The AcademyFoundational
Map Your Value Path
What you'll build
Your own relationships mapped onto the eight Value Path stages — Audience through Champion — with the Value Path stage set as a real property on Contact in HubSpot, plus a working stage-reader agent on valuefirstagent.com that, given a Contact, returns its Value Path stage and the one signal that would move the relationship forward. The framework becomes something you can recognize and act on, not just name.
The live cadence
How the live thing runs for this path.
Weekly Office Hours (Thursdays) as the live build clinic — bring your own contacts and your stage-reader, get unstuck in the room. No fixed cohort; you progress at your own pace and the live touch is always available.
The build, step by step
What you'll do, in order.
- Learn the eight stages, exactlyWalk the full Value Path — Path TO Value (Audience, Researcher, Hand Raiser, Buyer) and Path OF Value (Value Creator, Adopter, Advocate, Champion), with the shift happening at the moment of purchase. Learn each stage's mantra in the person's own words, so you recognize the stage by how it feels, not by a funnel label.
- Watch the stage that matches your relationshipsThe Value Path Stages series takes each stage one at a time — what it looks like in the relationship and in the data. Start with the stage most of your relationships are actually in, then watch the two on either side so you can read movement.
- Map a handful of your own relationshipsTake five to ten real relationships and place each on its actual stage using observable signals — not where you wish they were. Notice how recognizing the stage changes the next thing you would do.
- Put the Value Path stage on your ContactSet the Value Path stage as a real property on Contact in HubSpot and record the stage for the relationships you mapped. This is the first thing you build — the framework made real in your own platform, replacing funnel thinking with the eight stages.
- Build your stage-reader agentOn valuefirstagent.com, build an agent that reads a Contact and returns its Value Path stage plus the one signal that would move it forward. The artifact: a working agent that proves you can read the path, not just recite it — and that feeds straight into Build Your Customer Value Platform and Become a Value-First Practitioner.
- Bring it to Office HoursJoin the next live clinic, demo your stage-reader against a real relationship, and get your one stage-reading judgment call unstuck in the room. From here the natural next step on the ladder is to build out the platform around it.
Where the build becomes real
You build it on valuefirstagent.com.
build a stage-reader agent: input a Contact, output its Value Path stage plus the signal that would move it to the next stage.
Join
Join the next live session for this path.
Tell us where to reach you and what you want to build. We will send you the next live session details.
Keep watching
Recent conversations to learn from.

Value-First AI DailyJuly 24, 2026
Value-First AI Daily - Jul 24, 2026
The show's first Friday at its new 1:00 PM Central time opened with a live Top 3 - Google ATLAS, FLUX 3, and HubSpot's Agent Hub - then an honest reckoning…
Open the episode
Value-First AI DailyJuly 22, 2026
Value-First AI Daily - Jul 22, 2026
A show-and-tell episode recorded through real compute strain. Chris teased AIROI, the week's AI value-measurement calculator, and aired the org's candid…
Open the episodeThe Road to UNBOUNDJuly 22, 2026
The Road to UNBOUND - The ROI Question: Boston Tickets, Breeze Credits, and the Dashboard That Can't Exist
Rob is on vacation, so Chris, George and Kyle ask the ROI question twice: is a trip to UNBOUND defensible on a spreadsheet, and can you prove what an AI credit…
Open the episodeThe next step
You're building. Here's where it goes next.
And then, the rest of the path:
- Practice with peersComing soon
- Teach the next personthe Academy