How to build your value pillars, and get your team to agree on them

What a value proposition is for

A value proposition is a decision tool, not a tagline.

The textbook definition is the promise of value you make to a customer: the reason they should choose you over someone else. That’s fine as far as it goes. But in a B2B business with more than one service and more than one type of buyer, you need it to do something more practical.

It’s what sales uses to open a proposal. It’s what the website says at the top of the homepage. It’s what you hand an agency or a freelancer so they don’t have to guess. And it’s what you point at when someone in a meeting says “I just don’t think that’s us”.

If it can’t do those jobs, it isn’t working, however good it sounds.

Why one sentence isn’t enough

A single line has to be so general to cover everything that it ends up saying nothing.

Most B2B businesses already have a value proposition. It’s usually a sentence along the lines of “we deliver high-quality services that help our clients grow”. It was agreed at some point, it’s on the about page, and nobody has used it since.

That isn’t because the people who wrote it got it wrong. It’s because one sentence can’t carry a business that does four things for three kinds of buyer. To be true of everything, it has to be vague. Vague doesn’t get remembered, doesn’t get repeated and doesn’t win work.

Value pillars fix that. Instead of one line, you have three or four short statements. Each one is a reason someone buys from you, and each one has proof behind it. Together they’re your value proposition. On their own, each one is something a salesperson can talk about for five minutes without making anything up.

How to find your value pillars

Start with why people actually buy from you, not what you’d like them to buy.

This is the part we spend most of the afternoon on in a strategy workshop. You can do a version of it yourself.

1. List every reason you’ve ever given a prospect. Pull them from proposals, pitch decks, the website and what sales says on calls. One reason per line. You’ll have twenty or thirty.
2. Add what your best customers say. Not what you think they value. What they’ve told you in reviews, on renewal calls, or when they referred someone.
3. Group them. Most of the list will fall into a handful of themes. “Responsive”, “easy to deal with” and “always picks up the phone” are probably the same pillar.
4. Test each group against your buyer. Would the person signing off care about this? Could a competitor say exactly the same thing? If they could, it’s the price of entry, not a pillar.
5. Cut to three or four. More than that and nobody remembers them. Fewer than three usually means one pillar is doing too much work.

Write each one as a plain sentence a buyer would recognise. “We’ve done this in your sector before” beats “deep vertical expertise” every time.

Proving each pillar

A pillar without proof is just a claim, and your buyers have heard all the claims.

For every pillar, write down the evidence: a number, a client result, a process, a credential, a quote. If you can’t find any, that’s useful to know. Either the pillar isn’t true yet, or you’ve never written the proof down.

I’d lay each one out like this:

• The pillar, in one sentence.
• Why it matters to the buyer, meaning the problem it takes away.
• The proof, with numbers, names and examples.
• How it sounds out loud, in a sentence sales would actually say.

This is the bit that makes pillars useful rather than decorative. Your web team can build a page section from it. Sales can open a proposal with it. A freelance writer can produce a case study without three rounds of amends.

Getting the team to agree

Writing the pillars is the easy part. Getting six people with a stake in them to agree is the hard part.

Everyone in the business has a version of what you do, and each version is true from where they sit. Sales leans on what closes deals. Operations leans on what’s hard to deliver. The MD leans on where the business is going next. And marketing is left trying to make all three fit on one page.

That’s why value pillars rarely survive being written by one person and sent round for comments. Comments turn into edits, edits turn into a longer list, and the longer list is back where you started.

What works is getting the people with a stake in the answer into the same room, working through it together, and deciding. Once it’s decided, the conversation changes. “I don’t like it” becomes “that’s not what we agreed”, and everyone moves on.

That’s what our brand strategy workshop is for. One day, the right people, and agreed pillars by the end of it.

An example pillar set

Good pillars are specific enough that a competitor couldn’t copy them word for word.

iLockerz makes smart locker systems. When we started working with them, their website led with “Intelligent locker systems”. That’s accurate, but it describes the product, not a reason to buy it. In the workshop we stopped talking about lockers and started talking about what happens on site when they aren’t there. That’s where the pillars came from.

• “Your team gets back to work in seconds, not minutes.” Proof: staff who used to queue for twenty minutes at shift change now collect their kit in nine seconds. Out loud: “When every minute counts, iLockerz delivers.”
• “Every item is accounted for.” Proof: kit is scanned in and out, so nothing relies on someone writing it down. Out loud: “You’ll know who has what, without anyone keeping a list.”
• “Trusted where downtime isn’t an option.” Proof: NHS trusts, one of Europe’s largest police forces and Jaguar Land Rover. Out loud: “If it works at shift change in a hospital, it’ll work for you.”

Notice what changed. “Intelligent” became nine seconds. A competitor can call their lockers intelligent. They can’t claim your nine seconds or your clients. AI tools are brilliant at the obvious, and “intelligent” is exactly what one would hand you. Your pillars are the part it couldn’t have guessed.

What to do with them next

The website is one place your pillars go. It isn’t the only one.

Once they’re agreed, your pillars feed everything: the website, the sales deck, proposals, case studies, campaign briefs, recruitment ads and the brief for the next agency you hire. They also give AI tools something consistent to pick up when buyers ask about you, instead of three different versions pulled from three different pages. It’s also what stops your content sounding like everyone else’s. Good content isn’t about keywords. It’s about what you believe, and your pillars are where that gets written down.

Put them somewhere everyone can find them, and use them to check new work. Does this piece prove one of our pillars? If not, why are we making it?

Then come back to them once a year. They should change when the business changes, not every time someone new joins.

Before you start, run the four free tests that show where your positioning is stuck. If you’d rather get it agreed in a day, book a brand strategy workshop.