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From DevOps to ValueOps
From DevOps to ValueOps

How Startups Can Start Value Selling by Automating Business Case Development Process Just Like CI/CD Does:

Val Kucherenko avatar
Written by Val Kucherenko
Updated over 3 weeks ago

Why Technical Founders Need a DevOps Approach to Value-Based Selling vs. Selling features and technical specs of their solutions

Introduction: The Startup Founder’s Dilemma

As a technical founder, you’re an expert in building — writing scalable code, deploying robust infrastructure, and ensuring seamless integrations. You probably already use DevOps tools like GitHub, Jira, and Asana to automate software development and streamline your engineering workflows.

Of course, this might not be the case if you have a business co-founder who knows how to build business cases, sell, develop financial plans, and handle business development and COO (Chief Operating Officer) functions. But if you’re a technical founder without that expertise, this gap can slow down your growth, making it harder to secure funding, close deals, or scale your company efficiently.

This is precisely where a ValueOps approach — an automation-first mindset for business case development — can help.

This gap — between technical innovation and business storytelling — is where most startups struggle. The good news? You can automate and optimize business case development like you automate DevOps workflows.

The Business Case Bottleneck: Why Startups Struggle to Sell Value

In software development, DevOps exists because manual deployments, fragmented processes, and lack of automation slow down innovation, create numerous workarounds, and inflate development effort — ultimately increasing costs. That’s why you use:

  • GitHub → For version control and collaboration

  • Jira → To track development sprints and issues

  • Asana → To manage cross-functional projects

But when it comes to business case development, most startups still rely on:

  • Manual customer research → Copy-pasting industry data from Google and ChatGPT, Perplexity, Deepseek R1, or any other Generative AI assistants.

  • Scattered financial modeling → Messy Excel sheets with disconnected ROI calculations and valuable data inputs. Imagine if you have hundreds of opportunities where you have to justify economic benefit for your product.

  • Unstructured storytelling → Manually assembling PowerPoint slides with no clear positioning, sales narrative, and poor graphical design.

The result? A slow, inefficient, and error-prone process that hurts your ability to close deals, raise funding, or justify your product’s ROI.

So why not apply the same DevOps principles that transformed software engineering to business case development — a personalization engine to highlight the value of your product?

Introducing ValueOps: Automating Business Case Development to boost our Sales efficiency Like CI/CD.

Imagine if you could create a business case for your solution as quickly as pushing code to production. That’s where ValueOps comes in — the same automation-first mindset used in DevOps, applied to business value communication.

At Value Viewpoint (VVP), we built a CI/CD pipeline for business cases and value narratives in the format of Executive Summaries of ROI studies of your solutions, personalized to every sales opportunity. Here’s how it works:

1. Automating Customer & Industry Research (Replacing Manual Google Searches with our trained AI assistant)

🚀 Instead of manually searching for industry value chains, market trends, impacted metrics benchmarks, customer strategic imperatives, and the state of their process maturity,

✅ VVP automates research, pulling relevant customer and industry insights into your business case and creating top-management consulting quality slides.

🔗 DevOps Analogy: Just like Jira syncs with GitHub to track commits and pull requests, VVP syncs with public data sources to pre-fill business case inputs, libraries of industry metrics, and value drivers, giving you a head start.

2. Automating Business Benefits Logic (Replacing Guesswork with Data-Driven Insights)

🚀 Instead of figuring out how to map your product’s technical capabilities to a customer prospect’s real-world business pain points,
✅ VVP provides a structured framework to automate value mapping — instantly connecting features → pain points → business impact → DCFs (Discounted Cash Flows from cost savings and increase in revenue) → ROI report.

🔗 DevOps Analogy: Just like a CI/CD pipeline ensures that every deployment follows best practices, VVP ensures your business case follows a standardized, repeatable methodology — without reinventing the wheel every time. Your extended Sales team and Partner channels will be able to quickly adapt your narrative to boost Sales effort effectiveness without significant effort.

3. Automating Financial Modeling (No More Messy Excel Sheets)

🚀 Instead of manually building ROI models in Excel,
✅ VVP generates dynamic, real-time financial calculations — including ROI, NPV, cost savings, efficiency gains, and payback period — without spreadsheet nightmares and manages their versioning to address various sales prospect scenarios.

🔗 DevOps Analogy: Just like infrastructure-as-code eliminates manual server configurations, VVP eliminates manual number-crunching with automated, audit-ready financial models.

4. Automating Business Case Storytelling (Auto-Generating Slide Decks & Reports)

🚀 Instead of spending hours formatting PowerPoint slides,
✅ VVP auto-generates a structured, visually compelling one-pager (SDRs could use it to personalize outreach campaigns) or full business case deck — tailored for Sales Managers to address decision-makers (CFOs, COOs, CEOs), uplifting conversation from IT to C-suite.

🔗 DevOps Analogy: Just like GitHub Actions automates testing and deployment, VVP automates executive-ready business case creation — so you can focus on selling, not on time-consuming activities like personalizing your positioning and slide-building.

The ValueOps Impact: Why This Changes Everything for Startups

By automating business case development, VVP helps startups:
✅ Reduce sales cost — avoid hiring enterprise-level sales Executives.

✅ Cut business case development time by 80% — from weeks to minutes.

✅ Increase deal conversion rates — by presenting clear, compelling, data-driven value stories.

✅ Enable sales teams to deliver business cases independently — reducing reliance on expensive Value Engineering teams.

✅ Deepen customer engagement — by sharing VVP access, co-building ROI reports, benchmarking metrics, refining benefits logic, and fostering shared ownership of the value discovery process — ensuring quick alignment with decision-makers.

✅ Standardize business case logic — ensuring every deal follows best practices, just like DevOps pipelines enforce deployment standards.

Final Thoughts: From DevOps to ValueOps

As a technical founder, you already understand the power of automation, pipelines, and streamlined workflows in software development. Now, it’s time to apply those same principles to selling your technology effectively.

If DevOps transformed the way startups ship code, ValueOps will transform the way startups sell value.

And just like a CI/CD pipeline removes friction in deployments, VVP removes friction in business case development, making it faster, repeatable, and scalable.

If you’re tired of manually building business cases and struggling to articulate your product’s value — it’s time to automate and scale your ValueOps process.

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