales effectiveness.

‘As is’ Evaluation

  • We evaluate existing assets and capabilities to formulate a design hypothesis.
  • Correlation assessment – customer attributes vs product take-up and usage metrics.
  • What are the ‘anchor’ products?
  • What are the inter-product dependencies/ hierarchy/ ‘sticky’ factors?
Proposition Innovation/Product ‘Packaging’

We adopt a 3-stage rapid ideation programme:

  1. Discover: build insights around a specific opportunity and generate candidate proposition constructs.
  2. Design: design solutions that fulfil the market opportunity.
  3. Deliver: test and iterate, build a commercial case.
Pricing Strategy

  • The pricing ‘solution space’ is analytically assessed by determining market constraints and opportunities.
  • Pricing goals may necessitate changes in proposition and vice versa. A ‘test & learn’ approach is required to balance these objectives (as part of the GTM strategy) and optimise revenue.
Sales capability

  • Scaling product conversion rates, incorporating best practice sales methods, covering the complete end-to-end sales process.
  • Produce sales support materials/tailored to specific client needs assessment.
  • Create a robust sales culture with all functions/processes aligned to support the business’s growth plans.
Go-to-Market (GTM) Strategy

  • The go-to-market plan will form the roadmap to launch successfully. It will also help align all business functions to work towards the same goals.
  • Before building the proposition strategy, it is essential to have a clear idea of the operational requirements and possible risks and critical activities and milestones – locked down in the GTM plan.

How it’s delivered

We deliver our service using these core principals; comprehensively evaluate all dependencies, yet only do what is needed, achieve benefits quickly, progress in a ‘planned and agile manner’ and keep an eye on the future. Delivered through 5 stages:

1. Discovery & Diagnostic

2. Develop Hypothesis

3. Test Validity in Market

4. Implement Solutions

5. Go-to-Market (GTM)

1. Discovery & Diagnostic

Gather 360 insights (internal and external) to diagnose any underlying performance gaps and identify market value potential.

2. Develop Hypothesis

Rapid ideation to develop a range of ‘candidate propositions’, aligned to target customer personas, that are prioritised based on pre-determined criteria.

3. Test Validity in Market

Conduct primary research to validate the proposed proposition constructs and assess response to core features, pricing and promotional materials.

4. Implement solutions

Implement, test and iterate. Our approach is tailored to your business requirements, but we normally advise a single market/select segment, prior to a wider rollout.

5. Go-to-Market (GTM)

  • A launch plan running six months into the new venture. Identify dependencies and capability requirements realistic timeframes/ projections.
  • This may include a ‘sales configurator’ tool, linking the newly defined proposition constructs to segmented customer needs.

Previous success

Changing free services into a paid for subscription/bundle basis

Proposition Management All Funds Case Study

  • One of the strategic enablers that helped Allfunds become the world’s leading fund management marketplace was free value-added services to build custom at both ends of the solution. Helping to solve scaling

  • With the sale of the business to a private-equity investor and scale achieved, an opportunity was identified to grow revenues by turning the free services into a paid-for proposition, delivered digitally to the customer base.

  • Providing a bundle of solutions targeted to various customer base segments on a subscription management basis.

  • While ensuring no erosion of its primary business model, the volume of sales in the marketplace.

  • With a rich suite of services spread across various functions, the first task was to build a comprehensive catalogue of products.

  • Insights into customer groups were then generated to understand needs.

  • Strategic business rules were created to help guide the development of the proposition bundles and assist stakeholder management.

  • Proposition bundles were defined, including the translation into a digital experience.

  • Clear and straightforward pricing structures were created, including the interplay between bundles to encourage upsell (including value discounting).

  • Internal education of sales and marketing functions was conducted for buy-in. External customer testing helped to iterate and de-risk the approach.

  • Work was conducted to identify the changes in technology, organisational, and working practices to enable and support the new proposition approach.

  • Which was translated into an investment case for sign-off.

  • Allfunds launched the new ‘Connect’ service, fully accessible via a digital experience, in late 2019.

  • It has been a significant commercial success, with a 45% growth in revenues to £20mn in 2021.

    • Combined with an average number of monthly users at 7200, a growth of 32% – there has also been a recognition of the solution’s ability to enhance customer engagement of the overall Allfunds offering.

Delivering a new value proposition and distribution strategy

Proposition Management Vanquis Bank

  • Vanquis Bank had established a business goal to double monthly sales volumes by targeting three underserved consumer segments.?

  • A new product proposition (or range of propositions) was required in the ‘credit builder’ space, based on the latest market, competitor and consumer insights.?

  • To secure and prioritise investment to support this initiative, a clear business case would need to demonstrate expected outcomes from several perspectives – linking customer behaviour to product economic performance.

  • The proposed ‘go to’ propositions (product features, pricing and distribution strategy) would also need to have considered positioning versus their existing product range.?

  • A rapid assessment of the market, competitor environment and consumer landscape were conducted.

  • A range of ‘opportunity themes’ was identified and used to generate nine candidate proposition constructs. A series of workshops were facilitated to flesh out these propositions to understand all functional delivery requirements and constraints.

  • The proposition solution space was defined, working with internal stakeholders and external partners.?

  • A detailed business case and financial model were produced to forecast product/customer economics and investment requirements.

  • A delivery roadmap and consolidated implementation plans were created and socialised with all functional leads.

  • An MVP and entire ‘go to’ proposition roadmap, working prototype and detailed delivery plans by function.?

  • Customer end-to-end specifications (including product features, pricing strategy, distribution channels, ECM marketing and comms plans etc.)?

    • An entire business case, financial plan and investment budget detailed (for Manco & Exco approval).

Meet some of experts

DWG is the UK’s most experienced digital transformation consultancy. A team of 50+ senior digital change experts, internationally experienced, meet some of them:

James Kershaw
Partner, Voice of the Customer
mark churnside
Mark Chirnside
Partner, Financial Services & Fintech
Marco Potesta
Marco Potesta
Partner, Product Management
Andrew Salmon
Andrew Salmon
Managing Partner
Leonard Vitarana
Leonard Vitarana
Partner, Project Management

Need help?

Keep up to date with us or find out more about how we can help you.

Sign Up!

Keep updated with our Digital Digest for proven digital transformation advice and resources – blogs, interviews, webinars, guides and more.

Let’s talk, I
have a project

Speak to us about our deep digital expertise, end-to-end services, and proven methods.