The Price Value Map: Grounding Entrepreneurial Dreams in Customer Reality

Entrepreneurship has always been more than building a business. It is, at its core, an intimate process of awakening — learning to listen beyond yourself, tuning your perception, and realizing you are not the center of the universe. Markets do not exist to fulfill your ego or ambitions. Investors will not write checks simply because you dream passionately. Customers will not pay for products simply because you believe they should.

This is where spiritual growth and entrepreneurship meet: when you step out of self-centered tendencies and into the lived experience of the customer. True innovation begins with the humility of perception — recognizing the light within, as the Quimbayas once understood, and allowing that light to guide you toward creating value that truly serves others.

Why the Price Value Map Matters

The Value Proposition is the first step — identifying and articulating what matters most to your customer. But knowing is not enough. You must also measure and compare. The Price Value Map takes those customer-verified features and places them side by side with what competitors are already delivering — and what customers are already paying for.

This is not about analysis paralysis. Following the lean startup spirit, it is about moving fast with clarity. The map forces you to land your entrepreneurial dreams feature by feature, weighting each by what matters most to the people you serve. It can be applied per segment or key channel step, because what one group treasures, another may ignore.

And the lesson is humbling: sometimes competitors are excelling in areas where you believed you were unique. Customers are rewarding them for it. To ignore this reality is to step into a battlefield blindfolded.

Why Angels and VCs Care

For angel investors and venture capital teams, a business plan that lacks both a detailed Value Proposition and a Price Value Map is an immediate red flag. Without these tools, gaps inevitably appear — often after money has been committed, people have been hired, and pivots become costly.

These tools can save you millions of dollars. They can mean the difference between a pitch that feels like hopeful rhetoric and one that stands on evidence and grounded clarity. Every elevator pitch or pitch deck should carry these two tools as pillars of the business case.

The Role of Perception

Perception has always been the difference between survival and extinction. For ancient leaders of North American tribes, perception decided whether the strangers arriving could be allies or enemies — whether the tribe could eat or be eaten. For olive growers in Mediterranean valleys, perception determined whether customers valued hand-harvested fruit over machine-harvested ones, preserving quality and tradition.

Perception is the starting point. It opens the enchanted channel, the expanded awareness that lets entrepreneurs connect their vision with the realities of the market. Without it, even the best ideas become self-referential fantasies.

The Table and Graph: How the Price Value Map Works

The process is simple but powerful:

1. Identify the key product features and assign each a % of importance (from the Value Proposition customer verifiers). The total must add up to 100%.

2. Evaluate each feature based solely on customer-verified data (focus groups, surveys, Customers Gemba walks). Assign a grade from 1 to 4:

   • 1 = Does not meet minimal performance to compete.

   • 2 = Barely competitive, significant gaps.

   • 3 = Competitive, but at least one rival does better.

   • 4 = Best in class.

3. Plot the results in the Price Value Map (a simple Google spreadsheet can generate this graph see it below).

   
   

By drawing a line that connects the evaluated products, you can see the fair market price-value line.

• If your product is below the line, you are leaving money on the table. You should consider raising your price or improving your sales training and channel strategy so that innovation and benefits are better communicated.

• If your product is above the line, then your price is out of sync with perceived value. Double-check discounting and execution — perhaps your price list is correct but the realized (executed) price is too low. Adjust accordingly by client type or segment.

This visual clarity gives you a grounded sense of where you stand — not in theory, but in the reality customers live and pay for.

An Alternative Kind of Accelerator

This approach is not a traditional accelerator. It is not strictly business planning, leadership training, financial coaching, or investment sales. It is a combination — a boutique system that starts with you, the entrepreneur, and extends outward into strategy, value, and capital.

It is natural to feel doubt when encountering a system that does not fit neatly into existing categories. But that is precisely the point. By weaving together disciplines that are usually siloed — strategy, finance, spirituality, perception, and customer empathy — the Price Value Map and Value Proposition together become a living framework for growth >>> Before Even creating a projected financial plan <<<.

This is about expanding the garden, as I once wrote, where the granite sustains everything. It is about innovation grounded in self-knowledge, about donations and contributions that arise naturally when value is authentically created.

Closing

If you want to ask for money — or invest it — and you carry these two tools with you, then you truly know what you are talking about. If you ignore them, it is ego speaking. Remember that ego is not bad at all... (This will be in another post). And to serve, in business as in life, is to live the experience of the other - with empathy.

That is the path of entrepreneurship as spiritual awakening. That is how we align dreams with reality, light with action, and innovation with the greater good.

Accessing the price value map example

Click on the link below and take a look at the google sheets example. Contact me for a session or a proposal about the price value map and value proposition training or coaching.

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