Impact Pricing Blog

Buyers don’t pay for the value you create. They pay for the value they can see.

I’m writing a book called Buyer Disconnect, about the gap between the value a company creates and the value its buyers can actually see. While I was working on it, I kept circling back to one example, because it shows the whole problem in miniature, in a single conversation you have probably had a hundred times. I wanted to share it before the book comes out.

There is a moment in a sales conversation that almost no one notices, because it happens by reflex. A buyer says what they want, and the seller starts describing the product.

It feels like the right thing to do. The buyer asked; the seller answered. But watch what happens to the value of the deal as that same conversation is run five different ways, each one a little less about the product and a little more about the buyer’s own situation. 

The number the buyer is willing to pay does not stay put. And it does not just get bigger. It gets justified. It moves from a figure the buyer discounts to a figure the buyer believes, because by the end they built it themselves out of problems they can see. 

Let me show you, with one deal.

A company sells a CRM. The buyer is a B2B business doing $40 million a year, closing about 25% of the qualified opportunities their reps work. They are shopping for a CRM because, in their words, “we’re not closing enough of our at-bats.” 

Same buyer, same product, same price list, five times below. Only the conversation changes.

Technique 0: Describe the product

This is where most selling lives. The buyer asks about the CRM so the seller describes the CRM.

“It has pipeline management, customizable forecasting, a mobile app, and it integrates with everything you already use. The reporting is best-in-class, and onboarding is fast.”

Every word is true. None of it has a number attached. The seller has handed over a list of capabilities and trusted the buyer to do the math that turns capability into value. Some buyers can. Most can’t, and won’t. They nod, they file it under “seems capable,” and the value of the deal sits at whatever the buyer can assemble on their own, alone, from a feature list, which is to say almost nothing.

Buyer Disconnect is the gap between the value a company creates and the value a buyer can see, believe, and act on. At Technique 0 the gap is at its widest. The product may be worth a fortune to this buyer. But none of that worth is visible.

Technique 1: The seller’s benchmark

The seller says, “Across our customers, we typically see at least a 5% lift in revenue after the first year. On your $40 million, that’s $2 million a year.”

Now there is a number, and $2 million is not nothing. But notice whose number it is. It’s the seller’s benchmark, an average drawn from other companies, applied to this buyer like a coat off the rack. The buyer hears it and quietly discounts it, because they know what it is: a claim built from someone else’s results. They have no idea whether they are an average company or a below-average one or a special case where the number doesn’t apply at all. The figure is real, but it isn’t theirs, so they trust it about as far as they trust any vendor quoting their own success rate.

The number on the table: $2 million, believed at a discount.

Technique 2: The buyer’s own metric, moved

Now the seller stops talking and starts asking, “What’s your current win rate?” Twenty-five percent. And then the crucial question, “What do you think you could get it to?”

The buyer considers it and says thirty. That number is now theirs. They chose it, so they cannot discount it the way they discounted the seller’s 5%. Now the seller only has to help with the arithmetic. “What would that be worth to you?”

They work it out together. The buyer’s reps run about 1,000 qualified opportunities a year at an average deal size of $50,000. At 25%, that’s 250 wins, $12.5 million in new business. At the 30% the buyer named, that’s 300 wins, $15 million. The same pipeline, worked better, produces $2.5 million in additional revenue, and a far larger share of it drops to profit, because the cost of generating those opportunities was already spent.

The buyer trusts this number in a way they never trusted Technique 1, and for a specific reason: every input came from them. They named the target. They supplied the situation. The seller only helped with the math. You believe a number you built yourself.

But be honest about what that number still is. It is a guess. The buyer pulled thirty percent out of the air, and a guess can land high as easily as low. Had they said fifty, the math would have produced a far bigger figure resting on nothing more solid. The number is owned now, which is real progress, but it is not yet justified. Could that buyer justify it to their boss? Nothing underneath it explains why thirty is achievable, or whether it is even ambitious enough. That foundation is what the next two techniques build.

Technique 3: The landscape

Most sellers, if they ever reach Technique 2, stop there. They’ve found a real, owned number, and they pitch it. But the win rate is just one problem in a landscape of them, and the CRM solves far more than the one the buyer could name.

So the seller keeps asking, and each question surfaces a problem the buyer has but didn’t name. Every one of these gets the exact same treatment as the win rate: ask the buyer for their current number, ask what they think it could become, and work out together what the change is worth. The principle underneath is simple and broad. Almost any KPI a company tracks can be turned into incremental profit, because every operational number eventually connects to revenue raised, cost removed, or risk retired.

Take capacity. The seller asks how much of a rep’s week goes to administration rather than selling. The buyer thinks and says nearly a day. The seller asks what reclaiming half of that would do. The buyer realizes it means each rep could work more opportunities, and with 1,000 opportunities now becoming, say, 1,150, the same improved win rate is applied to a bigger base. They do the math together, and another seven-figure number lands on the table, owned by the buyer because the buyer built it.

Now the same question runs across the rest of the landscape, each one quantified the same way:

• Ramp. What does it cost while a new rep gets up to speed, and what is it worth to cut that time? 
• Continuity. When a rep leaves, how much pipeline walks out undocumented, and what would recovering it be worth? 
• Forecast accuracy. What does a wrong forecast cost in over- and under-hiring, and what is a trustworthy one worth? 
• Margin leakage. Here is one from my own past. At a company I worked with, the same customer would request quotes through different channels, and because no one realized it was the same buyer, they’d receive different prices. The buyer always took the lowest. A system that simply recognized the buyer stopped a leak no one had ever put on a spreadsheet. What is that worth? Ask, and quantify.

None of these was the reason the buyer came shopping. Every one of them is real, every one has a number, and every number belongs to the buyer because the buyer built it. This is breadth: the seller has moved across the KPIs that convert to incremental profit and helped the buyer see value hiding in each.

But every one of these numbers is still the same kind of guess as in Technique 2. Better-owned, spread across more metrics, but still floating. To truly justify them, you have to go the other direction. Not wider, deeper.

Technique 4: Underneath one number

Go back to win rate, the first number the buyer named. The buyer guessed they could move it from 25 to 30. But neither of you yet knows why it sits at 25, and until you do, 30 is just a hopeful round number.

So the seller asks the question almost no one asks. “Why thirty? What is actually happening in the deals you lose?”

And here the buyer’s own situation starts to come into focus, problem by problem, each one recognized rather than pitched:

• “Honestly, a lot of them just go quiet. The buyer agrees we’d help and then nothing happens.” They lose to no decision, to the comfort of the status quo.
• “My reps can’t really explain why we’re worth more than the cheaper option.” A differentiation problem.
• “We’re great in the demo, but the business case never gets strong enough to defend internally.” A value-clarity problem, costing deals at the finish.
• “Deals stall right after the champion is sold, like they’re afraid to pull the trigger.” A confidence problem, the buyer afraid of being wrong.
• “And we waste a ton of time on deals that were never going to close.” A discovery and qualification problem upstream of all of it.

Watch the buyer as this happens. With each problem named, two things move at once. First, their trust climbs sharply. “How did you know that” is the most valuable sentence a buyer can say, because a seller who can name the problems they live but never articulate obviously understands their world, and a seller who understands their world can probably fix it. Second, and this is the part that justifies the number, the buyer can now see the path. Thirty percent stops being a hopeful round number and becomes the visible sum of fixing five specific, recognized things.

And now the buyer revises. Looking at the list, they say something like: “If we actually fixed all of that, thirty was conservative. Forty might be real.” That is not the seller pushing a bigger number. That is the buyer, seeing their own problems clearly for the first time, realizing the upside was larger than their first guess. The number grew, but it grew because understanding grew, and it is now grounded in a way the Technique 2 guess never was. The same problems that explain why the number is stuck are the evidence that it can move.

Notice the asymmetry that just appeared. There are only a handful of KPIs that convert to money: win rate, ramp, capacity, leakage, forecast accuracy. The many problems beneath them carry the belief. You quantify on the KPIs, but you build confidence on the problems, and the more problems the buyer comes to understand, the more they trust that the KPI will actually move, and the higher a target they will accept as real.

And we have done this for only one of the five named KPIs. We went deep on win rate and never touched ramp, leakage, forecast accuracy, or capacity, each of which sits on a landscape of unnamed problems just as deep. The seller has fully opened exactly one door of five. The value on the table is no longer a figure. It is a landscape, and the buyer is just now beginning to see how far it extends.

The inversion

The value did not grow between Technique 0 and Technique 4. It was all there at Technique 0. The product was identical the entire time. The buyer was identical. The price list never moved. Every dollar of value the buyer ended up seeing existed, in full, while the seller was reciting features at the start.

What changed was how much of the value the buyer could see and believe. The seller spent the conversation closing Buyer Disconnect, moving the value from the company’s head into the buyer’s, one specific, owned, recognized problem at a time. And the value a buyer is willing to pay for is never the value that exists. It is only ever the value they can see and trust.

Your job is not to pitch a number. It is to help the buyer understand their situation so clearly that the value becomes real to them on its own.

The figures here are illustrative, chosen to make the math easy to follow; your own numbers will differ. The pattern does not. The gap between the value you create and the value your buyer can see has a name, Buyer Disconnect, and closing it is the most reliable way to be paid for work you are already doing.

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