What I mean by value add is your company’s unique blend of products and services, and how those are perceived by your prospects and clients. You may be the absolute best at what you offer, yet aren’t growing as expected. This often happens when you don’t effectively communicate your expertise.

Communication is key
What’s behind your value add? If you don’t spell out everything you do, starting with your estimates and proposals – to invoices, your value add could be overlooked. What does it take to provide your business solution? Infrastructure, research, surveys, reports, travel time, understanding the competition, proof reading, editing, revisions, design work, interviews, phone calls, industry schooling and licensing? The list goes on and on, but are these communicated to your prospects and clients? If not, your value add will be negatively impacted.

Expertise is a business value add
Why do I pay my automotive dealer $95+/hour for labor? When I was repairing typesetters, our first hour labor rate was $180.00, and that was 25 hours ago. Hair coloring and styling can run $100.00+. And these rates are invoiced and paid routinely because there’s a perception of value associated with each service. The perception of your value can be elevated via marketing campaigns, blogs, case studies, testimonials and so on.

Web hosting value adds
Among the value adds I envision as important for a web hosting provider, infrastructure, 24×7 support and hands-on expertise rank high. Every provider, it seems, has bronze, silver and gold plans. For providers, if your value add is ecommerce, disaster recovery or managed services, how do you communicate what makes your service unique, and worth the price you advertise?

If you offer collocation, how do your plans differ from your competition? Would two 20AMP circuits per rack be a value add, or simply norm? If you offer business class shared web hosting plans, would that be a value add?

Certainly, value adds are competition driven. Do your prospects and clients know how you differ from your competition? Telling them, or not, will impact your business.

Good points Steve, good points. Yes, creating a USP (unique selling proposition) seems to be a major issue in the hosting industry.

It can really help to shop for a host ourself. If we can't achieve the required level of objectivity, maybe hire someone to shop for a host, and look over their shoulder as they do.

Host shopping can be a real pain, as all the sites look pretty much the same, and you can read good or bad reviews of almost any host.

Personally, when I'm host shopping, I'm not really host shopping, I'm person shopping. Where do I find that person or team, hosting experts, that I can really trust.

Many or most hosts seem to hide in anonymity behind their sites. So one way one to create a USP would be to put ourselves out front. Sell ourselves, more than selling hosting. We are unique, hosting is not.

I need to work much harder on this myself. Note to self.

Yes, I absolutely agree, E. I've recently started a staff interviews section on our blog to try and open up our company a little bit, so our customers can get to know our staff better. As time goes on, I hope to build more things like this into our website and company philosophy-- the better our customers know us, the safer they feel about our products and the more easily and quickly our business can grow.