[Insights B2B Executives] The B2B Value Gap: Do Your Customers Actually See the Value You Deliver?

Insights tailored to B2B executives.

You can create enormous value for a customer and still lose the renewal. It happens when the people receiving that value can't measure it or defend it to their own CFO. It's called the value gap, and it's one of the most expensive, least-watched holes in B2B.

In one line: every B2B company carries a blind spot that early growth hides for years, the gap between the value you create and the value your customer can see, quantify, and defend internally. Leave it open and renewals stall, price pressure builds, and strategic deals never close.

Closing it isn't a sales or marketing task, but an executive decision.

Most B2B companies live with this gap without ever naming it. For a while, strong growth masks it, until sales slow or a competitor starts eroding your margins.

By then the problem is usually well advanced, because the erosion is gradual and no one measured it while it was happening.

What the value gap is

The value gap is the distance between two things we tend to blur together: the value your solution actually generates, and the value your customer is able to perceive, measure, and argue in front of the people who control the budget.

A customer can get daily benefit from your product and, at the same time, have no way to turn that benefit into a number they can take to their CFO or CTO.

In that moment the benefit is real, but to the organization paying the bill it's invisible.

The consequences follow a familiar pattern. Renewals stall. Price pressure intensifies. The most important deals stay open indefinitely. It's the same mechanism that, further downstream, produces deals that die without a decision: if the person backing you internally doesn't have the numbers to convince the rest of the buying committee, the safest choice for everyone becomes not deciding.

The Splunk case: a value gap hidden by growth

The most instructive example comes from the HBR article "Do Your B2B Customers See the Value You Deliver?", whose authors watched Splunk from the inside in 2013.

At the time, Splunk was doing nearly $200 million in revenue and growing more than 50% a year, driven by IT teams that had adopted the product to solve IT-operations problems that had been painfully expensive until then. From the outside it looked like a flawless success story: users loved the tool and growth showed no signs of slowing. From the inside, leadership saw the opposite signals. CIOs were telling Wall Street analysts the product cost too much. Consumption-based pricing was scaring buyers, because they couldn't predict the spend.

The issue was precisely the value gap. Users experienced the benefit every day, but the CIOs and CFOs who controlled the budget did not, and no one inside the buying organization could quantify what Splunk was already generating. Without that number, justifying full-scale adoption was impossible.

Splunk closed the gap through a multi-year transformation that started at the executive level and then reached Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, and product, building a culture centered on customer business value. Over the next six years revenue grew more than tenfold, to $2.3 billion. In 2024, Cisco acquired the company for $28 billion. The lesson that matters here isn't the size of the numbers. It's that the shift came from a decision made at the top, not from a bottom-up sales initiative.

Why the value gap costs more now, and faster

The value gap has always carried a price. What changed is how fast it presents the bill. Feature advantages that once lasted years now erode in months. Buyers scrutinize every technology investment, AI-related ones in particular, and increasingly tie renewals to demonstrable business impact.

The most exposed companies are the ones whose customers can't build the business case in front of the executives who control the budget. In a market that demands proof, unmeasured value simply doesn't count. And the window to build this capability is narrower than it was even two years ago.

How to close it: understand, prove, operationalize, scale

Closing the value gap follows a precise sequence. It doesn't take a big budget. It takes treating the understanding of customer value as structured work, not as a talent a few Salespeople happen to have.

1. Understand the value, for real. Start with a small, dedicated team focused on how your solution is used by customers to reduce risk, grow revenue, or cut cost. This work can't be done with surveys, or by asking customers "what do you value?". It takes the mindset of an economist and a product-usage analyst: gather input from the people closest to customers (sales, customer success, product), pick a representative subset of customers, and run deep, one-to-one conversations about how you actually move their costs, revenue, and risk.

2. Prove it, starting with sales. This is where impact is fastest and most visible. Apply the approach to live opportunities, with a first group of strategic sellers, and build value quantification into the sales process itself, not alongside it. Value messaging goes into the pitches, the validation events, and the materials used every day. One step is non-negotiable: the customer's internal champion has to co-build the business case they'll later take to their own leadership. Without that co-creation, the business case has no internal credibility.

3. Operationalize it with repeatable models. Give teams business-case models that measure the customer's current state and project future value, on real data and benchmarks. The goal is to make the value conversation a prescriptive step in the sales method, the same for everyone, rather than an improvisation.

4. Scale it across the organization. Once the models hold, extend the mindset beyond sales. Marketing communicates impact on the core use cases and runs demand generation on outcomes, not features. Post-sales moves customers toward the most differentiating capabilities and makes them able to articulate the value they're generating. Product uses customer business value to set innovation priorities. Pricing and packaging get rethought around the value each use case produces.

Why it's a leadership imperative

The value gap is a senior-leadership problem for a simple reason: no single function, not Sles, not Marketing, not Product, has the authority or the visibility to align an entire company around a shared understanding of customer value. It takes an executive decision to prioritize the investment, mandate cross-functional coordination, and hold the organization accountable for an outcome no single team owns.

The bottom line

We've seen value gaps erode companies that looked healthy on every conventional metric. It's the thread running through many of the dynamics we write about: the deal that won't close, the price pressure, the customer that never expands. The companies that close the gap, starting from an executive decision to align the whole organization around customer value, are the ones that will grow, retain, and expand their customer base. The rest will find out how quickly the market can leave them behind.

FAQ

What is the value gap in B2B?

‍The value gap is the distance between the value a vendor actually generates for a customer and the value that customer can perceive, measure, and defend internally, especially in front of the people who control the budget. Left open, it stalls renewals and expansion and increases price pressure.

How do you recognize a value gap?

‍The signals are recurring: renewals that stall, growing price pressure, strategic deals that won't close, and customers who don't expand despite using the product well. Because the erosion is gradual, the problem is usually well advanced by the time it surfaces.

Where do you start to close it?

‍With a small, dedicated team that deeply understands how the solution reduces risk, grows revenue, or cuts cost for customers; then you prove the value starting from sales, with business cases co-built with the customer's internal champion. The full sequence is: understand, prove, operationalize, scale.

Why is closing the value gap a leadership responsibility?

‍Because no single function has the authority or visibility to align the whole company around a shared understanding of customer value. It requires investment priorities, cross-functional coordination, and accountability for an outcome no one team owns, all executive decisions.

This post was inspired by "Do Your B2B Customers See the Value You Deliver?" by Wendy Wise and Dough May, originally published on Harvard Business Review. We've taken some of its ideas further, and we recommend reading the original here.