Respond to diverse problems and seamlessly introduce your unique framework
Your unique framework organizes and illustrates your comprehensive expertise, by expanding on your principles with supporting elements. Your framework should cohesively convey your service model, and help you respond to diverse problems by introducing its most relevant element. A unified, responsive framework will demonstrate your authority, build credibility, and provide flexibility.
In the previous step, you crafted value principles to support your headline message, and retain and engage your ideal client with greater context. These form the pillars for this step of expanding into your unique framework of component elements to fill out your service envelope and help you respond to diverse client needs. In the next step, your framework components will provide the content foundation for publishing blog articles and social media posts.
Despite all your work to refine your expertise into a clear, compelling, and actionable framework, it’s actually rare that someone will ask for exactly that. Everyone has their own lens on their challenges and solving them. Rather than telling them they’ve got it wrong, and that our perspective is correct, we need a way to acknowledge their challenge and smoothly introduce how we can help.
A broad but cohesive framework of your expertise – that expands on your headline message and value principles – gives you a greater range of responses to peoples’ problems. Arranged in a branched structure, it lets you go on to introduce its parent value principle, and your headline message. This approach positions you to solve their immediate challenge, and introduces your expertise to provide a greater scope of service.
If you’re not sure what to decide for this step, use your best guess and move on. Your perspective will develop and you can always update previous answers as you go, so don’t feel too constrained by what you’ve already written either.
Be sure to review your headline message and value principles to work well together with these elements.
Your unique framework paints a helpful picture of your expertise; with each element providing a compelling point, and all of them working in concert to demonstrate a purposeful methodology. Elements should be organized intuitively under each of your value principles, so they make sense however your prospect experiences them.
For someone exploring your service hierarchy top-down – for example, navigating a branched menu on your website – they should be logical sub-points of each value principle, expanding on and reinforcing that principle.
For someone matching their problem to a particular element, its peers should offer relevant adjacent value, and their parent value principle offer a higher degree of value, that encourages your prospect to increase the scope of their enquiry.
Together, your framework elements should reinforce each other, demonstrate your expertise, and convey authority.
Your unique framework conveys your service envelope; it should inspire confidence that you will deliver a resolved, holistic solution.
The scope of your framework elements will influence the authority you’re awarded and the latitude you’re afforded. There is a Goldilocks breadth that demonstrates the areas you want to work in, without appearing too generalist, or reaching beyond your demonstrable expertise.
Each of your framework elements needs to reinforce its parent value principle, as well as its immediate sibling elements. To make this editing or curation process easier, start with a tree-of-threes branched structure. Beneath your headline message, try three value principles, each supported by three framework elements. Flesh out each of these nine elements with three explanatory bullet points or subheadings.
Structuring your expertise into levels, and limiting your prospect’s choices to three at each branch or decision-point, encourages easier decisions and removes analysis paralysis from what is – at a glance – a comprehensive and complex menu of services.
Like your headline message and value principles, each framework element should relate to a problem experienced by your ideal client, and convey the benefit of adopting it.
If you’re keen to demonstrate features of your solution, framework elements is a good point in your prospect’s journey to convey them.
This leaves your headline message and value principles free to remain benefits. Benefits are positive outcomes of choosing your approach, while features are functions of your methodology. Benefits are more likely to help you connect with your ideal client; features can then help get you over the line versus your competition (but only if you’ve managed to connect in the first place). Research shows that focusing on beneficial outcomes is more customer-focused than promoting features, and that higher value clients are more likely to be trying to achieve their overall objective than fulfil a feature list. Features can play an important role in reinforcing the credibility of your benefit-focused headline message and value principles, and here in framework elements would be an appropriate place to convey them.
There is no requirement for your framework elements to list features rather than beneficial outcomes, only that if you wish to list features, this is the appropriate point in your prospect’s journey to convey them.
When conveying features, be sure to write them to still be benefit-focused, with the customer’s perspective in mind, and in succinct plain-English.
Demonstrate your value with key principles that enhance your headline message and set you apart. Your principles should directly address the main challenges for your ideal client or customer, from your perspective. Well-chosen principles will make you more relevant to the right people and elevate your credibility.
Your unique framework organizes and illustrates your comprehensive expertise, by expanding on your principles with supporting elements. Your framework should cohesively convey your service model, and help you respond to diverse problems by introducing its most relevant element. A unified, responsive framework will demonstrate your authority, build credibility, and provide flexibility.
Publishing content puts you and your unique perspective in front of your target audience. Your content should convey your headline message, its supporting principles, and their elements, in formats tailored for the publication platform. Well-written content enables your network to engage with your perspective, share your expertise with their networks, and open new channels for insight and opportunities.
Greg Harbour
Simplify your expertise to connect with more people and make a bigger difference. Greg utilises decades of creative communication experience to help leaders resolve their innovate, meaningful, comprehensive vision into a clear, compelling, and actionable proposition to reach the right people, motivate action, and create momentum.