What is Value Buying?
Value Buying is the discipline of helping B2B buyers succeed across the <em>full</em> purchase journey — covering why they should act, what they need to win, and how their champion gets internal stakeholders like procurement, InfoSec, and finance to say yes. The deal is actually won or lost not in your demo or pricing, but in the buyer’s experience of trying to buy: the champion alone at 9pm, building the slide that has to survive the internal fight. Value Buying hands them the map.
“Deals aren’t won in your demo or your pricing. They’re won or lost in your buyer’s experience of trying to buy.”
–– Bruce Scheer
Value Buying starts here: it’s 9pm, and your champion is still at it, fighting for you. Not in a meeting with you. Alone, at the kitchen table, building a slide. The slide that has to survive procurement, satisfy the CFO, answer InfoSec, and somehow get eight stakeholders, each defining success differently, to nod at the same time. You sold them weeks ago. But this part, the hard part, they’re doing without you. And nobody handed them a map.
That moment, the champion alone with the internal fight, is where your deal is actually won or lost. Not in your demo. Not in your pricing. In their experience of trying to buy.
The data is blunt about it. Ray Makela and the team at SBI found that for bold, high-conviction decisions, 59% of the influence comes from the buying experience itself, and only 41% from the offering. Read that again. How you help someone buy matters more than what you’re selling.
So you’d think we’d pour everything into that experience. We don’t. 67% of B2B buyers now say they’d rather buy with no sales rep at all (Gartner). That’s not buyers being antisocial. It’s a verdict. They’d rather go it alone than sit through one more conversation that adds nothing to the hardest part of their job.
Here’s the real problem. Buyers just aren’t seeing the value, and they certainly aren’t getting the value they need to be successful. The proof is brutal: as many as 60% of qualified deals end in no decision at all. Not lost to a competitor. Just lost.
It’s time to raise the value we deliver to buyers throughout their entire buying journey.
Value Buying is the discipline of delivering buyer value, not just seller-defined solution value, across an entire purchase journey by addressing the why, the what, and especially the how: how a champion gets every internal stakeholder to yes.
We’ve been selling the wrong kind of value
Somewhere along the way, the category shrank the word. “Value” came to mean our value: the benefits, the ROI, the innovation, the competitive edge. Call it solution value. It’s real, and it matters, but it’s value as the seller sees it.
The buyer is sitting somewhere else. True value is what the buyer receives: the solution, yes, but also the experience of buying it and the outcomes they live with long after. I call it buyer value. Karl Albrecht had this right back in 1992, in his seminal book, The Only Thing That Matters. Value was never the vendor’s ROI deck. It was always the customer’s. His point still lands: the only thing that matters is customer value.
That distinction is everything. When you hear that buyers care about risk, not value, don’t buy the framing. Risk is buyer value, seen from their side of the table. The cost of a wrong call, the disruption, the personal exposure: that’s value expressed as what they stand to lose. And it’s only one of the things they weigh, alongside the business and personal outcomes they want, the people they have to carry, and whether they can defend the decision later.
For thirty years, value selling mastered solution value: the why and the what. Why the buyer should care, and what they need to win. But it went quiet exactly where buyer value gets hard. The how. How does your champion get a sprawling committee to yes? How do they clear procurement, InfoSec, finance, and the governance board? How do they win the fight in rooms you’ll never enter?
That blank space has a name. I call it the Value Fog. When the value is clear, the decision is near. When it isn’t, the deal parks in the fog, and the fog is thickest right where solution value quits, in the how.
Think about your last complex deal. Ten or more people on the buying side, each with their own definition of success. Your champion gets it. But your champion isn’t the one who signs. They carry your value into a dozen rooms you’ll never enter, and somewhere in the fog, it gets dropped. No wonder Forrester finds 86% of B2B purchases stall somewhere in the buying process.
That’s not a selling problem. It’s a buying problem. And nobody’s been arming the buyer to solve it.
From Value Fog to Valueocity
Imagine the opposite of the fog. Your champion sees the value clearly, believes it in their bones, and walks into every internal room confident that the initiative will be approved and will actually succeed. They’re armed with what they need, when they need it, ready to answer the hard questions and clear the forms lickety-split.
I call that state Valueocity. It’s the moment value moves with velocity, because the person carrying it is convicted and equipped. Valueocity is what gets deals across the line. The Value Fog is what keeps them parked.
So how do you move a buyer from one to the other?
Value Buying: the trifecta
This is the work I’ve come to call Value Buying. It’s the discipline of delivering buyer value across the whole journey.
Value Buying borrows a page from Simon Sinek and turns it inside out. “Start with why,” yes, but not your why. Your buyer doesn’t care about your why yet. Start with their why. What are they trying to achieve? What does inaction cost them every month it drags on, and every year after?
Then the what. What capabilities do they actually need to win, and how does your solution help them gain those capabilities?
And then the part the category forgot. The how. How does your champion get every stakeholder to say “yes,” or at least not say “no”? How do they clear the internal gates, free up the budget, and walk procurement and InfoSec through without the deal dying in committee?
Why, what, and how. That’s the trifecta. Value Selling helped shape the first two. Value Buying completes the set.
And notice where that puts the real selling. It doesn’t happen in your meeting. It happens later, inside the buyer’s building, when your champion stands up and makes the case without you in the room. I’ll always remember a line from Tom Williams: the real selling starts after the customer says “yes.” That’s the territory Value Buying is built for, sending your champion into that fight ready to win.
I’m not the only one waving a flag over the how. Brent Adamson’s new book, The Framemaking Sale, pushes deeply into this territory, and if you haven’t picked up a copy yet, it’s well worth your time.
I learned this the hard way, and it won an award
Years back, my team took on the Microsoft and HP Frontline Partnership. We helped frame up eight joint go-to-market solutions between two giant organizations, with every kind of internal complexity you can imagine. One of the most stressful initiatives of my career.
We could have stopped where most do: a sharp value message and a tidy business case. The why and the what. Instead, we leaned hard into the how, aligning the joint business case and activating the field, equipping sellers and buyers to actually move the deals through. One of the most effective ways we delivered on the how was a series of executive briefing sessions for qualified prospects. Win rates on those multimillion-dollar enterprise deals climbed past 50%. Unheard-of success. The work earned HP’s Marketing Circle Award.
It wasn’t a better pitch that did it. It was refusing to abandon the buyer at the hard part.
The research backs the pattern. When buyer and seller genuinely align on the problem, win rates jump roughly 38% (Corporate Visions). Value that crosses the why, the what, and the how doesn’t just feel better. It closes.
So, Where Is Your Value Buying Gap?
If you’re a revenue leader staring at a pipeline full of deals that won’t move, ask yourself an honest question. Are you raising the value across all three, or handing buyers half a map and hoping they find their way through the Value Fog?
That’s the whole idea behind Value Buying, and I’d love to hear what you think. Push back. Add to it. Tell me where I’m wrong.
And if you want to see how ready your team is to help buyers buy, take our Value Ready Assessment (it’s on the resources tab at ValuePros.io). It’s a quick, honest read on where the fog is thickest in your deals. When you’re ready to build the muscle, that’s exactly what our Value Edge program is for.
The deals dying in the fog aren’t lost to a better competitor. They’re lost to a buying experience that ran out of value right when the buyer needed it most. Close that gap, and you don’t just win more. Your buyers win too.
Frequently asked questions
The Value Fog is the gap that opens when solution value (the why and what) is clear, but buyers get no help with the how, winning internal approval, causing deals to stall or end in “no decision.”
Because buyers often understand the product’s value but aren’t equipped to navigate their own internal buying process; research cited shows up to 60% of qualified deals end in no decision, not a competitive loss.
The Value Buying trifecta covers the three things a buyer must resolve to move forward: why they should act, what they need to win, and how their champion gets internal stakeholders — procurement, InfoSec, and finance — aligned to a yes.
Your gap is wherever the buyer’s champion is left doing the hard internal work alone — building consensus, defending the decision, and clearing procurement and finance — without a map from you. Closing that gap is what turns a sold buyer into a bought deal.
About ValuePros
ValuePros is a value enablement firm for organizations selling big-ticket B2B solutions. We help revenue teams work with their buyers to see, quantify, and capture real value, so their CFO can say “yes.”
We do that through a program we call the Value Edge: value narratives, CFO-ready value calculators, and value enablement training.
Let’s talk about how to lead your buyers with value.
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