Brace yourself. The sentence in the next paragraph has been specifically designed to make you uncomfortable, trigger your gag reflex and cause you to roll your eyes uncontrollably. Ready?
We are an innovative, market leading, premier provider of high quality, customer focused solutions, reliably delivered through trusted partnerships grounded in our rich history of great service and superior people.
Are you OK? Able to continue? I know, reading that clap-trap all lumped together in the context of a blog post, exposes a whole collection of company-describing words as meaningless drivel. You’re embarrassed for the knucklehead who would try to pass that sort of trite, cliche-ridden, totally undifferentiated nonsense off as a “value proposition.”
Speaking of value propositions… Any of those words or phrases on your web site? Or in any of your proposals? Or plastered on your sales collateral? Or pop out of your mouth during sales calls?
Using any of them one at a time or in different combinations does not make them any less pathetic. Please stop. Please delete those words and phrases from your marketing materials and stop uttering them yourself.
You’re better than that. You know that deep down inside customers don’t care about you. They don’t care about your products. They don’t care about your services. They don’t care about your company. They’re in the money-making business. Your value propositions talk cash.
