Why can’t most companies name their own value?
Because they look where the light is best — their own feature list — when the value was never in the product. It lives out in the dark where the buyer is standing: in what your buyer can suddenly do because of you, and what that is worth to them. Point the light there, and the value stops hiding.
By Bruce Scheer, Co-Founder and CEO, ValuePros.io
“Your value was never in your product. It lives in what your buyer can suddenly do because of you, and what that is worth to them.”
–– Bruce Scheer
Most companies search their own feature list for their value. It has been hidden in the dark the whole time, in what their buyer can now do and the meaningful value that creates for them.
Your features might get copied in a week. What your buyer can do differently because of your unique capabilities can’t. That is where your unique value has been hiding, and most companies are looking in the wrong place.
Last week at Seattle Tech Week, I ran a workshop called The Value Edge that was way oversubscribed, which caused me to run it literally three times. It was such a joy to see the hunger for this earned wisdom, and the content landing so well with product builders, entrepreneurs, and former very senior go-to-market operators from Microsoft, Meta, AWS, Google, and others. One had run a billion-dollar business at Microsoft. They self-identify now as “Builders,” and Seattle is hot, hot, hot for new builders trying their best to make it happen for their customers, themselves, their families, and their investors. They have such a precious little bit of time to hit the market right. The clock is ticking. I always respect and am grateful to serve this group of pioneers.
The Value Edge is what companies gain when they take a value-based approach to going to market. Companies this is useful for have what I call a “high-consideration” solution, the kind their customers have to think hard about. It’s big-ticket, disruptive, and strategic to the buyer. To get there and inspire buyers into action, I introduced a simple sequence: Find Your Value, Communicate Your Value, and then Quantify Your Value. When we got to finding value, the room got quiet fast. These were sharp founders with real products. Most could recite their feature list in their sleep, the stuff they have been building. But most were not clear at all on the differentiated value they were bringing to their target market. That part was very cloudy, what I call the Value Fog.
That gap, “I understand my product” and “I don’t know my differentiated value,” is not a Seattle problem. It is the biggest problem there is, and it hits early-stage startups and very mature companies with very mature products alike. This one you can’t delegate away to AI. It is a human judgment and market insight problem, and an opportunity for the few who get it right.
The Big Problem: Searching Under the Streetlight
There is an old teaching tale, the kind they tell about Nasreddin Hodja. Late one night, a man comes upon his neighbor on hands and knees under a streetlamp, searching the dirt. “What did you lose?” he asks. “My house key,” the neighbor says. So the man kneels down and helps, and together they comb every inch of ground in the pool of light. Nothing.
Finally he stops. “Are you sure you dropped it here?” “Oh, no,” the neighbor says, nodding toward his dark doorway down the street. “I’m pretty sure I lost it over there.” “Then why are we spending our time looking here?” “Because the light is so much better over here.”
That is how most companies look for their value. They search their own product, because that is where the light is. Features are easy to see, easy to list, easy to talk about. So we point the flashlight at the feature list and start reading it out loud, sure that there is real value in explaining our stuff to a buyer.
The trouble is the value was never in the product. It was dropped somewhere else, over in the dark, where the buyer is standing. It lives in what your buyer can suddenly do that they could not do before, from anywhere or anyone else.
Point the light at yourself, and you will describe yourself. Point it at the buyer, and you will finally find the real value, or find that it isn’t there yet. Either way, the important thing is that you go to market steeped more in reality.
The Risks: What Feature-Talk Costs You
Stay under the streetlight, and here is what happens.
You sound like everyone else. When you describe your product instead of your buyer’s new capability, you land in the same bucket as every competitor, and the buyer’s only remaining question is price. I watched a company get a signature feature copied by a competitor in one week. One week. If your differentiation is a feature, it has the shelf life of a feature.
Then the deal stalls. Not because the buyer picked someone else, but because they could not see enough value to move. 86% of B2B purchases stall somewhere in the buying process (Forrester), and 40 to 60% of qualified deals end not in a loss to a rival but in “no decision” (The JOLT Effect). The buyer never saw a reason worth the risk, so they did nothing.
That is the real cost. Not a lost bake-off. A buyer who could not find the value, standing in the dark, while you read your spec sheet under the light.
The Desired Outcome: Value in the Light
Now picture the opposite.
When you get your positioning right, the buyer does not have to work to understand why you matter. The value is obvious. They see it, they see themselves in it, and they can carry it into a room you will never be in. April Dunford articulated this so well in her recently updated classic, Obviously Awesome, currently my favorite book on positioning.
The Value Edge is measurable. When buyer and seller align on the problem to be solved, win rates rise by 38% (Emblaze). Yet sellers and buyers misread that core problem more than half the time, an average 54.5% misalignment after they have talked (Emblaze). Getting positioned around real value is what closes that gap, early, before the commoditizing starts.
Obvious does not mean loud. It means found. You found the value where it actually lives, out of the dark and into the light, and now your buyer can see it too.
The Path: How to Find Value
Finding value is really an act of positioning. Get your positioning right, around your meaningful value for buyers and the unique capabilities behind it, and the value stops hiding.
After 30 years of doing this, here is how I teach it. Six ingredients, in order. And I start where a lot of frameworks don’t, with the market, because your buyer sizes you up against the world they already live in before they ever weigh what only you can do.
- Overall market context. The trends, the chatter, the thought leadership your buyer is already swimming in. Seek to understand their world first.
- Alternatives. What your buyer does to solve their problem without you, including the most popular option of all, nothing.
- Unique capabilities. What only you can bring together. Not a feature, but what you enable your buyer to do that no one else does.
- Meaningful value. Because they can do that, what is the payoff in their own dollars, the quantifiable business value your buyer’s CFO will eventually need to see.
- Target customers. Who feels the problem most, and can actually act on it with you. Sometimes I call this the “burning need” segment. In the spirit of Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm: so many segments, so little time. Which one, or ones, do you target?
- Appropriate category. Where you sit in your buyer’s mind, so they have a frame for what you are.
Ingredients three and four are the heart of the whole thing. A unique capability is not “we have X feature.” It is “because of us, our buyer can now do this thing differently.” A feature is what you built. A capability is what the buyer can suddenly do. Competitors copy the first one in a week. The second one is a lot harder to lift, because it is often a unique collection of features and functions working together. And meaningful value is simply the payoff that new capability represents for the buyer, said in their terms, figuratively and then in quantifiable time, money, risk, and growth.
Here is how that looked with one analytics company I worked with, years back.
The market context was brutal and simple. Research on data-driven decision making had found that companies that adopted it were roughly 5 to 6% more productive and more profitable than their peers (Brynjolfsson, Hitt and Kim). Everyone wanted to be data-driven. Almost nobody could be. The alternative most people lived with was the status quo: decisions made on gut and opinion, a report factory you waited weeks in line for, or rogue spreadsheets where a large share carried bad data, bad formulas, or both.
We did not lead with the software. We led with the unique capability and what it let the buyer do: give people who are not analysts the ability to see and question their own data, with no programming or code, one question breeding the next until they land on an insight. We named that state self-reliance, and self-reliance became the category. The target customer was the business-minded leader who felt the pain most and could act on it. The meaningful value followed on its own. At that company, data usage went from 8% of the people who wanted it toward 80%, and leaders could finally act on what they knew instead of waiting on a report.
Notice what carried the story. Not the visualization engine. What the buyer could suddenly do, and what that was worth to them. That is the value, and that is the part a competitor cannot copy by cloning a feature. Care to guess the company I’m talking about?
This is also your moat. Here is why. Anyone can copy a feature, match a price, or echo your messaging, and with AI they can do it faster than ever. What they cannot easily copy is a clear, hard-won line from your unique capability to the meaningful value it creates for a specific buyer. That line is not a tagline. It is the foundation your whole go-to-market stands on. Your foundation is the moat, and very few companies build it, which is exactly why it defends you.
Next Steps
So, can you name it? The unique capability you enable for your buyers, and the meaningful value it creates for them?
Take a hard look at your own positioning against a simple acid test: does the buyer see the value, see themselves, and see the value for themselves? If any of the three is missing, you are still under the streetlight.
If you want help finding it and getting your go-to-market story straight, that is the work we do, so let’s talk about getting your value out of the dark and into the light. And I would love your feedback: how are you doing at crystallizing your positioning and finding your unique value? Hit reply, comment, or connect with me on LinkedIn.
The founders in that Seattle room did not leave with a better feature list. They left knowing where their value had been the whole time.
Your value was never under the streetlight. It is out in the dark, right where your buyer is standing. Go find it.
Author
Bruce Scheer is CEO of ValuePros.io and the author of Amazon Best Seller Inspire Your Buyers. He helps B2B revenue teams find and name the value their buyers can see, defend, and retell without a seller in the room. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
Research cited
- Forrester, The State of Business Buying, 2024: 86% of B2B purchases stall during the buying process. forrester.com
- The JOLT Effect, Matthew Dixon and Ted McKenna, 2022: 40 to 60% of qualified deals are lost to customer indecision, or “no decision,” rather than to a competitor. jolteffect.com
- Emblaze, 2024: win rates rise 38% when sellers and buyers align on the problem to be solved, yet there is an average 54.5% misalignment between how sellers and buyers perceive that core problem. corporatevisions.com
- Brynjolfsson, Hitt and Kim, “Strength in Numbers: How Does Data-Driven Decisionmaking Affect Firm Performance?”, 2011: firms that adopt data-driven decision making show output, productivity, and profitability roughly 5 to 6% higher than peers. ssrn.com
Frequently asked questions
Finding value is an act of positioning. It is naming the unique capability only you enable for your buyer, and the meaningful value that capability creates for them in their own terms of time, money, risk, and growth. The value was never in your product. It lives in what your buyer can suddenly do because of you.
Because a feature has the shelf life of a feature. I watched a company get a signature feature copied by a competitor in one week, and with AI that copying is faster than ever. What cannot be copied is the hard-won line from your unique capability to the meaningful value it creates for a specific buyer. That line is your moat.
A feature is what you built. A capability is what your buyer can suddenly do because of it. “We have X feature” is a feature. “Because of us, our buyer can now do this thing differently” is a capability. Competitors copy the first in a week. The second is a lot harder to lift, because it is usually a unique collection of features working together.
Run it against a simple acid test: does the buyer see the value, see themselves in it, and see the value for themselves? If any of the three is missing, you are still searching under the streetlight. When positioning is right, the buyer does not have to work to understand why you matter, and they can carry the value into a room you will never be in.
About ValuePros
Find your value before your buyer has to.
At ValuePros.io, we help revenue teams gain the Value Edge by eliminating buyer indecision and making value unmistakable, so decisions happen faster and revenue growth accelerates.
Let’s talk about how to strengthen your go-to-market approach and lead buyers with value.
ValuePros.io | Phone: 1.425.444.9595 | calendly.com/value-edge