ABCDE
Audience, behaviour, content, delivery, evaluation: the five questions for planning any value pitch.
ABCDE is the planning frame for a value pitch, internal or external. Audience: who exactly is in the room, and what does each of them need to hear? Behaviour: what do you want them to do afterwards, specifically, not “be impressed”? Content: which parts of the proposition serve that behaviour, and which are there for your comfort? Delivery: who presents, in what order, with what evidence? Evaluation: how will you know it worked, beyond the mood in the room?
The frame is deliberately unglamorous. Most pitches are planned from the content outwards; ABCDE starts from the audience and the behaviour and lets the content be the consequence. Used with the decision-making unit map it stops a pitch being one message delivered to seven different people.
Set out in full in: Creating Customer Value Propositions with AI (Kogan Page, 2027), chapter 8.
Related terms
Value selling
Selling the proposition twice: first inside your own company, then to the customer's decision-making unit in their financial language.
Decision-making unit (DMU)
The people who decide, influence, use, pay for and can veto a purchase. Mapped as roles, dispositions and relationships, not job titles.
See the method run on one real account in three days: the One Page Proposition.