What Does Providing Value Really Mean? 12 Client-Service Professionals Weigh In

Written by Mariela Azcuy

Published September 2021

When your business or function services clients, the word “value” tends to come up again and again. But, have you ever suspected not everyone is always on the same page about what that term means?

The signs are usually there -- there’s head nodding but stunted discussion or an example of value someone uses doesn’t align with what’s in your head.

We reached out to a crew of client professionals -- servicing internal and external clients -- to get some consensus on what “providing value” really means.

One of the biggest overlapping themes we noticed in responses was that value lies in the eyes of the beholder. 

Tosca diMatteo, Founder, TOSCA Coaching and Consulting

Providing value is about centering your stakeholders and being of service to them. This requires being curious about their pain points and understanding if and how you can be of support (either through your own services or through connections / knowledge). Providing value is not something that can be fully determined by the provider – as it must be received as such by the recipient – even if that isn’t in the present moment.

Jamie Bell, VP of Marketing, Workshop

Value is subjective! It’s up to the person on the receiving end to define your offer as valuable.

Where does this leave organizations trying to be proactive about providing value? We can’t just hope, right?

Jamie Bell, VP of Marketing, Workshop

First, I’d say customer and/or prospect interviews: Spend time with 25 or so to learn about their problems and what would be valuable to them. And don’t forget KPIs: At their heart, a lot of performance metrics are measuring value (MRR or purchases, click through rates for emails, conversion rates for landing pages, etc.)

Lisa Bagley, Director of Global Internal Communications, Takeda

Providing value means helping someone or an organization meet their goals in a measurable way. For example, if you’re trying to build awareness, does the reader finish an article knowing more than they did before and have you inspired them to spread what they’ve learned via their own formal or informal networks? If you’re trying to drive purchase consideration, are they clicking through or searching for more information.

Another big theme? Value means the benefits are “above and beyond” -- what clients expected, what they can do on their own, what money can buy.

Ariel Nathanson, SVP, Full Picture

Providing value means delivering what your client either can’t do in-house or doesn’t have the expertise to do – and doing it in a way that ultimately ladders up to a specific measurement of success. If your client is on the comms team, success might mean earned media. If your client is on the content team, that might mean higher viewership, and so on. Value is a vector – meaning it has both a measurement of magnitude and direction. You are only providing value if you’re doing something great (magnitude) in an area that really matters to your client (direction).

Adam Bockler, Digital Marketing Project Manager, Onefire

To me, something is valuable if it is worth more than what I paid for it, whether I paid in time, money, or both. It's about the story I tell someone else about why I feel good about having engaged with it. Last year, my girlfriend and I adopted a dog. We paid something like $200 in adoption fees for it. But there's no way I'd even entertain an offer from someone else to adopt her for $200 because her value to our home outweighs her "cost." She entertains us, we get to play with her, she keeps us active. All of that is worth way more than her adoption fee. Same with your agency. You might write a blog post that costs $X, but hopefully, it's way more valuable than its cost because it produces results for your days, weeks, months, or years after you've paid for it.

Drew Kerr, Founder, Four Corners Communications

I think value can be summed up as “benefits that money can’t buy.”

Jenna Silver, VP of Ad Sales Marketing, Univision

It’s all about giving people something to walk away with. Whether it’s an insight, best practice, or even just a feeling. Whether it’s personal, professional, tactical or strategic. If people come away from an interaction or event with you or your business with anything that makes them feel inspired or empowered to make change, do something differently, or lean more confidently into what they’re already doing – then we’ve succeeded in providing value.

Paul Goot, Division Director of Product Marketing, Digital Strategy and Analytics at American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO)

Providing value means that “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” So when business partners work together, the value of the outcome is bigger than either could achieve individually. Or when a new product comes to market, consumers get value because it lets them do something they couldn’t do before or it solves a problem they couldn’t solve before.

Jack Randall, Revenue Builder, Octopus Interactive

Providing value can be seen from many perspectives. For example, providing a service or solution that is turn-key for a client or at a reduced competitive cost. But these are expected these days to get a seat at the table. Providing true value means you are a trusted partner to your client. You have vision beyond short term execution and help the client “see around the corner.” Finally, you provide true value when you help your client identify a blind spot for opportunity through deep insights, competitive benchmarking, and bold ideas/recommendations that cut through the noise.

Michael Blumfield, Content Creator

When it first became a buzzword, it suggested unexpectedly high ROI -- a greater benefit than the user imagined, often due to a synergistic effect. Like so many overused business terms, it has been watered down to mean sometime that is more positive than negative, or economical, or merely "free but useful." My rule of thumb is to avoid expecting a word or phrase to carry too much meaning by itself, especially when they have been overused. Instead, I try to spell out what exactly I mean in a sentence or two to be sure readers understand whatever point I am trying to make.

So being clear about what’s expected of the relationship may be the most important first step.

Colleen Schwartz, SVP of Communications, WSJ/Dow Jones

There has to be consensus on what the "value" is before it can be assessed in any way. It should be a first-step conversation in the same way we talk about goals. For example, "What do you most need from my team?" In Comms, so much of the value can be invisible, in terms of navigating risks and saying “no” to projects that don’t align with the corporate mission. How do you quantify those efforts? Sometimes value isn't about results but about the strategic partnership to avoid the wrong things and collaborate on the right ones.

And, also, it’s pretty easy to spot what value is not.

Jed Meyer, SVP Domain Leader, Kantar

I had a mentor back at Nielsen that always guided me to lead my teams this way. "Create lasting value," she'd say. It was helpful advice - helped us tune out the noise and the short-term politics and focus on delivering value for our clients, our team mates, the company. It's been one of my guiding principles - especially during turbulent times. "Value" can be really hard to define/quantify. But you also “know it when you see it.”  And, to me, you know the people that are not trying to create value -- they are just focused on their own agenda or scoring political points. 

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Taking all of this input into consideration, here is our ultimate definition of providing value. 

Providing value means understanding what is most beneficial to your client and delivering on it above and beyond.

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