Revenue Academy · Sales · S2

Discovery with the value tree

The value tree is not a diagram to present. It is a question order — value splits into profit and cash, revenue into price and quantity, and every branch has a different owner who measures it differently.

Read time ~10 min Includes 8 questions and a 3-line script For AEs, solution consultants

01 The shape of it

Four branches, four conversations

Each branch opens a different door and lands on a different metric. Most sellers only ever walk through the cost door, which is the one with the least money behind it.

Price

What you charge and what you keep after discount, rebate and mix. The half of revenue most reporting cannot see, because the leakage happens between the list price and the invoice.

Lands on: price realisation, average net price

Quantity

Customers, frequency and basket. Growth conversations start here and quickly become an entity resolution conversation, because nobody agrees how many customers there are.

Lands on: active customers, purchase frequency

Cost

Cost to serve, yield, downtime and the cost lines that only exist when several systems are joined. The most familiar door, and the one with the most internal disagreement.

Lands on: cost to serve, OEE, scrap rate

Cash

The cycle, its three owners, and the working capital growth will consume. The fastest route to a CFO conversation because the number is large and nobody owns the total.

Lands on: cash conversion cycle, DSO, DIO, DPO

02 Questions

Eight questions that work in any sector

Ask them of the business, not of IT. The uncomfortable pauses are the qualification.

Which number in your monthly pack causes the most argument, and what is the argument about — the figure, or what it means?
When two reports disagree, who decides which one is right, and how long does that take?
How much of the close is consolidation, and how much is reconciliation?
Which figure would you not want to defend to an auditor without a week of preparation?
How many customers do you have — and would procurement, sales and finance give me the same number?
What did you stop measuring because it was too hard to produce?
Which decision are you making on instinct because the data arrives too late to use?
If an assistant answered that question tomorrow, what would have to be true before you acted on the answer?

03 Sequence

A discovery meeting that goes somewhere

Forty-five minutes. The failure mode is spending it all in step two.

0101Ten minutes on their business model, in their words. Which branch of the tree carries their margin.

0202Fifteen minutes on the one number that hurts. Not a list — one, in detail.

0303Ten minutes tracing it: which systems hold the inputs, who owns the definition, where it breaks between them.

0404Five minutes sizing it with their own arithmetic. Your job is the multiplication, not the estimate.

0505Five minutes on what would have to be true to fix it in one quarter, and who would have to be in the room.

04 Reference

Branch, question, metric, owner

Use it to decide which door to walk through before the meeting, based on who accepted it.

Branch	The question that opens it	Where it lands
Price	What is the gap between list and invoice, and who can approve it?	Price realisation · owner: commercial / CFO
Quantity	How many customers do you have, and who agrees with that number?	Active customers · owner: CMO / sales ops
Cost	Which cost line only appears when two systems are joined?	Cost to serve · owner: COO / finance
Cash	Who owns the total cash cycle, rather than one of its three parts?	Cash conversion cycle · owner: CFO / treasury
Data underneath	What share of what you report on has one agreed definition?	Governed metric coverage · owner: CDO / CFO

05 Language

Say this, not that

Discovery goes wrong in the same three places.

They describe a data problem

Say this

Which decision does that stop you making, and what does the delay cost you in a quarter?

Not that

Right, so you need a single source of truth.

They ask for a demo in the first ten minutes

Say this

Happy to — bring the number you argue about most and we will trace it back to source, live, on your data.

Not that

Sure, let me share my screen and walk you through the platform.

They cannot size the problem

Say this

What would you need to see to know it was worth a quarter of someone's time?

Not that

Companies like you typically see a 20 to 30% improvement.

06 Questions

Frequently asked

What if they will not share numbers?

Use their public accounts, or ask for the shape rather than the value — the ratio of stock to revenue, the number of days in the close. A directional figure they correct is more useful than a precise one they never give you.

How does this differ from a standard qualification framework?

It is not a substitute for one. Frameworks tell you whether a deal is real; the value tree tells you where the money is in their business, which is what makes the case defensible once the deal is real.

See what the buyer sees

Every claim in this module traces back to a page the customer can read for themselves.

Open the Data Hub