Lesson 13 - Create a Value Ladder and Value Hypothesis

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This lesson will teach you how to build a value ladder and hypothesis tailored to your prospects. You’ll learn how to connect your product’s features to specific benefits and align those benefits to your prospect’s business objectives. Your assignment will involve drafting a value ladder and a hypothesis for one of your target accounts, ensuring it’s ready to guide your outreach strategy.

Transcript

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Nicholas, welcome back to the daily quota. I'm your host, Nicholas Hill, and in today's lesson, you're going to create a value ladder and a value hypothesis for your organization that you've been researching now over the past few episodes, we did your territory plan, we prioritized your accounts, we started to research your top account, and now we're going to take the research that you've done on your account and we're going to distill it down to some of the top, most important things that you want to align on with your customer. Because I think you'll agree what we did in the last lesson was a lot there were a lot of different avenues of research that we did, both external and internal. So how do we actually start to strategize on this research to understand what we're going to go after first? So the two, the two areas that I mentioned here, the value ladder and the value hypothesis. A value ladder is basically just a structured overview of your prospects, top priorities, initiatives, objectives, and then a value hypothesis is a one to two sentence point of view on how your solution is going to help them. These are really important because you're going to end up using them in your outreach. So, let's talk about the value ladder first, when you're with your value ladder. And the reason it's called a ladder is because you're going to start at the top and then you're going to go down piece by piece. So at the top of your ladder you should write your prospects, corporate objectives. So you want to be thinking about this is like one or two sentences Max and it should illustrate your customers highest level aspirations. What is their top mission? You can normally find this on their website right then, right under their top most important mission, you're going to write down their business strategies. So these are the broad organizational priorities that are going to outline how the company plans to achieve their mission. So mission at the top of the ladder, company business strategies right right underneath on how and tying them to how they support the mission. After that, you're going to write down the business initiatives, in case I accidentally set initiatives a second ago. Let me rephrase it. Goes corporate mission at the top, business priorities and corporate objectives right underneath. And then the initiatives to support those objectives are underneath that, and they all kind of ladder up and rung up. So business initiatives are specific. They are large scale programs. They have budget attached to them. They have an account owner attached to them. They are typically tied to objectives and key results metrics that they are being measured against important initiatives. If it's important, it will always have budget attached and that's why, that's why it's so important for us to start thinking about what these are, how they tie up to the larger mission. And then you're going to identify risks and critical capabilities. So risks are the potential obstacles that could derail the company's progress towards meeting its mission and underlying objectives. And then the critical capabilities are the essential skills and competencies that the company either already has or must develop in order to achieve its goals and excel in its industry. Cool. So that is the value ladder. Let's go over it just one more time at a high level company, mission vision at the very top, objectives that are going to support that mission or vision initiatives, what you're going to be tied to those objectives, and then risks or risks and critical capabilities, the risks of not hitting those initiatives and the capable capabilities that they need to develop or excel at in order to hit those initiatives, mission, objectives, initiatives, risks, capabilities. If you can get those five things down, you've got your value ladder. Now notice the value ladder is all about them, but the value ladder, the thing that's so nice about it. It's only five things, right? The thing that's so nice about it is you can quickly and easily put this on a slide in front of your customers, and align on it, so you can go to them and say, hey, does this make sense? Is this what you see as your mission, your objectives, based on the research that we've done, this is what we think you're after and how you're going to go get there. So value ladder very important, the value ladder is going to lead to your value hypothesis. And the value hypothesis is essentially your best educated guess on how your solution is going to help this organization to either avoid one of the risks that you uncovered, or. Or develop one of the critical capabilities that you uncovered. So this should be your value hypothesis. Should be clear, bold and confident. You should be coming at them and saying, If my solution can help you avoid this risk, then you will be able to execute this business initiative and ultimately achieve this business strategy. Same thing on the other side of it, right? If you can come in and say, hey, if my solution can help you to deliver on this critical capability that you need to develop, then you will be able to execute this business initiative and achieve this business objective, that sort of value hypothesis is. Now there are a couple of do's and don'ts when it comes to forming your value hypothesis. One, you want to make sure that you're getting a reaction within their organization. You want to make sure that you are putting your value ladder up in front of them. If you come with a confident value hypothesis that isn't based on an aligned value ladder, then they're going to be like, Whoa, you. You've missed the mark here. That's actually not what we're after. Those aren't our objectives. That isn't our mission, and that's that's not, that's not what you're after, right? You also, you want to use this as a starting point for casual conversation. You don't just want to come in and say, Here's my value ladder, and it's my way or the highway. And this is exactly what we're going to do for you, right? You want to come in humble. You want to come in and say, Yes, I am confidently stating my value hypothesis, but I'm also humble enough to know that I don't know everything about your business, and I'm willing to listen and learn and iterate based on what you tell me, right? So I realize that's a bit of a mixed message, right? You want to be confident but humble, but you really, do. You really need to have an element of both, where you're coming in confident that the research you've done is good, you're confident in the value that you can provide, but you're humble when it comes to how much you know about this prospect, you want to ask for feedback. You want to ask for criticism. You want to be constantly seeking to refine your understanding. You want to be using your value hypothesis in your outreach. That's when it becomes the most powerful, when you can start putting it in your emails, your phone calls, your LinkedIn messages towards your key stakeholders at the organization. We'll talk about how to do that in a future episode. Don't assume it's perfect, and don't act like you're teaching them about their own company. You don't want to come in and say, well, here's what I know, and I know everything about what you're after and what you're doing, because then they can, they can very easily say, No, you've you've missed the mark, or they'll agree with you. And then as soon as you're off the call, they'll be like, What was he talking about? What was she talking about? I have no idea what's what's going on here. So an example of this, let's say we work for Microsoft, right? Microsoft has their Microsoft 365, product. So I might say, if Microsoft 365 can enhance agility in your product development by providing seamless collaboration tools and advanced data security, then your team will be able to accelerate the launch of AI driven analytics and achieve your business strategy to lead the market in the integration of AI and advanced analytics. So is it a perfect example? No, but that's an example of what this might look like if I weren't for Microsoft. Right cool. Over the next few episodes, we'll learn how to take this information and use it to create Strategic Outreach that will get you more meetings with the right people. But for now, it's your turn. I want you to take what you learned today and in your study guide, Your assignment is to create a value ladder for your highest priority account and then based on the research you did in your last episode, and then use that value ladder to create your value hypothesis, which should succinctly state the expected value that your solution is going to deliver. Be prepared to present both your value ladder and your value hypothesis to the customer. This should be customer facing. You should be confident in your ability to get this in front of them and of course, check in with your manager, your mentor, your new hire buddy, let your study guide walk you through this and make sure that you're willing to continue to iterate on this as you go. And that's it for today's lesson on the daily quota. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time you.