How to Help B2B Companies Find their Value Proposition

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B2B companies must have a compelling reason why customers should choose them over the competition. They need to be able to prove and substantiate their differentiation and convince companies that they are the right partner to work with.

That’s why we’re having a conversation with B2B copywriting expert Linda Melone (Conversion Copywriter & Strategist, The Copy Worx) about how companies need to have a strong value proposition. During our conversation, Linda explains the importance of having a value proposition and the pitfalls to avoid. She also explains what you should look out for when conducting customer interviews, how to leverage AI the right way, and provides actionable tips for developing a value proposition that truly differentiates your B2B company from the rest.

https://youtu.be/sZPxNh69DOQ

Topics discussed in episode

Linda explains what a value proposition is and why it’s so important [2:10]
The most common mistakes pertaining to value proposition and how these can be addressed [4:36]
How to find your real value proposition:
- Study your competition[5:52]
- Conduct customer research [7:53]
Actionable tips: [13:37]
- Conduct the right research
- Rate your value proposition based on 5 traits (Unique, desirable, specific, succinct, & memorable)
Linda elaborates on what should be in the value proposition – using her own value proposition as an example [15:51]
Linda shares an example of how she researched and crafted the value proposition for her B2B client [20:39]
The role of AI in copywriting [24:51]
Bonus question: The one person that Linda would love to interview [33:16]

Companies and links mentioned

Transcript

SPEAKERS

Linda Melone, Christian Klepp

Christian Klepp 00:03

Welcome to B2B Marketers on a Mission, a podcast for changemakers where we question the conventional, debunk marketing myths, provide actionable tips, think differently, disrupt industries, and take your marketing to a new level, from improving your campaigns to making you a better marketer. These are the inspirational stories that will help us change the way we think and approach B2B marketing, one conversation at a time. This podcast is brought to you by EINBLICK Consulting, helping you to stand out in the market and drive revenue to your B2B business. And now your host, Christian Klepp.

Christian Klepp 00:44

Okay, welcome, everyone to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission. This is the show where we help you to question that conventional, think differently, disrupt your industry and take your marketing to new heights. This is your host Christian Klepp. And today I’m joined by someone on a mission to help B2B companies craft compelling, high converting copy and emails. So coming to us from Arizona, USA, Linda Melone, welcome to the show.

Linda Melone 01:08

Thank you so much for having me on Christian.

Christian Klepp 01:11

Great to be connected. Linda, I’m really looking forward to this conversation. And before we jump in, please shout out to Eric Melcher from Innovators Can Laugh for this introduction.

Linda Melone 01:22

Yeah, I know. It’s great that he connected us. Yeah.

Christian Klepp 01:26

All right. Well, let’s dive in. Because you know, this is gonna be quite the conversation I think. You are… You’re quite the expert I would say when it comes to copywriting. That might be the understatement of the new year. But…

Linda Melone 01:41

There’s a lot of a lot of good copywriters, but I hold my own. (laugh)

Christian Klepp 01:45

Absolutely. So but you know, for this conversation, let’s focus on a topic that I think has become part of your professional mission. And that’s how to help B2B companies find their value proposition. So I would say, let’s kick off this conversation with two questions. One is, first of all, let’s clear the air and define what a value proposition is. And number two, why do you think that’s so important?

Linda Melone 02:10

Value Proposition. First of all, it’s my favorite topic of all when it comes to B2B. And I’ll tell you why later on, we get into the other questions, but it’s really, it answers the question: Why should I choose you? Like the value proposition. Really, it’s not just about what you do. But it’s why what you do matters to your clients. So it’s like a unique promise. And I say unique, because this is what really hones in on why it’s important. It’s your promise of value. It’s a compelling reason why a business should pick you over your competitors. So that’s really why it’s so important. And most B2B companies can’t tell you what theirs is. I know because I work with them.

Christian Klepp 02:57

Oh, wait a minute. You mean, the value proposition has nothing to do with the amazing product features and the patents and technology? (laugh)

Linda Melone 03:02

You know, it can be…. they can be woven in. Yes. And in full transparency. It’s funny because getting ready for this interview, and I knew this was going to be our main discussion, I took a look at my own value proposition. And I changed it, which I could tell you, if you want me to reveal for the first time on this podcast. Well, I recently shifted my niche, boosts your fitness and health brand with expert crafted magazine quality copy. And it meets all the criteria that we’re going to be talking about. So it’s boost your fitness and health brand with expert crafted magazine quality copy, which really separates me from other copywriters.

Christian Klepp 03:02

So that’s your current value proposition. Right?

Linda Melone 03:09

That’s what I just came… Yes, that’s what I came up with literally yesterday. Because I had otherwise been focused on SaaS companies. And so I’ve shifted my niche.

Christian Klepp 03:56

Right, right, right, because that’s the one that I saw. When I was doing your I keep calling it a background check. But what I’m really doing is my homework and researching my guests, and that’s what I saw on your LinkedIn profile. Right?

Linda Melone 04:10

Yeah, I changed that already.

Christian Klepp 04:12

Okay. Okay. So that’s, that’s a great start. Now, let’s segue into the next question, which is about and you will have no problem answering this, I’m sure. Um, common mistakes and misconceptions. And you mentioned some of them already. But what is it pertaining to value proposition? What are some of the mistakes you’ve seen out there that marketers make? And most importantly, what should they do to address them?

Linda Melone 04:36

Well, the biggest mistake, it’s not really a mistake. It’s sort of a lack of, it’s more of a, I don’t even know. Well, I’ll tell you what it is. You can tell me if it’s actually a mistake. It’s just that they either don’t have a value proposition, or it’s not niched down enough. It’s too vague. You know, a lot of these companies sound like everyone else, and there’s a couple of reasons And for that one is they, they don’t want to, like they want to stand out, but they don’t want to stand out. You know, it’s always, especially if it’s a big company where a lot of people have their say with what is, you know, the messaging is, but it works against them because they’re not setting themselves apart from their competitors. So that I think is the biggest issue that I see. And I see it all the time. Like on a landing page or home page.

Christian Klepp 05:30

Yeah, yeah. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. But what do you think they can do to address that? Because I mean, like we, you know, that’s the classic, like B2B scenario, right? It’s the whole, like, let’s play it safe. Let’s not rock the boat too much. But let’s try to be different anyway. So it’s kind of like they’re always becoming their worst enemy at some point in the journey, right?

Linda Melone 05:52

Well, what I suggest and this is the best way to find your real value prop is you want to study your competition. And what you want to do is like, when I work with a client, I will get into the social media, what are people saying about them? What are people saying about their competitors? And what are the biggest complaints and what are their competitors not doing or not talking about? It may not even be that they’re not doing something. But if they’re not talking about it, that’s something you want to talk about. There’s that famous story among copywriters is famous. Now I’m gonna forget all the names associated with it. It was a famous copywriter, who was working for Schlitz beer back in, I don’t know, 60s or something. And he was brought into a factory. And because his job was to find, you know, to create this high converting copy. And he saw a process that they were doing to clean their glassware or something they were doing where they were, it was to him, it was astounding, like, I didn’t know that you guys did this, it was some kind of steam cleaning of it was like a step that he was not aware of in the process. And the person, the marketer, he was talking to, said, well, all our competitors do it, too. He said, Yeah, but they don’t talk about it. And so he brought that out in their copy. And they ended up being like the number one selling beer, like after that point, because they just pulled out what it was their competitors weren’t talking about. So that’s how you find the best value prop.

Christian Klepp 07:27

That’s, that’s a pretty good example. And I love that you brought up that bit about research. You kind of can’t like talk about value proposition. And just skip the research part, right? Especially customer research. So talk to us about what marketers and/or copywriters should be looking for when they’re, for example, conducting customer interviews, like what kind of insights should they be extracting?

Linda Melone 07:53

The most important thing is to ask… First of all, is to talk to customers, and past and present customers, and a lot of companies don’t feel they need to do that. But you need that outside perspective. And you want to ask them, what is it that made them go with you instead of competition? And, you know, what was the transformation, so this fill again, it goes back to kind of that gap that your competitors are not doing or not talking about. So you know, it could be something. I mean, there’s just that could be anything really. I have one of my clients, all of their customers, because I talked to them when I was doing before I did copywriting for them. It was all about how they have this, as one person put it other worldly customer service where everyone had a, you get caught in that voicemail loop, oh, click three, if you want to speak to this department. And these people, this company, it’s a big company, they have real people answering the phones and they’re not just answering the phones, but they’re they’re very helpful and everyone was talking about the same thing. And so they’re actually… I use that phrase in some of their copy other worldly customer service, which is exactly what someone said. So it’s what is it that you know, made you go with them? And how did it transform you or transform the way you do your business? Whatever it is, the product or service does?

Christian Klepp 09:25

Don’t even get me started on this whole like thing with customer service and AI. I mean, like every bank that you call here in Canada, you never actually get to talk to that person because they just give you this whole menu and press one for this, press two for this, and it says: What would you like to do today? And then it’s AI right? And then you tell him what you want to say. And it’s like, I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that. Could you please repeat? It’s like, ah, give me a break. (laugh)

Linda Melone 09:50

Yeah. And so people are starting to really you know, appreciate that when a company has real people answering the phone.

Christian Klepp 09:56

Yes. Imagine that. Right. I know. Real people. I wanted to go back to something you said earlier, because it’s, it’s, it’s something that I know some of the listeners are struggling with. And I’d like to get your take on it. Conducting customer research is important. extracting all those insights that you talked about are important. But let’s take it another step back. How do you… it’s not so much buy-in. But how do you get customers to agree to this type of interview? Because you know, we’ve all seen this before, where you try to interview customers, and there’s pushback because of oh sales are guarding their customers, and they’re not very comfortable with marketing talking to the customers directly, et cetera, et cetera. And that impacts the work of people like you.

Linda Melone 10:41

Yeah, it’s not always easy. Yeah, I mean, I usually I tell my clients to strive for contacting as many people as they can 15 or 20. And if I get five or seven interviews, that’s usually enough. And side note, you know, it’s enough when people start saying the same thing, like everyone starts repeating something. So what I do is I have a letter that I write for them, and it talks about how… and it’s coming from my client. So it’s like, it’s people who are usually happy with their service, you’re not going to talk to somebody who’s not. So hey, this is going to really help our you know, it’s going to help our marketing. Could you please talk to Linda for, and I say, 15 minutes. Now, I know that a lot of researcher, people that I know, other copywriters say I allow an hour, you tell somebody want to talk to him for an hour, and they just will shut down because no one wants to do that. So I tell them 15 minutes, and what happens is, if they have a lot to say, and it runs over that they usually don’t have a problem with it. And I’m very casual. I’ve interviewed, you know, I’ve done so much like, writing in 20 years, and I did a lot of content writing, which means I did articles, magazine articles, I interviewed hundreds of people. So I have a good ability to know how to talk to someone. If people are very curt, if they give one word answers, and I can’t go any farther, it’s going to be a short interview. But I usually say You know, it’s a 15 minutes, it would help us out a lot. And you know what, the people that I’ve worked with, when they give me the names of their customers, a lot of times those people reach out to me and say, I am more than happy to talk to you about so and so because they’re just… I’ve just loved them. That’s the ideal situation. So yeah, it’s just tell them it’s going to be short, tell them it’s, you know, they’re not going to I tell them, Listen, you’re not going to be quoted, because they’re not unless they want to be, I’m not going to quote you. I’m just I want to get an idea of whatever it is, I need to find out.

Christian Klepp 12:37

Absolutely. No, I 100% agree with you on that. You know, having done some of these customer interviews myself, I always, I always, I top it up by five minutes. So I’m like, I usually say like 20 minutes of your time, right? And nine times out of 10. Linda, I’m not even kidding. They go for about 30 to 45 minutes. Because people just have a lot to say like, you know, when you start making it about them instead of the company, right?

Linda Melone 13:03

Yeah, like, how did this help you? And they start talking about… I’m sure.

Christian Klepp 13:07

Absolutely. Alright, we get to the point in the conversation where we’re talking about actionable tips, right. So let’s appreciate this for a second. We all know that. Rome wasn’t built in a day, as they say, and you know, some of the stuff you can’t do in an hour or in 24 hours and so forth. But if somebody who is out there struggling with copywriting, helping to define the value proposition of their company, what are three to five things that you would tell them you can do right now?

Linda Melone 13:37

Number one thing is study your competition. And that’s going to take I mean, you can do a brief, even just a brief research, you don’t have to dive into it super deep unless you want to. I mean, I do because that’s what I do. But you want to look at, you know that there’s that there’s a site, answerthepublic.com. You familiar with that? So you find out what people are asking about that product or service, what are they looking up? That’s the first thing I would do. The second is there’s five traits of value proposition that you want to have. And so when I actually have like a scorecard, and I rate a value prop on these five traits, so it’s, it should be unique. It should be desirable, something that your customer says they want specific, succinct, so keep it short. And lastly want it to be memorable, something people will remember. And so it it has to be… it could be stronger on one part than the other but look for something that stands out and doesn’t sound like everyone else. And how do you do it? There’s only something you know, I’ve worked with a lot of health and fitness companies that on the surface seems like they do what everybody else does. But when you get into it, there’s always something unique that they’re doing. And so those are the things I look for, where’s that gap? So it’s study your competition look for the gap. Look for these five traits, unique, desirable, specific, succinct and memorable. So that’s three things. Well, is that, is that enough to get started?

Christian Klepp 14:17

Absolutely. And, um, you know, I gotta backtrack a little bit. And this is my bad. Like, it might also help or be useful for the listeners out there, if we can just dissect that a little bit, right? Because there is a process. And you’ve mentioned that already, to developing a value proposition. But can you elaborate a little bit more on what that actually consists of like what in the value proposition?

Linda Melone 15:51

It should say, going back to my own. So the reason that I chose… I said, boost your fitness and health brand. The reason I said that to start is that I have a fitness background, and I’ve written for a lot of health companies, and brand indicates is B2B, because I do B2B. And then I said, with expert crafted magazine quality copy, because I spent 15, 20 years working for and writing for glossy magazines, they call it like the real, you know, I’ve been in Time Magazine and Huffington Post and a lot of these other ones. And so it combines what makes me unique, as well as who my target audience is, and what I’m doing so boosts your brand. That’s what I do. Health and Fitness brand that’s specific to the audience. Magazine quality copy shows how that’s what my magazine, my magazine writing background. So if you can combine those things, a lot of it, too, is also about testing. So you want to run these things by like you could even there’s a number of sites, and I can’t name offhand that was usertesting.com. And that was one that used to be $50 a person to try. But I think it’s more than that. Now, it can be pricey to test this, but even just run it by your, you know, colleagues, or people who are potential customers, do a poll on LinkedIn, you know, this, these are three things, you know, what do you think is, is best? So they come about… like the value props usually come about, partly from the research from interviews with my customers. What are they saying? What are the terms that keep prop, you know, popping up? what’s being said on social media is also important, because it’s unfiltered, especially a site like Reddit, where I get some really good stuff, because people just don’t care. (laugh) Anything.

Christian Klepp 17:49

Oh, yeah, there’s no filter there.

Linda Melone 17:51

Right? I know, I posted things, made a mistake, they’ll just blast you. And so it’s a combination of what you hear kind of on the streets, what your customers are telling you. And then what you want to be, you know, as far as the unique versus your competitors, and it takes a while. I mean, I allow for weeks of research, to pull together a really good value prop and I could probably do a little bit quicker than that. But to get a hold of everything and really look at what’s important. It’s not something that’s easy to do. And people just throw these things out there. Yeah.

Christian Klepp 18:30

Well, I’m glad you brought that up. Because I, I tend to see that a lot, even, you know, with my customers or what not. A lot of them are under this illusion that while it’s a value proposition, that can’t be that hard, or it can’t take that long, right? But then the reason, the reason they think that way is because you know, nobody’s ever like, you know, pop the trunk, lifted the hood or whatever, whatever analogy, you want to use right, so they don’t actually know what’s happening behind the scenes. How much work goes actually goes into it? Right?

Linda Melone 19:02

Yeah, it’s not something you can just toss together. But if you do, I mean, you’re gonna end up sounding like everybody else, like even using AI.

Christian Klepp 19:09

Case and point. Yeah,

Linda Melone 19:10

I mean, I will use AI to brainstorm. I never use like, for something like this, I did go in there and say, Hey, this is everything I do, what do you think would be a good value prop, but you have to keep in mind AI is going to pull together what’s out there already. So it’s not going to be unique. It’s going to be okay, this is what other people are saying. So, but it gives me an idea of how like when it said, fitness and health brand, I like that because it said if you’re using… if you’re a B2B, you want to include brands. So yeah, I did use AI to brainstorm a little bit, but the end result was my own. And, you know, that’s the way I use AI to help it along, but it’s not the end result.

Christian Klepp 19:53

Yeah. Oh, absolutely. And we will get to the topic of AI in a second but before we do that, Um, if you could just give us an example of how you help the customer to develop and define the value proposition that they have, or they didn’t have.

Linda Melone 20:08

I was working with an Australian company that had… it’s a recovery company. So it’s for sports, it was owned. Well, it is owned, it’s still there. It’s owned by a former professional athlete. And so this is it’s not a gym, it’s more of a recovery and recovery place. So you go in and you do ice baths, massages, like things to recover from your…

Christian Klepp 20:37

Physical therapy?

Linda Melone 20:39

Yeah, it’s like that. But it’s even beyond that. Okay, so I talked to him. And I spoke to his… Trying to think…. his customers. This is a while ago. So I’m trying to think customers, he’s, he’s started a franchise of these. So this is the B2B where it comes in. So B2C would be the people or the end user, but he actually was selling the franchises to people who had the same goals as he did, which is to help people recover from sports, injuries, or just to up their game. And so when I talked to him, and the people that were potential customers. They talked about how they were driven by a greater purpose, it wasn’t about the money. It wasn’t about how much am I going to make, you know, running this franchise, how much can I charge… like that never came up. And so it was always like, after talking to him, and literally, that’s the thing that got him out of bed in the morning. He and his wife, were running this franchise. And so I incorporated that into the header. And that’s what made… I mean, he, I remember, because what happens is, when I do a value proposition, I create this whole presentation. And so when I was presenting it, he was silent. And that’s either really good or really bad. You know, in this case, it was really good. He just said, I don’t even know what to say, This is so good, is what he said. And the, the franchise, you know, the header on his website was for entrepreneurs, driven by greater purpose. That was it. That was it. You know, it wasn’t the money. It wasn’t Hey, you know, even even helping people was I mean, it was secondary was part of it. But it really was about that inner drive to, to seek, to have a greater purpose. And this was…what their they felt their purpose was. That was probably the biggest one as far as a revelation. Like, he didn’t even expect that.

Christian Klepp 22:36

Yeah, ya no, fantastic. I mean, that must have been nerve racking for you. I think we’ve all been in those meetings where you know like the customer doesn’t say anything, and like you said, it’s like, okay, he either really loves this, or he really hates it. And he’s just waiting, like, until you’re done and then. And that’s the grand finale.

Linda Melone 22:54

And I don’t give them anything ahead of time. Because I mean, we talk back and forth during the process, but when I present everything, I don’t send them everything until it’s completely done, because sometimes I’ll edit it live during it. There’s something but it’s nerve wracking. And, you know, I’m pretty good at ad-libbing here and there and not getting nervous and not showing that I’m nervous. But sometimes inside I’m just… So…

Christian Klepp 23:23

I hear you, I hear you. I’ve tried to train myself to do this. And I haven’t been very successful. But I’ve tried to train myself to avoid using gap fillers. Yeah. When I’m nervous in a presentation, like, you know, they say just exercise or practice using silence instead. Yeah, there’s apparently silence can be very powerful. But I’ve found also that silence can also be to your detriment as well.

Linda Melone 23:51

Yeah. Sometimes I know I used to years ago, I was a part of a Toastmasters, where they teach you how to speak. And then somebody… did you ever go to one of those meetings? Yes. And they have somebody counting your ohms and ahhs and that’s what got me out of it. I usually can catch myself but makes you really, really aware of it for sure.

Christian Klepp 24:12

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. All right. And now we are going back to the topic on everyone’s lips these days AI. All right. Now don’t get me wrong. We’re not going to start talking about how the machines are rising up and replacing all the copywriters because I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon. But I think the more important question, which I’m passing on to you, Linda, is AI seems to be impacting almost every aspect of our work, not just as marketers and copywriters, but pretty much across other industries. But do you think that AI should be used in copywriting? If yes, how?

Linda Melone 24:51

I think it should be… there’s definitely a role. There’s a place for it. What I have found is I like to brainstorm with it, but it tends to come up and I have the ChatGPT there’s next level, there’s like I paid $20 a month for it, which is supposed to be my copywriting coach said, get this one because it’s it’s better. It comes up with the same phrases a lot. And it loves words like dive into, and I can’t think of the… it’s like marketing speak is what I call it. So I think that it’s great to get a start. Like, a lot of times I will take an entire interview, even like my podcast, you know, I’ll put everything. The notes are a bulk of it into AI. And so can you extract what the main points are? And that will speed up things for me, it really worked well, when I had a client that had, she said she had five different target audience personas. And when I looked at this Excel spreadsheet she sent me I’m like, how am I gonna go through all this? And I said, you know, I’m throwing all this in AI. And I said, Can you merge these into one? Like, what are the commonalities? That was probably the eye opener for me, because it came up with what was the same in all five. So it saved me a ton of time. I think that’s the way to use it really is you want to… it can save you time for extracting important information. It can get you started with titles and headings. I don’t rely on it a lot for that because as I said, it uses a lot of marketing speak. It’s the same stuff, everyone says and that’s what this whole interview is about is not sounding like everybody else. And even AI at one point I asked something about that kind of as I put it, I made it punch itself in the face. I said what is it that humans do better than AI. And it said, you have to remember that AI does not create, it repeats, and it gets information that’s already out there where it doesn’t. It can speed up research, but it’s not the… To me, it should never be the final word, you’ve got to be a copywriter. And you’ve got to know how to create good copy and use it as a tool. It definitely has a place and it has sped up processes for me for sure.

Christian Klepp 27:24

At the very least, it’ll help you to filter out all the terrible ideas. When you prompt ChatGPT to come up with headlines, and it comes up with all these like cringe worthy ones.

Linda Melone 27:38

Oh, I know. And it always uses colons. It’s like it has one part colon and I. So you can say you can put in it. You know, please change these two titles without colons. It’s still sometimes will still do it. It’s very uncooperative at times.

Christian Klepp 27:56

Absolutely. No, I…

Linda Melone 27:57

It started the uprising using colons (laugh)…

Christian Klepp 28:01

Like these little …. like like these microaggressions. Right, like?

Linda Melone 28:06

Yeah,

Christian Klepp 28:07

No, I agree. I mean, like, Look, I’m not against AI. A potential client asked me this last week, you know, how does the the availability of all these AI tools impact the kind of writing work that I do? And I said, like, look, there’s a time and place for AI. I just don’t think that it should be used. And I think this was your point. Like the way that people are always chasing the next hack or looking for that shortcut. I don’t think that it should be to shortcut your work. Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean that you can save time researching. I think that’s great. But I don’t think that you should rely on AI to do all the copy for you. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I think that’s where it goes. All right.

Linda Melone 28:49

And you can tell, you can tell when someone’s used it, even in LinkedIn, I’m on there a lot and people will… You can tell, because if somebody if their comment is a summation of what you said, That’s AI, like, 9 out of 10 times.

Christian Klepp 29:04

Absolutely.

Linda Melone 29:05

They’re not adding anything. They’re just repeating and it’s like, just stop.

Christian Klepp 29:12

That was how you feel… really…

Linda Melone 29:14

Well, you know it’s interesting. I just recently heard an interview with somebody who had met… Oh it was one of the actors in Jurassic Park had met the who was I can’t think of his name. The writer of Jurassic Park. Yeah. So he had a conversation with Michael Crichton. And he asked him about somehow… I just, it wasn’t even AI specifically, but it was the internet and he said, What is it you know, how do you feel about everything that’s happening and Michael Crichton said, I hate it. And the actor… why? It is because people aren’t thinking for themselves. He said Einstein came up with his ideas by sitting and looking out into, like, whatever he looked out into it was, you know, he just, he would sit and think. And he said the AI and our reliance on the internet is kind of a, what did he call it? But it meant like, it’s just everybody else’s ideas put into one, like you don’t have your own idea. He said, You need to sit by yourself and think of things, originate ideas on your own without relying on everybody else’s input. And I thought that was great. was such a good point to make.

Christian Klepp 30:35

More people should be following that advice today. I would say, even more pertinent than it was like, a decade ago.

Linda Melone 30:43

Yeah, it’s easy to just rely on AI.

Christian Klepp 30:47

Absolutely. Linda, it kind of sounds like you’ve been on your soapbox all this while but I’m going to ask you to stay up there a little bit longer, just for a couple of minutes for this next question. So here goes, the status quo in your area of expertise that you passionately disagree with, and why, and let’s make it relevant to value proposition.

Linda Melone 31:13

Value Proposition. Okay, somebody else lined up for that. For a value proposition, I think. And I don’t know if it’s something people do all the time, but it’s really not either not thinking they need one, I think that’s probably the biggest thing is, you know, we don’t need a value proposition. People know what we do. Or we just can keep talking about what we do. And it’s just your value proposition is the foundation for all of your messaging, once you have that down. And that’s why I do that first with my clients, we need to find your value prop, because all the copy needs to come back to that. So not taking it seriously enough, not spending enough time creating it. These are the things just really not seeing that it’s that important. And that’s one reason why I chose this as sort of my area of expertise, because I’m really good at distilling down a lot of information and summing it up into one statement. So I think is just feeling like you don’t need one or the edge. It’s not that important. And you’d be wrong.

Christian Klepp 32:20

Absolutely. I mean, at least in my experience, because I’m more of like the branding guy for B2B. And it tends to be that way with a lot of B2B companies, they don’t feel the brand is important until that actually becomes a serious problem. Right, in terms of the lack of differentiation, I mean, to your point earlier on the conversation, right?

Linda Melone 32:39

Or the saying that people… if you don’t create your brand, and I think also pertains to your value proposition, people are created for you? Yep. You don’t want that.

Christian Klepp 32:49

I’ve heard that one. Okay, Linda, here comes the bonus question. Let’s see if that’s something to do with your actual area of expertise, or it’s just something for you personally. Okay, here we go. If you were given the opportunity to interview someone, one on one, living or dead. Who would it be and why?

Linda Melone 33:16

You know, the first thing that popped into my mind is Keanu Reeves. Because I love him as a he seems to have escaped all the Hollywood BS and maintained his humaneness. I want to know how, how he did that. I could also say about Tom Hanks, but I’ve heard some negative things about Tom Hanks. Keanu Reeves. Also, because Keanu is half Asian, like you and I are. So I’m fascinated whenever I read things about him where he doesn’t, he doesn’t talk about things like how he gives away money. You know, he supports things that he doesn’t look for the accolades. He doesn’t do it for the publicity. And he gives up his seats on a bus for you know, for people. I mean, I’m fascinated by that. So probably him and he just seemed like he would be so cool to sit down and talk to.

Christian Klepp 34:18

No, I mean, absolutely. To your point. It’s, he’s managed and kudos to him because it’s not easy. He’s managed to avoid all these, you know, this Hollywood intrigue and scandal that other celebrities of his caliber are plagued with. And, you know, some of them, some of them can’t seem to get away from those scandals, right.

Linda Melone 34:36

And the other question I would have for him is how does he do a movie like John Wick, which… have you seen any of the John Wick movies? So they’re violent. I mean, they’re violent to the point of almost being comical. They’re like insanely ridiculous. But how does he do that at the same time that he seems to be such a… I don’t know if he’s spiritual, asserted, he comes across like that. Yes.

Christian Klepp 34:58

Yeah he does.

Linda Melone 34:59

You know, And it’s interesting…

Christian Klepp 35:01

I could be wrong. But there was a movie. I think it was the early 90s. And it was Bernardo Bertolucci was the director. It was Little Buddha, I think.

Linda Melone 35:04

Okay, I haven’t heard that

Christian Klepp 35:09

He was in that one.

Linda Melone 35:15

Oh, interesting.

Christian Klepp 35:17

So he actually did play Prince Siddhartha, who eventually became the Buddha right. So

Linda Melone 35:22

Oh, yeah, I just, I don’t know. He just seems like somebody. I also feel like he’s somebody who you can sit down and talk to without feeling intimidated, like, there’s other actors that you would be the kind of, you know, you’d be nervous. I just don’t think I’d be nervous. I just think he’s just a regular guy. How does he do it?

Christian Klepp 35:41

Yeah, absolutely. It’s all part of the magic. Linda, thank you so much for coming on the show today and for sharing your expertise and experience with the listeners. So please, quick intro to yourself and how people out there can get in touch with you.

Linda Melone 35:57

Oh, thank you so much for having me, Christian. It’s been a lot of fun. Well, obviously, I’m on LinkedIn a lot. The Copy Worx, Workx.com is my website. And you can reach me there or DM me on LinkedIn. And if have any questions or comments, I’d be happy. And I also have my podcast, of course, which is the B2B marketing and copywriting podcast.

Christian Klepp 36:26

Linda once again, thank you so much for your time. Take care. Stay safe. Talk to you soon.

Linda Melone 36:29

Thank you. Okay.

Christian Klepp 36:31

All right. Bye for now.

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