NOVA-6 · Dimension 3 of 6
Why us, why now, why this much — making the solution the obvious answer.
Buyers compare you against three things — your competitors, doing nothing, and their own preconceptions. Value Influence is the dimension that shapes which criteria they evaluate on. Win the criteria conversation and you win the deal. Lose it, and you compete on price.
For the rep
Without Value Influence, you're competing on features. Features lose to incumbents and to "let's wait." Value Influence is what makes the buyer pick you instead of pushing the decision to next quarter.
For the customer
The decision criteria the buyer will write into the RFP, the eval scorecard, the business case — those criteria are forming during your discovery calls. If you don't shape them, your competitor will. And the buyer will think the criteria were their idea.
For the sales process
Differentiation that lands is anchored to the buyer's stated criteria, in the buyer's own words. "We're better" is noise. "Here's why your team's specific situation makes this matter" is signal.
Reps know they should differentiate. The problem is they're trained to differentiate on features they think are impressive — instead of on criteria the buyer actually cares about.
Feature dumps without anchor
Reciting product capabilities without first surfacing what the buyer cares about. The buyer hears noise; the rep thinks they're selling.
Letting competitors set the criteria
If the buyer is evaluating on the incumbent's strengths, you lose by default. You have to teach a new criterion the buyer hadn't considered — one your solution wins on.
"Do nothing" treated as not a competitor
It is. Most B2B deals are lost to inertia, not to a competitor. If you haven't made staying the same feel more painful than buying, the deal stalls.
Competing on price by default
When the buyer asks "what makes you different?" and the rep answers with a price comparison or a feature list, the deal is now a procurement exercise. You lost.
Generic value props for everyone
The same "save time, save money, reduce risk" pitch the rep used last week. Buyers can smell the script. Value lands when it's anchored to *this* buyer's situation.
Pipedrive, Salesforce, HubSpot
CRMs hold the deal data — value, stage, products. They don't capture the buyer's decision criteria, what competitors are in play, or how to position against them. CRMs run the pipeline; they don't shape the conversation.
The verdict: a deal record, not a positioning engine.
Gong, Chorus, Clari Copilot
Surfaces competitor mentions and keyword frequency. Useful for managers reviewing what already happened. But "your rep mentioned Gong 3 times last week" doesn't tell anyone what to say differently next call.
The verdict: a transcript, not a strategy.
Battle cards, decks, training
Battle cards become outdated the day they ship. Generic value-prop training doesn't know your specific deal, your specific buyer, or what criteria *this* buyer is using to evaluate.
The verdict: a binder, not a coach.
What's missing across all three:
None of them know the buyer's stated decision criteria — in the buyer's own words — for this specific deal. So none of them can tell the rep how to position value here, today, for this buyer.
Opsight sits on top of the CRM you already trust. It reads the deal data, adds the execution layer, and feeds the diagnostic back to the rep — every day, on every deal. Five things make Value Influence coaching a closed loop:
A direct, results-driven rep gets challenger-style provocations: "Tell them their current setup is leaving $X on the table." A consultative, relationship-led rep gets peer-validation framing: "Three teams like yours discovered they were measuring the wrong metric." Same insight, your voice.
Every deal gets a Value Influence score. Low score = your differentiation isn't landing for this specific buyer — and NOVA tells you why. Maybe you haven't surfaced their criteria. Maybe you're competing on the wrong axis. Maybe "do nothing" is winning and you haven't addressed it.
NOVA writes a strategic analysis: who else is in the deal, what criteria the buyer has stated, what criteria you should still be teaching, and the specific provocation to use this week. Not a generic battle card — a deal-specific brief.
Stage-aware Value Influence questions surface at the right moment in your deal — competitor positioning at qualification, criteria-shaping at discovery, "do-nothing" framing at proposal. Check an item off and a text box opens — paste in the buyer's actual words ("they care about implementation speed because they had a 6-month rollout that failed"). NOVA attaches that context to the deal's memory.
Coach's Office Hours is your direct line to NOVA for everything the checklist doesn't capture. Competitor pricing you just heard. An RFP requirement that just dropped. A new internal stakeholder with a different priority. NOVA uses that context the next morning. Your notes shape the coaching. The coaching shapes the next conversation.
Value Influence isn't built by reciting features. It's built by asking questions that surface the buyer's real decision criteria — and shape new ones in your favor.
“Beyond the obvious requirements, what would make you choose one vendor over another?”
Why it works: The "beyond the obvious" framing forces the buyer to articulate criteria they hadn't consciously named — and gives you something to position against.
“What does our approach do better than your alternatives — or better than doing nothing?”
Why it works: Forces the buyer to teach you their mental model. Their answer becomes your positioning script.
“If we matched their pricing, what would you still be uncertain about?”
Why it works: Surfaces the real objection underneath the price objection. Price is almost never the actual blocker.
“What did the last vendor get wrong that we need to get right?”
Why it works: Past trauma surfaces hidden criteria. If they had a 6-month implementation that failed, "fast time-to-value" just became their #1 criterion.
“If you do nothing for the next two quarters, what specifically breaks?”
Why it works: "Do nothing" is the most common competitor. Forcing a concrete answer about consequences is the only way to beat it.
Pick one active deal. Answer honestly. If you can't answer all three, your Value Influence score on that deal is low — and that's the deal NOVA will surface for you tomorrow morning.
Can you state the buyer's top 3 decision criteria in their own words?
Have you named at least one differentiator that maps to a specific stated criterion?
Have you addressed "do nothing" as a real competitor — with the buyer's own numbers?
14-day free trial. No credit card. Connect Pipedrive in two minutes and NOVA scores every active deal's Value Influence dimension by morning.