Developing value hypotheses from account research

Introduction

After our recent posts on analyzing 10-K’s and earnings calls, we were asked to take it a step further: how to translate an idea gleaned from a 10-K into a clear value hypothesis that can be used to engage with your customer or prospect. So we’re writing two posts to dig in more. Here, we’ll do a tactical example of some techniques around developing value hypotheses and messaging; later, we’ll write a post that’ll further explore how to think about developing value hypotheses more broadly.

Our basic framework here is:

1. Summarize the earnings call/10-K using ChatGPT

2. Identify concrete pain points based on discoveries from (1)

3. Map value props to pain points

4. Adjust based on what the personas involved actually care about

5. Develop messaging angles (with a little help from GPT)

Buyers want to work with trusted advisors—i.e., sellers who deeply understand them and focus on their needs. The above steps are a great way for a rep to establish the credibility that’s required to earn buyer attention and trust. It’s a lot of work, but AI takes care of most of the heavy lifting, so reps have more time to think through strategy.

Summarize the earnings call

Continuing our series as an Endgame sales rep focused on Zscaler, let's analyze their earnings call from 05/2024 (for a refresher on using ChatGPT to analyze documents, see our previous post). Earnings calls and 10-Ks are goldmines of information about public companies—revealing their goals, strategies, and potential risks. While these documents are dense and time-consuming to read manually, ChatGPT excels at quickly identifying key points. Check out the screenshot below for an example:

Let’s take a moment to appreciate the hours of tedious work ChatGPT has just saved us. Reviewing a 10-K and earnings call is no small undertaking, and we now have significantly more time to develop a robust account strategy. There's a wealth of information here, much of which aligns with Endgame's mission to help enterprise reps with account research and planning. This enables them to deepen their understanding of accounts and forge stronger relationships. Now, let's walk through the next steps of this exercise.

Identify pain points

We can now proceed with analyzing the AI summary, from which we can arrive at a few reasonable hypotheses on what might be going on internally at Zscaler.

Redistribution of accounts, including in-flight deals critical to Q4 revenue. As reps depart, Zscaler has likely been in a constant cycle of reallocating accounts among remaining reps, aiming to prevent deals from slipping through the cracks while maintaining momentum with early-stage accounts. Managers and reps are probably relying on quick handoff meetings as a stopgap while they struggle to grasp the history and context of unfamiliar accounts and opportunities, with many accounts likely receiving insufficient attention. Pain point: Risk of lost business as customers interact with reps who lack context and are managing more accounts than usual.

New rep hiring and onboarding, need to ramp quickly to impact 2025 revenue. Hiring this many new reps is backbreaking: hiring managers must be swamped with interviews and onboarding. However, these hiring managers are often the same ones trying to close existing opportunities with their teams, pulling them in all different directions. It's all too easy to get sucked into the most pressing fires, putting the quality and speed of new rep onboarding and, by extension, the 2025 revenue plans at risk. Pain point: New reps are probably getting subpar onboarding given the chaos, jeopardizing 2025 revenue.

Org-wide sales enablement amidst everything else going on. Implementing the new sales strategy is no small feat. Shifting to account centric sales is an org-level change that results in materially different responsibilities and tactics for reps. These approaches may further differ by geography, industry vertical, and market segment. It's a substantial undertaking requiring collateral, trainings, 1:1s, etc, placing still more burden on management, operations, and enablement teams. And while some reps might grasp these concepts quickly, it's reasonable to assume many will struggle, given the pressures they're under to keep deals moving and achieve quota. Pain point: Reps are inconsistently learning and applying new sales strategies to their accounts, jeopardizing both current and future deals.

Identifying value props

We’re starting to develop a perspective on Zscaler’s needs that we can offer some help with: Zscaler’s existing reps need to quickly come up to speed on accounts they’re inheriting which requires quick context; new reps need to get onboarded into their books which requires rich context on accounts; and all reps need to analyze their whole book in light of new sales strategies. These scenarios map to two of Endgame’s core value props:

1. Helping reps easily get the level of context they desire on any accounts in their book in real-time, and

2. Analyzing customer data for use cases, needs, and most interesting value props so sellers can build strong POVs and develop the ideal business case.

It’d be simple enough to stop here and start pinging Zscaler folks with messages about how Endgame can help, but it’s worth taking a little more time to think about each persona involved.

Focusing on people

VPs/senior leaders are under pressure to update strategy and need to count on execution. Typically, sales leaders' core responsibilities involve allocating budget to align with the company strategy—while also likely prioritizing time for flagship customers to ensure retention and stability in key accounts. Thus, they probably don’t have much time left over for hiring and ramping new reps, and likely want to entrust that work to their managers, Ops, and Enablement teams.

Managers and operators are putting out urgent fires, potentially at the risk of long-term success. They're juggling onboarding and ramping up new reps with maintaining healthy pipelines and customer retention. This balancing act is far from simple. Hiring devours time—even streamlined interview processes heavily burden managers. Onboarding often takes a backseat when managers prioritize headcount and deal management, shifting more responsibility to Operations and Enablement for proper rep training and ramp-up.

In the meantime, existing and new sales reps just want to get up to speed and sell so they can hit quota. Given all the other things going on, they likely aren’t getting much time from their managers, and are probably doing a lot of individual hacking to figure out how they can execute. Even the best Operations and Enablement teams can’t cover every need.

We’re certainly speculating here, but if the above is all true, it can be used to hone and refine one’s messaging. Instead of simply applying value props to pain points and blasting people with the same message, we can tailor things to each persona and demonstrate a deeper understanding of what they really need.

By the way: we asked GPT to speculate, and it did a great job here too.

Next steps

It’s again worth pausing to recognize how much more deeply we now understand the customer, what they’re going through and what they’re likely to care about. Next steps such as updating and sharing out the account plan, figuring out who to email with what copy, updating a pitch deck to be customer-specific, are all informed by a new depth of situational understanding that simply wouldn’t exist without this sort of research and analysis.

Here, we’ll continue with the outline from the beginning of the post by generating messaging that’s properly informed by our understanding of the customer’s situation. Also, messaging is a great time to take advantage of GenAI. Simply feed it our newly developed perspectives, and start crafting emails!

The generated emails will likely need some tweaks, but the huge win here is not only in the time savings, but also in your ability to stand out from the noise because of a clear understanding of the customer’s real, acute needs. And let's not forget that those tweaks are easy! Want the emails to be a bit shorter? Ask ChatGPT to make it more concise. Feel like the email doesn't quite align with company sanctioned messaging? Simply drop some enablement materials into the chat and ask ChatGPT to align the content and tone (assuming this is okay with your security team, of course 🙂).

The process above is really just scratching the surface. Here are a few ways you can take this approach even further (thank you Gurjeet Nijjar, Director of Enterprise Sales at Panopto, for the pro tips):

• Build a custom GPT that already has context on your company and products so that when you feed in a 10-K or earnings call transcript, the GPT answers for your questions are even more tailored to what you need without additional prompting.

• Once you’ve found some specific pain points you want to attach to, ask Perplexity to find you blogs or articles of executives from the company (or from similar companies) talking about those pain points. Often, you end up finding even more meaningful detail on how you can further customize your messaging as well as share content you find particularly insightful.

• Take it a step further and search for these pain points in general. You may find other companies facing exactly the same challenge, accelerating your process of finding more prospects.

Feedback? Questions? Comments? Ideas? Hit us up!