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May 29, 2025

Finding Your Value Wedge

# sales enablement

How to Help Your Sellers Stand Out In the First Demo

Niko Pajkovic

Sellers walk into their first demo with a lot on their minds.

They’re thinking about building rapport. Nailing the story. Not fumbling the clickthrough. Answering questions without over-answering questions.

What’s not always top of mind? Competitive positioning. But it should be.

Because the first demo isn’t just about showcasing your product – it’s an opportunity to frame both how the buyer thinks about the problem and how they evaluate every other competitor that enters the deal.

That’s where the value wedge comes in. It’s the strategic differentiator(s) PMMs need to nail down and make sure their sellers can run with.

In this blog, you’ll learn:

What a value wedge is (hint: it’s not just your differentiators)

The 5-step process for finding wedges that win deals

How to deploy your wedge when you’re first vs. second into a deal

Ways to scale this approach across your sales team

Let’s break down how.📌 Competitive intel stuck in the past? We wrote about why deal-first CI is the future – and how to get ahead

What Is a Value Wedge?

A value wedge isn’t just what makes you better – it’s what makes you undeniably right for this buyer, in this moment, when stacked up against a specific competitor.

Think of it as the overlap between:

Your Edge – What you do exceptionally well

The Competitor’s Gap – What your competitor doesn’t do and can’t easily replicate

The Buyer’s Problem – What the buyer wants to solve right now

Miss any one of these three? It’s not a wedge. It’s likely just a feature.

Here’s what this looks like in practice:

Imagine you’re selling expense management software. Your competitor requires finance teams to manually review every receipt. Your solution uses AI to auto-approve expenses under $100 with 99% accuracy.

Your Edge – Your AI-driven approval is proven to save 10 hours per week

The Competitor’s Gap – To match this, your competitor would need to rebuild their entire approval workflow

The Buyer’s Problem – Win-loss interviews show your ICP is overwhelmed with expense report reviews

That’s a value wedge. It’s specific, defensible, and directly tied to the buyer’s pain.

How to Help Reps Find Their Value Wedge (The Right Way)

Most teams start by drawing three overlapping circles on a whiteboard. You win here. Competitors lose there. Buyers care about this.

Simple, right? But there’s a catch, as Cody points out 👇

“Everybody knows the value wedge image – those three overlapping circles. But odds are, you’ve seen people just put these three columns in a spreadsheet and start listing things off. That’s completely subjective thought and assumptions. And when you make assumptions, odds are you’re going to be wrong." - Cody Bernard, Director of Product Marketing at Klue

But to be clear, the circles aren’t the issue. Starting with them is.

Competitors, features gaps – all of that comes after you’ve nailed who your ICP is and what problems they actually need solved.

Here’s the problem-first process that actually works:

Step 1: Start with Buyer Problems (Not Competitive Intel)

Before you even think about competitors, identify:

What pains are your personas experiencing?

What’s the impact of those pains?

Which problems are papercuts vs. broken bones?

This is where most teams go wrong. They jump straight to “how we’re different” without first understanding what the buyer actually needs fixed.

Tactical tip: Start with win-loss interviews. They’ll show you exactly which problems mattered most to buyers, and why they picked one solution over another. If you’re not running them yet, even 5-10 interviews can surface patterns you’d never catch in CRM data.

"It’s the difference between vitamins and painkillers. Nice-to-haves are easy to ignore, but when the pain is real, solving it becomes the priority." - Cody Bernard, Director of Product Marketing at Klue

Step 2: Map Their Ideal Solution

What does “better” look like for them? Not your features but their desired state. What jobs are they trying to get done? How would they ideally like to solve that problem? What benefits matter most?

Here’s a classic example:

In the 1960s, most people renting cars from big companies like Hertz were frustrated with poor service and slow experiences. That was the pain.

The ideal solution? A company that actually cared – one that went out of its way to help. Avis leaned into that by positioning itself as the underdog: “We’re #2, so we try harder.”

Instead of competing on size or pricing, they aligned with what buyers actually wanted: better service, which became their powerful value wedge. And in doing so, they reframed Hertz as the complacent market leader, without ever saying it directly.

That’s the power of mapping your buyer’s ideal outcome. Once you know what they actually want, you can shape your wedge to land right where it matters most.

Step 3: Connect Your Product to Their Problems

Only now do you layer in what you actually do. How does your product solve their specific pains? This could be features, services, or even something like better customer support.

Tactical tip: Build a trigger-based messaging doc. Start by mapping out common deal scenarios using this structure:

Trigger → Pain → Impact → Solution → Benefit

Example:

Trigger: Company is expanding to a new region

Pain: Current software isn’t localized

Impact: Regional revenue goals are at risk

Solution: Fully localized, dual-byte compatible platform

Benefit: Faster time-to-market and higher regional adoption

This helps reps tie your product directly to the buyer’s reality, not just your roadmap.

Step 4: Identify Genuine Gaps in Competitive Offerings

This is where competitive intel finally comes in. Look for places where:

Competitors genuinely can’t solve the buyer’s problem

Their approach creates new problems

They’ve made deliberate trade-offs that leave openings

Tactical tip: For example, Klue’s Competitor Profiles let you quickly compare any competitor in your market – side-by-side with your own positioning – highlighting where you’re strong, where they’re weak, and how those differences map to what buyers actually care about. It’s one of the fastest ways to validate your wedge with real-world data.

Step 5: Accept That Your Value Wedge Will Change

Here’s something most teams miss 👇

“Your value wedge changes constantly. It isn’t all-encompassing. At Klue, we operate across multiple industries, so the wedge we use in one segment won’t always apply in another." - Cody Bernard, Director of Product Marketing at Klue

In other words, your value wedge isn’t fixed – it evolves.

As new competitors emerge and products shift, so do the dynamics that define where you win. You don’t need to reinvent your entire strategy every time a new player shows up, but you do need to regularly reassess where your edge is strongest.

Wedges aren’t set-and-forget. They’re a living part of your positioning.

Tactical tip: Set quarterly “win-loss and wedge reviews” with your sales team to cover any updates for positioning against your top competitors. What new objections are emerging? Your wedge from Q1 might be stale by Q3, so this is a way to stay ahead of the shift.

How to Use Your Wedge in a Demo

Now comes the fun part: working the wedge into the demo without sounding like a takedown artist. There are two key moves, depending on when your rep enters the deal.

If Your Rep Is First In: Frame the Criteria

In this case, your seller has the rare opportunity to shape what matters before competitors enter the picture – make sure they waste it.

Let’s say your wedge is “fast, no-dev setup.” Make sure sellers aren’t saying, “Unlike Competitor X, we don’t require implementation teams.”

Set up talk tracks that say:

“Most teams we work with want to get up and running fast. That’s why we built this with plug-and-play integrations and no custom dev work required. Our customers typically go live in under two weeks.”

The buyer hears the message, and the seed is successfully planted. If another vendor shows up later with a 3-month onboarding plan, they’re already working uphill.

If Your Rep Is Second In: Reframe the Narrative

This time, the anchor is already set. Your rep needs to shake it loose without going negative.

Let’s say the competitor positioned their product around “pre-built workflows that ensure process consistency.”

Help your rep reframe with something like:

“We’ve found that tools that force teams into one rigid process often struggle with adoption. That’s why we designed our platform to flex around how your team already works – so you get consistency in results, not just in steps.”

You’re not calling anyone out. You’re just illuminating the trade-off, politely.

How Klue Helps You Scale It

Finding a wedge takes time. Updating it for every surprise competitor takes even more.

Klue acts as a 24/7 companion for PMMs doing the deep work of positioning – helping you find your edge faster, with sharper buyer insights and less guesswork.

Klue Win-Loss gives you on-demand access to real buyer feedback, surfacing the patterns behind what your ICP actually cares about, and organizing in one simple, intuitive dashboard.

Competitor Profiles, powered by your custom Knowledge Hub content, let you instantly assess how you stack up against key competitors in the areas that matter most, so you can pinpoint your wedge faster.

You still own the positioning. But Klue gives you the signal and context to do it faster, and with more confidence.

Start Winning at Hello

Competitive positioning doesn’t start after the first call – it starts before it.

By identifying your value wedges and equipping sellers to deploy them effectively, you transform what could be a generic product demo into a strategic competitive advantage.

The most successful PMMs aren’t just creating assets. They’re shaping the narrative of every deal from the first “hello.”

Help your reps find their wedge. Root it in real problems, not assumptions. And watch as they start winning deals before competitors even know what hit them.

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