Value Language

I participated in sales training with our sales team last week. Once a year, the team meets and participates in 2.5 days of in-person training led by outside experts in Solution Selling, a specific framework our sales organization uses. The days are long, filled with information and conversations in between the sessions. My main reason for attending was to meet people in person. I work with the sales team closely, so getting time to connect with them outside of video calls was important. While I’m a huge advocate of remote work, in-person time is still crucial and valuable. I always come back from in-person sessions with a new energy that’s hard to replicate over video calls. And this is coming from an introvert! My social battery was well past empty each day, but it was worth it.

If I had to synthesize everything we talked about into one word, it would be: value.

I’ve discussed the Value Engine as it pertains to product directly, which includes the orbiting functions like sales and marketing.

I told many sales people this:

We all work in the value chain.

Product is figuring out what’s valuable to build, delivering it, and refining it; marketing is amplifying the value; sales is selling the value. Each group, in its own way, is manipulating value as the raw material. Speaking the language of value is how you translate information into impact. It matters because value is pervasive. It’s an invisible thread weaving things together.

Almost every decision is built on a simple question of value: is this worth the investment? The investment of time, money, energy. Whether you’re deciding on a new hobby or a company is deciding on buying your software product, the underlying tension is the same:

Am I making the best choice?

It’s a question of value. But seeing the value, aligning with it, and realizing it are distinct and independent forces. Hearing about the language of value in the sales context opened my eyes to this invisible force.

This idea is called Value Language, which lives in the Clarity Codex of the Claritorium and Value Creation of Equilio.

The three pillars are:

1. Value Discovery: Asking questions and exploring to identify the value.
2. Value Alignment: Making sure everyone sees the value the same way.
3. Value Realization: Measuring success, learning, and defining next steps.

Value Discovery

The first step in speaking the language of value is seeing value. Before you can understand or actually feel the value of something, you need to see it. This is when you’re in a position to make a decision. The general business-y terminology is “ROI”: Return on Investment.

What am I going to get in return for my efforts?

If I dedicate time or money or energy to something, anything, will I get back something of equal or, ideally, greater value than what I put in? This is the ROI calculation. Most people make this calculation off of their intuition. Working in sales, you need to quantify the value of something, which is usually done by understanding the cost of the current state of doing things.

Value Accounting

If you can’t say where your resources are being spent, then you can’t understand the value. In the workshop, the idea of M.O.M. questions came up as a way to identify value during the discovery process with prospects:

• M for how many?
• O for how often?
• M for how much?

The answers to these questions come in the form of quantities. Knowing the quantitative data then helps you measure it. Underneath these questions, there are three resources you always consider when it comes to value:

1. Time: How much time does this take?
2. Money: How much money does it cost?
3. Energy: How much energy does it require?

The accounting of value is an evaluation of resources. Each of these resources are finite, which means they’re valuable. Your job is to quantify the investment, and use that as your comparison against the return. And you can’t look at each one in isolation because they directly relate and affect one another. It’s in the relationship where tension arises. The tension you surface is how you make decisions against clear and known trade-offs. Optimizing for one in isolation leads to bad decisions.

Value is choosing the right exchange between time, money, and energy.

Take the sales training. It required a lot of time, money, and energy. But the return was a massive amount of energy and team cohesion to drive new sales (more money).

Another example is buying software versus building it yourself. You can spend money to save time, or spend time to save money. But if you optimize for cost and sacrifice quality, you end up losing time, money, and energy in the long run. Short-term thinking can cost you more resources than you’re willing to spend.

Time, money, and energy are all investable resources. Value is created when one or more return at a higher rate than they were spent:

• You invest time in building an automation to return more time that compounds.
• You invest money in the stock market to return more money that compounds.
• You invest energy in a team offsite to return more energy that compounds.

Each investment is compounding leverage with a different expression for each:

• When time is invested, time leverage shows up as future time saved.
• When money is invested, money leverage shows up as higher returns.
• When energy is invested, energy leverage shows up as a greater capacity to act.

Principles

1. Value is revealed, not declared. Value emerges through the discovery process. Any value expressed before that is a hypothesis you must test.
2. Costs come before benefits. Evaluate the current state, understand it, and quantify it before you look at what you can save.
3. Value lives in the tradeoffs. Everything is an exchange between time, money, and energy. Nothing is free.

Practices

1. Current-State Narratives: Have people walk through the current state to understand the process, document it, and visualize what the current state is.
2. MOM Questions: Ask how many, how often, and how much questions as you understand the current state. Turn the abstraction into grounded reality.
3. Resource Accounting: Specifically focus on how much time, money, and energy is currently being invested. Only then can you understand the return of value.

Value Alignment

When you’re in Value Discovery, you’re seeking to understand the current state. The next step is to make sure everyone sees and agrees with the state as it was articulated. That’s Value Alignment. In the context of sales and selling software, that means repetition. You repeat what you heard and make sure the other person agrees. Agreement is the precursor to shared understanding. And asking the MOM questions while assessing the value of time, money, and energy is how you lay the foundation of data to assess collectively. If you don’t verbalize what you heard, you risk misalignment and misunderstanding.

During the sales training, we role-played customer conversations. One person would pretend to be the customer; the other the sales person. The sales person would ask questions about the customer’s stated pain, and use that as the bridge toward understanding. After receiving answers to the MOM questions, the sales person would restate what they heard.

Validation

In the book Validation, the author Caroline Fleck discusses validation in the context of personal relationships. Relationships are a core part of sales (and life), so the techniques expressed in the book are relevant to Value Alignment. Validation is not agreement; it is accurately understanding and reflecting another person’s internal experience. So when you ask questions to understand their current world, it’s in the reflection back to them where acknowledgement and understanding grows.

Three things matter in validation:

1. Accuracy: Did you actually understand what was said?
2. Reflection: Can you articulate it back in a way the other person recognizes?
3. Response: Do you adjust based on their confirmation or correction?

This isn’t about persuasion or approval. You’re not selling them something. At this stage, you’re seeking to understand and gain alignment on current pain.

In the book, Fleck expresses validation as naming what someone is feeling or experiencing. Then the other person confirms or corrects you.

But in Value Alignment, you validate by naming the current value state in terms of resources you’re investing (time, money, energy). Then the other party confirms or corrects you.

Same mechanism. Different context.

Principles

1. Understanding must be verbalized. Alignment doesn’t happen when agreement (or disagreement) is left unsaid. Understanding must be reflected back and recognized.
2. Disagreement is a form of progress. Alignment isn’t about immediate consensus. Correction, refinement, and pushback are signals of progress toward alignment.
3. Shared language precedes shared decisions. You can’t decide together and align if you’re using different units of measurement. Shared language is shared meaning.

Practices

1. Value Summarization: Pause and reflect back what you heard in conversations. You’re not just repeating information; your summarizing and aligning on what’s been shared.
2. Quantified Reframing: Using the right words matters, but so does using the right units of measurement. Make sure to align on the data. Say it out loud and document clear numbers.
3. Validation Checks: Summarizing at the end is critical, but you should also pause and reflect back information as you go. Use these checkpoints to measure understanding.

Value Realization

How do you know if something worked?

A question like this one came up in the sales training. We were discussing the steps after identifying the current state and the value of the proposed solution. Any return value is a hypothesis, even when you give a specific example of a similar customer. ROI is personal. You need to define specific metrics tied directly to the customer’s business. And this applies to any project where you want to measure impact. You define the current state, what you want to measure, and then see how the numbers go up, down, or stay the same.

This is Value Realization:

• Did you get any time back?
• Did you make more money?
• Did you restore your energy?

Success Criteria

To understand what realized value looks like, you need to define success criteria. The definition of success lives at the boundary of alignment and realization. But you can’t do this without slowing down to identify the pain in the current state. All the prior work up to this point sets the stage. Now it’s time to establish your hypotheses you’ll test against reality and use as measurements.

When we ship changes to the product, we often target a key problem tied to a specific product metric. Updating the funnel is tied to the New Trials metric, for example. If we update the flow where users try and buy the product, we want to increase the number of new trials. That’s the success criteria. We don’t define a specific number of new trials; it’s variable. But we could target a percentage increase for the criteria. No matter how you do it, the goal is the same: make sure you’re moving in the direction you want—the direction of forward progress and momentum.

That’s your success criteria. All the work before this was just talk. Now it’s about defining the reality you want to see.

Learning generates next steps. So whether you move toward or away from the direction of success, you create learnings. Those learnings inform next actions. If new trials trended down, then the “failure” is a signal. We need to try something different, a new direction. Use learnings as feedback to adjust and improve your approach.

Principles

1. Success criteria before solutions. If you don’t know what change you’re expecting, you won’t see or understand the value.
2. Measurement is directional. Metrics give you something to look at, but don’t expect perfect metrics. There are none.
3. Realized value informs the next decision. When you realize value, you generate an input for the next step.

Practices

1. Resource-Based Success Criteria: Define your success criteria as an expected change in the key resources: time, money, energy.
2. Track Changes: Write down changes in the metrics, as well as signals of progress.
3. Value Retrospectives: Don’t just stay in the land of the quantitative. Hold retros to talk and learn about how value changed.

The Throughline

Value is a shared material in building software.

Before you can fully realize value, you need to start with discovery. Understand first before moving on. If you don’t know the current state, you can’t affect change against it because you have nothing to compare the change to. It’s tempting to rush to a solution, but slowing down is how you increase your chance of success.

You also have to bring everyone along in the understanding of value. Do they see the same value opportunity you do? You won’t know unless you verbalize and visualize the information in a meaningful way. Simply repeat what you heard. Get confirmation before moving forward.

Finally, define clear success criteria. Make it obvious what you expect to change, and track how it changes. But also don’t forget about intuition. Because sometimes you can’t quantify value. Sometimes you just have to trust your instinct when a solution just feels better.

Value is a language. And generalists are fluent in many languages. To speak the language of value, you have to find it, understand it, and realize its full potential.