Ask a business owner whether they are good at explaining what they are worth, and almost all of them will say yes. Run their website through the Value Gap Audit from Step Change, and the number rarely agrees.
The market cannot tell you apart, and it will not tell you why
A value proposition almost never fails in public. It leaks in private, one interchangeable claim at a time, until a buyer cannot say what makes one supplier different from the next. The research is blunt about how common that is. Gartner, in a release from its May 2025 CSO & Sales Leader Conference, named the problem directly, calling it a customer value gap, being the distance between the value a supplier promises and the value a customer feels they got. Step Change set out to measure the first stretch of that gap, the point where a business either makes its worth legible or quietly loses the room.
A soft judgment, finally given a hard number
The audit asks for three things: a company’s website, a couple of competitors, and optional marketing assets such as a proposal. It reads them using a large language model and Step Change’s own scoring framework, then returns a result indicating where a value proposition is strong, blind, or leaking. It takes about two minutes and costs nothing. The design is the argument. A long-paid assessment gets postponed forever; a two-minute score gets used, and it gets used by people who would never have booked a strategy session to hear the same verdict.
The first numbers are not flattering
Across roughly 290 Australian businesses assessed so far, the businesses that score well are not doing anything exotic. They decided to say clearly why they are the better choice, and to say it the same way on the website, in the proposal, and out of a salesperson’s mouth.
“It’s about seeing where your value gaps are,” says Ashton Bishop, founder and chief executive of Step Change. In his telling, the score itself is not the prize. A number is simply harder to wave away than an opinion, and it starts a conversation that a business can act on.
The sample is young and self-selected, drawn from owners curious enough to try something new, and a scoring model is only as trustworthy as the framework behind it. What earns that trust over time is scale and a method others can inspect. Until then, the direction is already clear.
Step Change’s Value Gap Audit is a free online diagnostic. The audit’s real message is not the score on the screen. It is that most businesses have been graded for years already, by every customer who quietly chose someone else instead.
The Value Gap Audit is at https://value-gap-audit.hellostepchange.com. More information is available at https://www.hellostepchange.com and https://linkedin.com/company/step-change-marketing.
