Creating Customer Value Propositions with AI: the Cubs Privé talk

On 17 September 2026 Mark and Rich took the argument behind the next book to Cubs Privé at the IET on Savoy Place: how to build an offer that outsmarts the competition, and what AI changes about doing it.

The talk ran in three movements. First, why value and not price: customers buy what your product does for their business, most value propositions have never been costed in the customer’s numbers, and if you do not bring the number to the table, procurement will. Then the method itself, the Value Matters cycle in three parts (develop the offer, sell the value, capture the value) and the creative heart of it in four moves: the problem in one sharp sentence, the five sources of value, the seven elements of the offer, and the CVP Wheel. Two live demos showed the CVP Development Tool drawing a wheel from a problem statement and turning it into a board-ready proposition, then the proposition driving an eight-phase account plan.

The third movement was the technology: where the profession sits on the road from prompt to agent to collaborator, working examples at each stage (the Prompt Guide, an agent that scans a sector for opportunities three mornings a week, the LLM wiki as a living memory of a market, and KAM.fm as proof that play beats manuals), and the slide the room came back to in the discussion: what the technology cannot do. The machine reads the customer at speed, searches every source of value, drafts the wheel and the words, and pressure-tests the numbers. You decide the outcomes, choose the value, make a promise to your customer, and walk in and give your word.

The deck is the full set as presented, with the book chapters it draws on marked. The offer made at the end stands: a free two-hour session on your own customer, just ask.