How a value model is built
A value model is the structured set of value drivers, equations and market-backed estimates that turns "our product is valuable" into a quantified business case for a prospect. This page covers what valueIQ needs from you, what the pipeline does with it, how long it takes, and where to look when it is done.
What a value model is
A value model is a system of equations that estimates the economic value your product delivers to a buyer. Each equation belongs to a value driver: one quantified way your product creates value, such as removing a third-party fee or reducing time spent on a task. Drivers are grouped by category (Cost Reduction, Revenue Enhancement, Risk Mitigation and so on) and each one references variables that carry researched market defaults.
Every deal, coaching session and business case builds on this model, and it is shared across the workspace.
What valueIQ needs from you
The guided setup asks you to complete one sentence: the company you work for, its website, and the product you sell. You can add a region and target customers if you want to.
Supporting documents are optional. If you have product collateral, battle cards or a pricing doc, upload PDF, CSV, TXT, XLSX or image files and valueIQ uses them to sharpen the model. The pipeline can work from public information alone.
- Open the guided setup. On first sign-in, click Get Started in the Welcome dialog. If you closed it, start setup later from the workspace chat.
- Fill in the product sentence. Company name, website and product. Attach documents if you have them.
- Click Generate my value model. valueIQ scans public information about your company and product.
- Confirm what it found. valueIQ asks you to verify the detected company and product name, then shows a list of likely competitors. Reply Yes to confirm, or correct the details and add or remove competitors.
Once you confirm, generation continues in the background.
Documents that help most
The pipeline can work from public information alone, but the more real context you attach, the more precise the model. If you have any of the following, attach them during setup or add them to the product later.
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Customer ROI and outcome data. ROI studies, business case decks, or value justification documents you have used with customers or prospects. Win write-ups or case studies with quantified outcomes. Customer QBR decks with before-and-after metrics.
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Product and pricing context. Product one-pagers or overview decks. Your packaging and pricing structure: what is in each tier, what is an add-on, and typical deal sizes by segment. Feature-level sheets for your key modules.
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Sales and enablement materials. Discovery call guides or qualification frameworks your team uses. Objection handling guides, especially around price, value, or switching cost. Demo scripts or talk tracks that highlight customer value.
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Customer and market intelligence. Your ICP definition: the firmographics and situations where you win most reliably. Customer segmentation data. Voice-of-customer research, NPS verbatims, or win/loss interview summaries.
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Competitive intelligence. The competitors you encounter most often in active deals, and any battle cards or competitive materials you already have.
Nothing needs to be polished. Rough decks, internal notes, and spreadsheets all work. The goal is to ground the model in your own numbers rather than relying purely on market benchmarks.
You can keep adding documents after the model is built. Upload them into a deal through the vIQ, covered in vIQ, and they sharpen coaching and business cases on that deal as well.
What the pipeline does
The build runs as three chained workflows.
- Research. valueIQ researches your company, the product category and the competitive landscape.
- Value model generation. The pipeline produces the model itself: a list of variables, and a list of value drivers. Each driver carries a category and subcategory, a description, customer-fit criteria, an arithmetic equation that references the variables, and a key category metric that describes the KPI the driver moves.
- Market variables. The pipeline populates industry-benchmarked defaults for the variables, with a median, a range, a confidence level and sources. This is what makes the model calculable before you have any customer-specific data.
Variables come in two main kinds at this stage: Customer Variables, which the prospect measures (headcount, current cost), and Improvement Claims, which are assertions about how much your product changes a figure (a 30 percent reduction in resolution time, for example). The full set of variable types is covered in Value drivers and equations.
How long it takes
Generation takes about 25 minutes and runs in the background, so you can explore the rest of valueIQ while you wait.
While the model is building, your product appears under Products and Deals in the left sidebar with a status line such as "Researching your product and market position", an elapsed-time counter and a spinner. A "Surveying Market" badge means the drivers are ready and the market values are still being computed.
When the job finishes, a completion notice names the product and its driver count, and the spinner in the sidebar is replaced by a purple box icon. Hover over a finished product to see its drivers grouped by category and a summary of its variables.
The three views
Click the product name to open the value model. Three tabs run across the top.
- Value Model is the working list of your value drivers, their equations, and the criteria that define when each one applies. The Market Estimates section lower on the page lists every variable with its range and confidence.
- Model Insights is where you stress-test the model: sensitivity analysis, validation status and driver overlap.
- Story & Spec packages the model as a narrative for buyers and a machine-readable page for AI assistants.
Most day-to-day work happens in the first two views.
Review the generated drivers before you build your first deal, and rename drivers and variables to match your team's vocabulary.