Not Every Value Driver Belongs in Your Business Case.

Stop modeling everything. Answer three short steps about your buyer's objectives, constraints and timeline, and get a ranked shortlist of the drivers to build the case around—and the ones to leave out.

What You'll Discover

Up to four value drivers, ranked, with the reasoning behind each
Up to three drivers to deprioritize or exclude for this deal
Framing notes for skeptical finance teams—for example, presenting FTE savings as capacity unlocked rather than headcount reduced
A focused shortlist to take into your model build

Who This Is For

Sellers and value engineers at the start of a business case, before the model is built—when the risk is modeling fifteen drivers and being able to defend none of them.

Each objective you select adds weight to the drivers that serve it. Appetite for change, data availability, finance skepticism and time to impact then raise or lower each driver, and the highest-scoring drivers are recommended.

Business ObjectivesStep 1

Operational ConstraintsStep 2

Time to ImpactStep 3

Step 1 of 3

Business Objectives

What is the primary focus for this initiative? Select all that apply.

What outcomes matter most to leadership?

Prioritize Your Drivers

Enter your details to get your prioritized value driver list.

How the prioritization works

This tool is for the start of a business case, before any numbers are modeled. Its job is to narrow eight common value drivers down to the few this particular buyer will find credible, so the model you build next is focused rather than exhaustive.

What it asks

Business objectives — any of six: reduce operating costs, free up capacity, accelerate cycle times, reduce errors or improve compliance, enable revenue growth, and improve cash flow or working capital.
Operational constraints — the organization's appetite for change, how much cost, volume and time data is readily available, and how skeptical the finance team is.
Time to impact — when value needs to be visible (within three months, six to twelve months, or longer) and whether the decision is tied to a budget cycle.

What you get

A ranked list of up to four drivers from FTE capacity and redeployment, direct cost reduction, cycle time acceleration, error and rework elimination, compliance and audit efficiency, throughput and volume capacity, working capital and cash flow, and revenue enablement. Each comes with its category and a short rationale tied to your answers, followed by up to three drivers to deprioritize or exclude. The constraints change the order in ways that matter in finance review: a highly skeptical finance team pushes error-reduction and compliance drivers up and revenue and headcount-based drivers down, and a need to show value within three months favours error reduction and cycle time over revenue.

How to act on the result

Build your model around the top two or three drivers and leave the excluded ones out, even if they look impressive. The Value Modeling Playbook explains how to structure each driver as a reusable calculation with documented assumptions. Once the numbers exist, the Executive Value Narrative Generator turns them into a short narrative for the executive who will approve the spend.