🔀 Saving time isn't a value prop

This week in The Pivot: saving time and saving money are not what drives purchases—it’s what that time and money unlocks.

Hey friends 👋

Every Monday in The Pivot, we share one anti-pattern we’re seeing from founders in the Traction Lab ecosystem, and the quick redirect that makes all the difference—in just 250 words.

Here’s this week’s:

The anti-pattern: saving time as a value prop.

Founders are leading with “we save you time” as if time itself is the value proposition.

They’ve got users saying the product saves them hours every week, and founders think that’s the proof they need to charge big bucks.

Except… those users are full-time employees—saving them two hours a week doesn’t save the company any money. The business is still paying the same salaries. And so decisionmakers just give founders blank stares because few companies buys tools to make their employees’ lives easier unless it unlocks something else.

The mistake is stopping at “time saved” instead of asking what that time enables.

The fix: stop selling time savings 🤷

Start selling the outcome that saved time unlocks.

If your product saves someone two hours a week, what happens with those two hours? Are they closing more deals? Shipping more projects? Reducing errors that were costing money? Can the company scale without hiring another person?

Get specific about what the business gains—more revenue, fewer costs, faster growth, better compliance. Then quantify it.

If you can’t connect saved time to a business outcome the economic buyer cares about, you don’t have a value prop yet.

Go back to customer discovery and figure out what the CFO or VP actually measures success by.

The Tool: the “So What?” ladder.

Start with your time-saving claim: “We save your team 5 hours per week.” Then ask: “So what does that enable?” Keep asking until you hit a metric the economic buyer measures:

Time → efficiency → output → revenue. Boom.

If you can’t get there in three steps, you don’t have a value prop yet.

Until next week,

—jdm

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