BI-301a · Module 2

The Value Gap Analysis

4 min read

There is a distance between what a company does and how they describe it. That distance is the value gap. And it's almost always wider than the company realizes.

Here's a pattern I see constantly: a company with genuinely differentiated capabilities describes themselves as "a solutions provider delivering innovative, best-in-class outcomes." That sentence could apply to any company in any industry. It says nothing. Meanwhile, their actual differentiator — say, an implementation methodology that cuts deployment time by 60% — is buried in paragraph four of a case study nobody reads.

The value gap analysis makes this visible. You take a company's marketing copy, their sales deck, their website — everything they say about themselves — and compare it against their actual capabilities, metrics, and customer outcomes. The delta is the value gap.

Do This

  • Analyze the customer's marketing copy against their actual performance data
  • Identify specific claims that are too vague to differentiate
  • Show them the exact gap between capability and articulation

Avoid This

  • Tell the customer their marketing is bad
  • Rewrite their copy without first establishing the evidence base
  • Present the value gap as a criticism instead of an opportunity

AI makes this analysis faster and more rigorous. Feed the customer's website copy, LinkedIn posts, press releases, and sales materials into a structured analysis prompt. Ask for specificity scores: how many claims are backed by numbers? How many could be copied word-for-word onto a competitor's site without anyone noticing? How many reference actual customer outcomes?

The typical result is sobering. Most B2B companies have websites where 70-80% of the copy is interchangeable with their competitors. The remaining 20-30% — the specific, defensible, differentiated claims — is where the value lives. The value gap analysis identifies that 20% and builds on it.

## Value Gap Analysis Prompt

Analyze the following company's public-facing copy.
For each major claim, score it on:

1. SPECIFICITY (1-5): Is this claim unique to this
   company, or could any competitor say the same thing?

2. EVIDENCE (1-5): Is the claim backed by data, case
   studies, or verifiable outcomes?

3. DIFFERENTIATION (1-5): Does this claim create
   meaningful distance from competitors?

Flag any claim scoring below 3 on all dimensions as
a "value gap" — a place where actual capability
exceeds articulated value.

Materials to analyze:
[paste homepage, about page, key landing pages]