Why the NDV Chain might be the missing link between Buyer Pain & your Value Prop

One of the strongest challenges start-ups & scale-ups experience is translating Buyer Pain & Risk into meaningful Buyer Stories. You might recognize the language of Stories from your Prod-Eng teams, and it is just as essential here in Revenue engineering.

When you're in the early stages of building a business – and by that I mean anything up to about Series C (so in the region of $30M-$50M ARR) – you will need to define very, very tightly what these Buyer Stories, or use cases, are.

And the best way to do that is to understand with clarity what your Buyers’ Needs are, in order that you can develop a product which is hyper focused on:

Solving one Need extraordinarily well, whilst developing both your product & your value prop for this & this alone.

To help you solve this challenge I am going to give you a really simple sequence which looks at the Buyers’ Needs , our Delivery against those Needs, and finally the Value that your customer will receive. At Revelesco we call this the NDV Chain:

I’ve illustrated this with post-its as if we were white boarding. The first post-it highlights the Need.

I use a very, very simple sentence to help me get started, with sentence formulas containing blanks that we are going to fill with examples. Let's fill it in for a marketing manager for an imaginary SaaS business.

Need

As a marketing manager at a medium sized SaaS business, who needs to attribute our MQLs to our various inbound channels, I can’t currently provide my leadership team with anything even resembling reliable data, which makes it hard to know where to allocate budget.

So now we have a basic use case, with an expression of the Pain we previously identified. When I do this exercise with start-ups and scale-ups though, I encourage them to get much much tighter than this. So let's take it further:

As a demand focused marketing manager at a post Series B startup in NYC, that operates in the AI space and is trying to generate leads from categories A, B and C, I need to be able to attribute which channels those leads comes from in order to decide exactly where to spend my next quarter’s marketing dollars to minimize CAC whilst generating sufficient SQLs.

Same use case, much much tighter!

And inside our use case, we now know exactly who we're trying to help - it’s not just a random marketing manager, it’s a specific & recognizable marketing manager. We know exactly what they want help with; and we know why they want that help.

Delivery

We then move on to the Delivery. So let's go through a similar statement again.

Now that I have bought x y z product, I am able to accurately attribute my leads by channel, which means that I know precisely where to spend future dollars.

Notice how it is now going to be very clear to your product team where they are going to spend their time, as the problem we are solving is becoming clearer & clearer.

Surely, in this example, the product team’s objective now is to ensure that channel attribution is definitive, and that people recognize the precise value they get from the leads that we are generating. In addition we are going to give them performance indicators to help them understand where they might want to spend future money.

It is vital with your Delivery statement to get as specific as you can. What precisely is it you do that alleviates the Pain, eliminates the Risk, and fulfills the Need. The more focused this is, the easier it is for your Product leader to build. Even better, as a revenue leader, I now have essential detail to help me build the pitch & the value prop.

Value

Let's move onto the third and final post-it. This is about Value.

This is us going beyond just “I have had something delivered”, to “Now I can measure it & justify empirically why I bought it”. Let’s run through the formula: “I know this is working, because when I look at X, I see Y, which means I am likely to buy more of this product in the future”. So let's fill those blanks in with an imaginary example.

I know this is working because when I measure cost per lead, I see it has reduced by a factor of 20% versus where I was before therefore I am likely to buy this product again in the future.

The NDV Chain

If we join these three things together, we get the Needs - Delivery - Value Chain. We have understood your Need, we can prove that we have Delivered on it, and therefore you are likely to buy more in the future (Value).

Now, so far, so logical. Where it all unravels with so many organizations is they've built these value chains for many multiple Casualties & ICPs way too early - an error made by so many start-ups & scale-ups.

It’s just impossible for an early stage business to keep building a product with so many variables, it leaves you with a muddled value proposition. Your product team doesn't know who they're developing for, your engineering team has way too much to deliver; and as most products have to be re-engineered along the way, worst of all?, the resulting workload prevents you from ever doing anything new and innovative.

Write out as many of these NDV Chains as you can think of, before narrowing it down to no more than three. Crucially these three will show a clear link to the Pains & Risks & Strategic Drivers you identified previously.

This will enable you to remain hyper focussed on the core Pain that gives Value to your proposition, and urgency to your Buyer.