What is a value driver?

A value driver is a single, measurable way your product creates value for a prospect — for example "Reduced Manual Billing Time" or "Lower Infrastructure Spend". It's the building block of every business case.

Each driver carries a formula: an expression plus the input variables it consumes, producing an annual dollar figure. When you build a business case, you pick the drivers that apply to that deal, fill in the prospect's numbers, and Serre sums the outputs into the case's total annual benefit.

The anatomy of a driver

• Name and description — what the benefit is, in buyer language.
• Value category — cost reduction, productivity, risk reduction, revenue acceleration, and so on.
• Inputs — the variables the formula consumes, each with a label, a unit, a display format, and a default value that pre-populates new cases.
• Formula — readable arithmetic over your input keys, with a live preview of the annual value at defaults.
• Solution mapping — which of your solutions the driver applies to, or portfolio-wide if left unmapped.

The numbers are math, not AI

Every figure a driver produces is real math you can read — calculated by a transparent formula and shown with a step-by-step trace, never invented by the AI. Val (the AI copilot) helps you draft formulas and writes the narrative around the numbers; it does not modify them. This is what lets the output survive CFO scrutiny.

Configure once, reuse everywhere

Your driver library is the "value architecture" that value engineers normally carry in their heads. You configure it once, and every rep reuses it across deals — with each business case freezing the version it used, so library improvements never rewrite cases you've already delivered.

Related

• Build a value driver
• What is a business case?
• How Serre calculates ROI