Let’s Get Specific About Value – From Jobs to Strategy
The Impact Ladder: Jobs, Roles, Teams, Processes, Initiatives, Strategy
In the first Let’s Get Specific article, I outlined how to describe value to customers in terms of results, outcomes and impact. This follow up takes the work further with a simple Impact Ladder that helps us connect what we sell with the customer’s business and priorities.
Capturing Customer Specifics
To avoid generalisations, we need to capture customer specifics. Our approach to this is straightforward: with every customer engagement, we seek to learn about how our offering helps from the short list in the graphic above. The elements are arranged in a hierarchy, with jobs at the bottom and the scheme both serves as a journey, building up from the bottom, and as a reminder of set of possible connections.
The approach works best when applied to Sales, Product, Marketing and Customer Success teams.
We typically start with the humble job but are always on the hunt for more – at the level of the role, the team, and the processes that drive the business. Each level builds on the previous one. Some offerings will go further, making a meaningful difference to current initiatives and strategy.
Tasks vs Jobs
Product and engineering teams work at a task level, but for Sales, Marketing and CS, we need to group them into meaningful jobs. As an example, ‘doing my expenses’ is a job comprised of three tasks: gathering the expenses for the period; scanning them and creating a claim.
The logic behind this is simple – we want to work at a ‘day in the life of’ level of our customers where we can have a meaningful conversation about the contrast between the customer’s work with and without our offering.
Critical Mass and Connections
If there is a critical mass at any level, it will take you to the next one in the hierarchy. For example, if we are making a difference to enough jobs in a role, we can talk meaningfully at a role level and so on.
However, there are also connections between levels. For example, an Account Based Marketing Application, is used by a Marketing Operations Manager. The application makes a significant enough difference to the work of the MOPs manager that we can talk about its effect at a role level.
However, one of the features of the ABM app is that it automates the production of account timelines. These show the Sales and Marketing touchpoints that lead to both closed/won and closed/lost deals. Prior to automation, these were produced manually in tiny quantities.
With automation and higher volumes, patterns emerge from the touchpoints that inform which combinations increase closed/won deals. This is exciting to Sales and Marketing, who adopt the timelines as a central part of the collaborative Sales and Marketing process being developed. As a result, the company’s win rate increases. This finally realises the long-overdue promise of Account Based Marketing, an initiative deployed by the CMO as part of the company’s strategy to improve the return on Sales and Marketing investment.
Roles Revisited: Process, Initiatives and Strategy
The example above shows that when we are seeking to capture the difference we make at a role level, we should include the owners of processes, sponsors of initiatives and authors of strategy as they are direct beneficiaries, and usually senior individuals.
What About Other Models?
This Impact Ladder is designed to trace a path between what a company sells and the structure and priorities of its customers. It’s utility lies in helping us articulate value in a way that aligns with both buyer psychology and with how customers actually make decisions: through priorities, trade-offs, and operating models.
Compared to existing frameworks, I will argue that it fills a specific and under-served gap. Traditional value ladders, often used in marketing and direct sales contexts, tend to be conversion-driven. Here, were aren’t concerned with upsell mechanics, but with aligning with the world the customer actually lives in.
Bain’s B2B Elements of Value pyramid is far more sophisticated and backed by significant research, but it isn’t focused on linking value to outcomes. Instead, it serves to classify different the different forms of value (from functional to inspirational) that vendors can deliver .
The classic laddering technique from qualitative research bears some resemblance, but it’s designed for interviews, not messaging. Similarly, the “whole product” concept from Levitt and Moore emphasizes completeness of solution, rather than relevance to the customer. It helps with product design and risk reduction but says little about prioritization.
Its closest neighbors in structure are probably certain SiriusDecisions (Forrester) frameworks, particularly those concerned with messaging alignment and campaign planning. This is no surprise as I was a Sirius practioner for many years. The emphasis there is different as they are concerned with matching value to personas or buyer roles, whilst this ladder focuses on the internal logic of how value manifests itself across the customer organisation and against its priorities.
Limitations – Where the Ladder Might Wobble
There are limitations. The model assumes a relatively rational buying process and a buyer organization with clear operational goals. In reality, most B2B decisions are messy, influenced by risk aversion, politics, inertia and the 90-day tornado. The ladder can get pretty wobbly given enough organizational ambiguity, or chaos. It also places demands on the user to define use cases and map outcomes in ways that are evidence-based, and customer-centred, which is hard work.
Wrap Up
I am not claiming this model as to be a universal theory of B2B value. Far from it! But for companies trying to get clearer about how their products create measurable, organizational impact I think it’s a step in the right direction. It’s a simple idea, that introduces challenging work, but starting small, working step by step, we can talk to customers about value specifically, not generically.