---
title: "How to Identify Your Company's Inner Core Value"
episode: 10
podcast: "The LeanScale Podcast"
publisher: "LeanScale"
guest: "Tom Miller"
guest_title: "Author of 'Call Your Shots'; former CRO, Emailage"
date_published: 2023-06-01
date_modified: 2026-07-22
duration: 00:13:49
word_count: 1921
topics: ["brand-positioning", "gtm-strategy", "pricing-packaging", "revenue-operations"]
canonical_url: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/thomas-miller-inner-core-value/
source: "LeanScale Podcast Knowledge Hub — https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app"
license: "Free to quote and cite with attribution to The LeanScale Podcast."
---

# How to Identify Your Company's Inner Core Value — Full Transcript

> Episode 10 of The LeanScale Podcast, with Tom Miller.
> Published June 1, 2023 · 00:13:49 · 1,921 words.
> Machine-transcribed and **not diarized** — speaker attribution is inferred, so verify
> attribution against the audio before quoting a specific person.
> Structured breakdown: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/thomas-miller-inner-core-value/

## 00:00 — Cold open: value is perceived, not delivered

**[0:00]** Your value was being perceived by me. You did a lot of functional things to achieve that status, but ultimately it was the way I felt about your service, which became more important than the nuts and bolts of how you were achieving, you know, this data-constructed narrative.

## 00:27 — Welcome to The LeanScale Podcast

**[0:27]** Welcome to The LeanScale Podcast where we talk about everything RevOps. Thank you for listening.

## 00:57 — RevOps as a case study: functional vs. perceived value

**[0:57]** We talked about this just in conversations about those things as it relates to LeanScale. What is your primary promise of impact? Is it based on perceived value in the category of emotional value, or is it more in the category of functional value? These are real questions. I think LeanScale is like a great case study for some of these questions because you guys are largely selling RevOps as a service. It's easy to default into, you know, this idea that, hey, this is just a highly functional capability. Let's allow or pay someone to do all this plumbing that

**[1:44]** we don't want to do. But that's not really what RevOps as a service. That's, you know, I became a customer of LeanScale. That's not how I perceived your value. I perceived your value because I believed I could lean on you guys to help me achieve my objectives as an executive to communicate the narrative behind the performance discussion that I had to deliver every 90 days to a board, which was really complex, which was really sort of bottled up in a million different collections of data points, which could only be revealed if you could take those raw elements of data and turn

## 02:30 — Air cover and confidence: the board performance narrative

**[2:30]** them into, you know, a well-constructed performance narrative that would make sense at the board level. And so you're giving me essentially the error cover I needed to help the entire executive team and board have confidence in what we were describing as the performance narrative of the company. And confidence is a really powerful emotion, right? Now, you did a million functional things to help reach that phase or that stage of the development of how your value was being perceived by me. You did a lot of functional things to achieve that status, but ultimately

**[3:20]** it was the way I felt about your service, which became more important than the nuts and bolts of how you were achieving, you know, this data-constructed narrative. And it's amazing to me, you know, I have a lot of friends throughout technology. It's always amazing to me to look at content and to look at websites or to just have conversations with engineering or product or marketing or executive teams. And to see this sort of vacuum that exists in this understanding of in my terms, what I call the inner core, like it's the element of value that's most strongly

## 03:58 — The inner core: your superpower and the 70% rule

**[3:58]** connected to your brand. The data is pretty clear that that single element of value you can create that's unique and special to you. I sometimes call it the superpower often represents as much as 70% of perceived value. And so if you're not meeting with that element and you're not stacking the other critical elements of value underneath it the right way, you're sort of robbing Peter to pay Paul, you're not actually making progress towards a strategy which says, hey, let's reveal our value for its fullest extent. You're actually muddying the waters. And I love the expression.

## 04:37 — Lower the cost of customer thinking

**[4:37]** This came from Kellogg, the MBA program at Northwestern, where they said the primary job of a marketer is to lower the cost of customer thinking. And far too often, you know, we layer feature on top of feature or benefit on top of benefit, as if more is more, but it never is. It dilutes the overall perceived value, which is contained in these few unique elements. And, you know, like, you just have to be trained to understand that if the goal is to create a value exchange event, and if you're really endeavoring to maximize the chance of that occurring, then you have to understand these concepts that are upstream from where the

**[5:22]** marketer lives, because the marketer doesn't build the products, the marketer typically doesn't own, you know, the idea of features and benefits, you know, so you have product teams and product marketing teams, and often, all this stuff is siloed off. And until you start to understand the connective tissue between all of it, you know, the idea that you're just going to get lucky and stumble upon the perfect promise of impact, it's like almost impossible. And so that's kind of been my experience of why, you know, I think everyone has this innate desire, you know, to say, hey,

**[6:01]** I'm a shot caller or to be a high performer. But in isolation, none of us can achieve this without this connected understanding from, you know, I sometimes refer to it from innovation to cash through the full spectrum. If we don't understand how it all goes together, the chance that will create a maximum outcome is very, very low. Makes a lot of sense. And that was, even though you and I had worked together, and I have seen you use these concepts in other companies before, thinking about it from the perspective of LeanScale was still tough to do in practice.

**[6:44]** Because RevOps does have that functional promise. But you're right, most of our customers, most of the people that we work with, would say they work with us because they trust us because we have a level of competence they need, because we give them confidence, because they feel like we're invested in their business. Of course, we back it up with all the functional aspects, but changing the idea of understanding where your value is being perceived is really, really powerful and completely changes your perspective of how you communicate to customers, how you communicate to potential customers. I think something that would be really helpful for

## 07:27 — The value triangle: functional, emotional, economic

**[7:27]** people who are listening, I know you have three ways humans perceive value. And you pick one of them as your main core. Could you walk us through the three ways to perceive value? Well, I learned it as this thing called the value triangle. So simply draw a triangle on one line of the triangle, draw the word functional on the other line, draw the word emotional on the third line, draw the word economic. So your brain, humans are not really almost in control of this. This is what your subconscious does. If you think about anything you bought, you know, and maybe if something is

**[8:20]** so inconsequential value from a value exchange event, meaning, you know, you got fast food, you're not really thinking about that, the idea of whether you intend to, whether the exchange of value was worth it, but, you know, maybe you do like if it's Chipotle and the chips and guac are another $3.50 and your brain's doing the calculus a little bit. And so the way it works is, you know, there's this idea that any time values exchange, what you're exchanging is your currency for a tool. Right. And so in my framework, I talk a lot about this innovation framework called outcome driven

## 09:15 — Jobs to be done: products are tools

**[9:15]** innovation and another framework called jobs to be done theory. And it simply says that products are tools to help customers get jobs done. Now, the key to whether or not you will acquire a tool to help you get a job done is this combination of this calculus that goes on inside your mind about, hey, what job am I trying to get done? Is it largely a functional job? Right? Am I trying to saw a two by four and a half? That's a highly functional job versus, you know, I want to be entertained at a film, you know, so how's it going to make me feel? Those would be two extreme ends

**[9:52]** of the spectrum of contemplating a tool in this case of saw versus a film at a theater to create the outcome of being entertained. Now, either way, you know, your brain will stack the primary element as the most important, occupying as much as 70% of how you'll perceive that value. So that's the that's that's really the first idea. The second idea is there's always the idea of how this thing is going to make me feel. And sometimes the way it's going to make you feel has connectivity to the price of the object. And if you're buying an object, like if all I had to do is cut one piece of wood and never use that saw again, I'm going to probably buy

## 10:46 — From economic value to worthiness

**[10:46]** the cheapest tool to get the job done and feel pretty good about it. If I'm a carpenter and I need a saw that I'm going to have for the next 20 years, I'm going to really probably try to buy the saw that makes me feel like I have the best possible tool in my hand so I can effectively execute my trade. And so there are two outcomes, emotional outcomes that ultimately get derived between this balancing effect of functional value, emotional value. And I've sort of gotten away from this concept of economic value and replaced it with the concept of worthiness. And so what your

**[11:27]** brain is largely saying, hey, is this thing going to be worth it to me? If I buy this $5 saw and cut the piece of wood once, hey, that sounds like a pretty good deal. It's worth it to me. Or I'm going to buy this $50 saw because I'm going to use it for 20 years because I'm a carpenter. That seems worth it to me. Or I'm going to go see this film and invest these three hours of my life because my favorite celebrities are in the film. That seems worth it to me. And so that balancing is what ultimately becomes the essence of your brand. Like in the case of Lean Scale, we talked about this

## 12:00 — Plumbers and poets: the RevOps combo

**[12:00]** balancing between, I like to use the term plumbers and poets because that's how I think of RevOps. You don't have to instrument all this data collection apparatus. All has to get instrumented, maintained, and run. And then the data's got to get extracted. It's got to get visualized. But ultimately, it's got to get interpreted into a narrative. And that's what's that sort of combo effect of, hey, let's execute on the plumbing and then let's execute on the poetry to construct it into the narrative. And you know, that's one of the highest value features of Lean Scale, in my

**[12:54]** opinion. That's what separates you guys. Because I actually was at the last company I did, we were using an outsourced RevOps company. And they were good plumbers, but they couldn't spell poetry. With all the letters and all the vowels, they simply did not know how to take the data and construct a performance narrative around it. And so you have to think about that as the CEO of Lean Scale. Like what's the high order bid here? How will the market perceive my promise of impact? And should I lead with these functional promises or should I lead with these emotional promises?

**[13:35]** Thank you for listening to this episode. If you like the discussion, please like, share, and subscribe to wherever you listen to podcasts so you never miss a new episode.