Declutter Your Business: How to Waste Less and Grow Your Revenue More

There are two personalities when it comes to spring cleaning and decluttering. On one hand, you might be the type of person who has accumulated lots of stuff over the years but has a hard time parting with it.

Or maybe you’re in the other camp. Decluttering brings you joy, whether with a trash bag or a box for donations.

Now, I really don’t have an opinion on which one you should use when spring cleaning, but in the business world, there is a correct answer.

When your business is cluttered up, your growth suffers. You end up with too much in areas like your messaging, your offer model, or your strategic priorities. The result is that your customers, prospects, and employees don’t grasp what is most important.

Today, we’re tackling the top 3 clutter-prone areas of your business that might be holding you back and how to declutter your way to growth again.

Do Less #1: Declutter Your Value Prop

Before nodding and scrolling, I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard, “Value props are business owner 101. I think we’ve moved beyond this.”

If that were true, my choice of a business name would be unfortunate.

In a sense, yes, value props are Business 101. The truth is that many businesses need to revisit their value prop by the time they reach Business 201. 

You’ve put a lot of thought into what you offer, and each detail has a purpose. The problem? No prospect has the attention span for the value prop overload that ensues.

This is why many businesses fall into the trap of describing their offer, quickly leading to information overload. Your ideal prospect has to watch long videos, click through long slide decks, or read short novels to understand your offer.

So, what can you do to declutter your value prop? 

The Best Value Props Do This…

This is the foundational truth about your value prop:

Your value prop acts as a vivid mirror of your ideal customer’s goal.

Put differently, your value prop makes your customer the main character–not you!

In your messaging, they need to know how your offer fits into THEIR world immediately. Your ideal customer is living out a story, and your offer is a supporting character.

I like to start with these three questions to de-clutter your value proposition. They help you place your offer squarely in the thick of your prospect’s story.

1. What is the pain point or aspiration your ideal customer is facing?
2. What is the outcome (especially in terms of ROI) they hope for?
3. What promise are you making about your offer? (And how do you prove it?)

Are these groundbreaking questions? Not really. But once you have your answer, go revisit your website, brochures, or social media. Is your messaging focused on your ideal customer? Or is it focused on you?

If you want to re-ignite your growth funnel from top to bottom, remove everything from your value proposition that doesn’t make your ideal customer the main character.

Read: There’s more than one ROI – see the 4 kinds and how to leverage yours.

Do Less #2:  Declutter Your Offer Model

Entrepreneurs are rightly accused of being ideators. The problem? It’s too easy to come up with too many ideas. I’m certainly guilty of this. We see opportunities, but too many irons in the fire can quickly become a bad thing.

Now, I’m often in favor of expanding your revenue streams. When wisely applied, adding offers that align with your core value proposition is a powerful strategy. That being said, many businesses are losing efficiency trying to support too many offers. 

Think of your different offers, all living under and depending on a single brand. Each one might represent more revenue (and, more importantly, more profits). 

But imagine you were to drill down and compare each one. Ask questions like:

1. Which offer produces the most margin?
2. Which offer best utilizes our existing resources? (Skills, people, processes, etc)
3. Which offer has the strongest value proposition?
4. Which offer gives you the strongest competitive advantage?

As our clients start dissecting questions like these, they also realize how often their best offers are under-supported compared to their value. 

Treat Each Offer Like an Asset

Think of each offer as an asset for your brand. Are you investing the most focus and resources into the offers that produce the most success?

I can’t tell you the number of times clients we’re working with are sitting on their best offer without realizing it! Their primary offer is hard on margins, exhausting, and hard to grow. But this upsell in the corner? It has a 4x margin, but you have no intentional marketing strategy for it!

So, enough of my soapbox. Time for, “What now, Jose?”

I challenge you to write down each of your primary offers. With each one laid out, do a little bit of research.

1. Identify which offers are the most financially efficient (your ROI)
2. Talk to your sails and fulfillment team. Which one gets the best feedback?
3. Seek out your best clients–which offers would they say are most valuable?

You may find that your path to more efficient revenue growth lies in cutting back on a few offer models that aren’t contributing to your targets. Focus more on the offers that are yielding the most success. It all starts by knowing which ones they are.

Do Less #3: Declutter Your Customer Experience

This last one probably should be its own separate article, but we’ll keep it short to thank you for reading this far.

The gap between idea and execution can be hard to grasp. Especially in the B2B world, we have to accept that our clients are less interested in our offer than we are. 

For example, how much of your CRM’s capabilities are you actually using? Teams like Hubspot or Salesforce have spent thousands of hours and millions of dollars building robust platforms for 70% of their users to use 20% of the features.

Your operations may not be as technical as Salesforce, but I bet your customers have a similar challenge. Think of all the steps required to work with you–from onboarding to fulfillment to extracting your promised ROI. How much of your value delivery is dependent on your customer?

If you want to maximize the value of your customers' investments, you must commit to providing the simplest possible experience. Make it easy to reach strong ROI.

Here’s a practical exercise to try this. Sit down with your sales and fulfillment teams and

1. Map out each step your customer has to take in each stage.
2. Identify the frequent log jam steps. Why do prospects/customers get stuck at certain stages?
3. How can you reduce the number of steps required to work with you? (Combine stages, automated tools, etc)
4. Refresh your supporting materials – focus on consumption. What will someone actually take the time to engage with?

I’ve seen great offers struggle because they are too customer dependent. If you have a high-value offer that’s losing to lower-value competitors, this is an important question to ask.

Prioritizing: The Superpower of Strategy

Every business owner (me included) reaches a point where more effort isn’t a growth strategy. “Just because you’re sweating doesn’t mean it’s working,” as I like to say.

This is why your company’s strategy is not a luxury or a “when I have time for it” item at the bottom of your task list. Now that your business has grown, strategy is a commitment that keeps your people and resources aligned with your priorities.

Strategy means knowing what needs to happen next.

We do this for owner-led businesses in the B2B space with revenue between $2 and $20M. Our proprietary diagnostic process, the Revenue Throughput Analyzer (RTA), helps you identify what’s restricting revenue growth (and how to unleash it).

More on RTA in a moment, but here’s the important part: if your business has been neglecting your growth strategy, let’s grab a time to talk. I think you’ll love what we’ve built for owners like you at Value Prop. 

We know you don’t have loads of free time and don’t trust quick, guru-magic fixes. The RTA process is designed to quickly remove the guesswork from your strategic growth plan and highlight your top priorities.

The RTA framework helps you to visualize your business as a linear, revenue-generating system. It walks you through # stages, helping you identify where your potential revenue is getting “clogged” (or lost) along the way.

1. Targeting – Uncovering and committing to your best customer
2. Differentiation – Finding your competitive edge that consistently wins
3. Marketing – How to locate, engage, and attract your ideal prospects
4. Sales – Building a winning process that isn’t talent-dependent
5. Leadership – Empowering leaders to generate growth beyond you
6. Resources – Uncovering creative ways to leverage who and what you have
7. Production – How to create no-brainer offer models
8. Fulfillment – Processes for delivering exceptional customer outcomes 

Thankfully, you likely don’t need help in all 8 of these areas, but are there 1-2 that you have been frustrated with? Like a pipe with a single clog, your business can get stuck on a plateau if any of these eight stages constrict your revenue flow.

That’s where RTA is invaluable. It gives you a framework to self-diagnose the restricting factors, followed by support from our team to implement playbook-style solutions. These playbooks give you direct, best-practice prescriptions to quickly adopt the solutions you need to move forward.

If you want to learn more, grab a time on my calendar. I’ll walk you through what the analyzer looks like, and you can determine if it’s the right fit for your business.