Exercise 1: Your Value-Chain (The Cure to A Vague Value Proposition)

Answer the following questions:

1) Who is your target customer? Think about company type (if applicable) and the
person who would buy/use your offering.

2) What is one specific problem your target customer needs to solve (and can solve with
what you do)?

3) How would you measure that they solved that problem? That is, what are the metrics
or key performance indicators (for a business) that show they accomplished the goal or
removed the concern?

4) What is it worth to your key audience to solve that problem? What’s the “big benefit”
they would get from this?

5) Now, put it all together in your Value-Chain Mad Lib:

We help _______________________________________________________

To make _______________________________________________________better

As measured by __________________________________________________

Which is worth ___________________________________________________

 Exercise 2: What is your Vision and Mission?

Answer the following questions:

1) Name 3 key trends that you see affecting your market today?

1.

2.

3.

2) How will these trends change the world during the next 5 to 10 years?

3) What is the MOST SIGNIFICANT change you see happening during the next 5 to 10
years?

4) What will be (could be) your company’s role in making that future happen?

5) Do you have a Mission Statement that reflects that thinking? What is it?
 Exercise 3: What is Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

Answer the following questions:

1) How do you segment your prospects/customers? What are the characteristics you
use to identify one segment from another?

Segment 1:

Key Characteristics:

Segment 2:

Key Characteristics:

Segment 3:

Key Characteristics:

2) Did you include both demographic/firmographic and behavioral/use case

characteristics? What data/research do you need to do to figure this out?

3) Which segment represents the greatest Total Available Market (TAM) to your
business? How do you know?
 Exercise 4: Identify Your KDMs And What They Care About

Pick one of the three segments you identified in Exercise 3 and write it here:

Answer the following questions:

1) How do you segment your prospects/customers? What are the characteristics you
use to identify one segment from another?

KDM 1:

What problems needs to solve? What care about? What keeps them awake? ::

KDM 2:

What problems needs to solve? What care about? What keeps them awake? ::

KDM 3:

What problems needs to solve? What care about? What keeps them awake? ::

2) How are each of your KDMs different from the others?

KDM 1 is different because:

KDM 2 is different because:

KDM 3 is different because:

 Exercise 5: Why Change? Why Should KDM Do Anything Differently?

Pick one of the three KDMs you identified in Exercise 4 and write it here:

Answer the following questions:

1) What is your KDM likely doing today about the problem(s) you identified?

2) What are the flaws in this current approach?

3) What is an opportunity or approach that they may not have considered? What should
they be doing differently?

4) How would you contrast what they are doing with what they could be doing? How
would you demonstrate this difference with a high degree of contrast?

5) Why might the pain of making this change to a new situation be less than staying with
the status quo? How could you demonstrate this in your message?

6) What problems or regrets with making the proposed change might your KDM have?
How would you diminish those?