---
title: "Value-Based Selling: How to Build a Value Case That Holds"
description: "Value-based selling needs sourced numbers. Learn the six account facts a value case rests on, where to find each one, and what the research costs."
canonical: "https://derrick-app.com/b2b-marketing/value-based-selling"
category: "B2B Marketing"
updated: "2026-09-19"
---

# Value-based selling: how to build a value case your buyer can actually check

> Value-based selling anchors the sale on the measurable outcome your buyer gets, expressed in their own numbers. It fails in most teams for one reason: a value argument is arithmetic, and nobody funds the research that produces its inputs. Six account facts carry almost every value case, headcount and function split, growth direction, open roles, technologies in use, recent news, and the buying committee. The first three cost 6 credits per account on Derrick's free plan, which carries 100 credits a month, with LinkedIn connected through the Chrome extension; without that connection, two of the three steps do not run.

*Canonical: https://derrick-app.com/b2b-marketing/value-based-selling* · *B2B Marketing*

---

## What value-based selling is, and what it actually requires

**Value-based selling is a sales approach where you anchor the conversation on the measurable business outcome your buyer gets, expressed in their numbers, instead of on your features or your price.** The seller does the arithmetic before the call, shows the working, and lets the buyer check it. Price then becomes a comparison against a figure the buyer already accepted, rather than the only number in the room.

That definition is the easy part, and every guide on this subject agrees with it. The hard part is the sentence nobody writes down: a value argument is arithmetic, and arithmetic needs inputs. You cannot tell a company what your product is worth to them until you know how many people do the work today, whether that team is growing, what they already bought, and what changed at the company in the last quarter. Without those facts you are not selling on value. You are selling an adjective.

So this page splits in two. The first half is the method, which works whatever tools you own: which facts a value case rests on, how to turn a fact into a defensible figure, and which discovery questions convert your assumptions into confirmed numbers. The second half is the part the rest of the internet skips, which is where those facts come from and what collecting them costs per account.

One boundary worth setting early. Value-based selling is not a pricing model. Value-based *pricing* sets what you charge; value-based selling decides how you justify it. A company can run list pricing and still sell entirely on value, and plenty of companies do exactly that.

## Why the value conversation stalls: a number with no inputs

Watch a deal that was supposed to be run on value-based selling and stalled. The pattern is almost always the same. The rep opened with a benefit statement, the buyer asked what that meant for them specifically, and the rep produced a number from a case study about a different company in a different industry at a different size. The buyer did the only rational thing and discounted it to zero.

There are three distinct failure modes here, and they need different fixes.

**The borrowed number.** A figure from someone else's deployment, presented as if it transfers. It does not, and experienced buyers know it does not. The fix is not a better case study, it is a calculation built on this buyer's own facts.

**The unfalsifiable claim.** "You will save significant time." Nothing in that sentence can be checked, so nothing in it can be believed. The fix is to make every claim a number with a stated assumption behind it, which the buyer is invited to challenge.

**The discovery-only value case.** The rep plans to build the value argument live, during the call, from what the buyer volunteers. That is a hard trick to pull off, and it wastes the meeting. A buyer who has to supply the raw material for your pitch is doing your job, and they notice.

The fix for all three is the same and it happens before the meeting: arrive with a draft calculation built on verified facts about that specific account, and use the call to correct it rather than to construct it. That reframes discovery from interrogation into verification, which is a far easier conversation to have.

## The six account facts a value argument is built on, and where each comes from

A value-based selling case for a B2B account almost always rests on some combination of six facts. Each one answers a different question, and each one has a different source and a different reliability.

| The fact | What it lets you calculate | Where it comes from |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Headcount, and headcount in the relevant function | The size of the problem. Ten people doing a task and two hundred people doing it are different businesses. | Company enrichment from the company's public profile. |
| Growth direction over the last year | Whether the cost you are describing is shrinking or compounding. A growing team makes a process problem worse every quarter. | Headcount history in company enrichment. |
| Open roles right now, and which ones | The most honest signal of where a company is spending. Six open roles in one function is a budget decision already made. | A hiring signal read from the company's live job postings. |
| Technologies running on their site | What they already bought, what you integrate with, and what they have already decided this problem is worth. | A technology lookup on their domain. |
| Recent news, funding, leadership changes | The trigger, and the language to use. A new VP has a mandate and a deadline. | News monitoring on the company name. |
| Who sits on the buying committee | Which version of the value argument goes to which person. | People search inside the target company. |

Notice what is not on that list. Intent scores, engagement grades, fit percentages. Those are conclusions, and a conclusion is not evidence. You cannot show a buyer a fit score and expect them to argue with it, because there is nothing in it to argue with. You can show them that they have six open roles in customer support and ask whether the support queue is the reason. That is a conversation.

The first three facts are the load-bearing ones, and they are also the cheapest. Start there. The last three sharpen a case that already works.

Choosing which accounts deserve this research at all is a separate question, and it comes first. If you have not written down which companies are actually a fit, start with our guide to the [ideal customer profile in sales](https://derrick-app.com/b2b-marketing/icp-in-sales) and the [glossary definition of an ICP](https://derrick-app.com/glossary/ideal-customer-profile). Research on the wrong account is expensive at any price.

## From fact to figure: a value calculation your buyer can check

Here is the move that separates real value-based selling from a slogan. You write the calculation as a chain, you label every link as either a verified fact or a stated assumption, and you hand the whole thing to the buyer.

A worked example, using a fictional mid-market company to show the shape of the arithmetic rather than to make any claim about your market.

| Link in the chain | Value | Status | How it gets confirmed |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Total headcount | 240 | Verified fact | Company enrichment, checked before the call |
| People in the sales function | 18 | Verified fact | Same source, function breakdown |
| Open sales roles today | 6 | Verified fact | Hiring signal on live postings |
| Hours per rep per week on manual list building | 4 | Assumption | Ask it in discovery, question 1 below |
| Working weeks per year | 45 | Assumption | Confirm with their ops lead |
| Fully loaded cost per hour | 45 EUR | Assumption | They will not confirm it, so offer a range |
| **Annual cost of the task today** | **18 x 4 x 45 x 45 EUR = 145 800 EUR** | Derived | Arithmetic, visible and checkable |
| Share of that task your product removes | 60 percent | Claim you must defend | Your own delivery data, not a third party's |
| **Annual value at stake** | **87 480 EUR** | Derived | Compare against your price |

Three things make this work, and all three are about honesty rather than technique.

First, the status column. A buyer who sees you label your own inputs as assumptions trusts the facts you did verify. Hiding the difference is what gets the whole number thrown out.

Second, the arithmetic is visible. Eighteen reps, four hours, forty-five weeks. Any CFO can redo that in their head and adjust one input. A number that arrives without its working invites suspicion; a number that arrives with its working invites negotiation, which is where you wanted the conversation anyway.

Third, the last claim is yours to defend. The share of the task your product actually removes is the one number you cannot source from the buyer or from research. Use your own delivery data, say where it comes from, and give a conservative figure. If the case only closes at 80 percent and falls apart at 50, it was never a value case.

Build the three verified rows first, because they are the ones the buyer cannot dismiss. The assumptions are what the meeting is for.

## What the research behind value-based selling costs, account by account

Every guide on value-based selling tells you to research the account. None of them says what that costs, which is why the advice rarely survives contact with a rep carrying 60 open opportunities. So here is the arithmetic, step by step, with the caveat that the exact figures below are a cost calculation rather than the result of a run we executed for this article.

Derrick prices per step, not per seat, and the credit cost differs per feature. Count steps, not features, because a two-step workflow on one account costs two lines.

| Step | Feature | Cost | Available on |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Company identity, headcount, function split | [Enrich Companies](https://derrick-app.com/features/enrich-companies?utm_source=seo&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=bm-value-based-selling-en&utm_content=feature) | 1 credit per company | Free plan and up, LinkedIn connected |
| Open roles and which functions are hiring | Company Hiring Signal | 1 credit per company | Free plan and up |
| The buying committee, 4 named people | Import Leads from Target Companies | 1 credit per lead, so 4 | Free plan and up, LinkedIn connected |
| Recent news and funding, 3 items | Google News Scraper | 1 credit per item, so 3 | Paid plans only |
| Technology running on their domain | Website Technologies | 2 credits per website | Paid plans only, from Mini |
| A verified email for 2 of the committee | Email Finder | 5 credits per email found, so 10 at most | Paid plans only, from Mini |
| **Full dossier, one account** |  | **21 credits** | Needs a paid plan |

Two readings of that table matter, and the second one is the one most articles get wrong.

The company layer alone, which is the load-bearing part of a value case, costs 6 credits per account: enrichment, hiring signal and the four committee names. All three are available on the free plan, which carries 100 credits a month at no cost and no card, with LinkedIn connected through the Chrome extension; without that connection, two of the three steps do not run. That is 16 accounts a month researched to the depth a value calculation actually needs, for nothing.

The full 21-credit dossier is a different matter, and the constraint is availability rather than arithmetic. News monitoring, the technology lookup and Email Finder are paid-only features, and the technology lookup and Email Finder are included from the Mini plan at 9 EUR a month. Email Finder is billed per email actually found, so the 10 credits it contributes are a ceiling rather than a certainty, and 21 credits is an upper bound for one account. You cannot spend free credits on these three, so no amount of free-plan budget produces a full dossier. At the Mini rate of 0.00225 EUR per credit, researching 100 accounts to the full depth is 2 100 credits, or 4.73 EUR of the 4 000 credits that plan includes.

Put that next to the alternative. A rep assembling the same six facts by hand, across a company profile, a careers page, a news search and a domain inspection, is somewhere between eight and fifteen minutes per account even when they are quick about it. That range is our estimate, not a measurement: time one of your own reps on three accounts and use their figure instead of ours. At that pace, 100 accounts is upwards of twenty hours. The research is not expensive. Doing it manually is.

## Discovery questions that confirm your numbers instead of fishing for pain

Most discovery question lists published under value-based selling are variations of "what challenges are you facing". They are not wrong, they are just early-stage. Once you arrive with a draft calculation, discovery changes job: each question now targets one specific assumption in your chain.

Six questions, each tied to a row in the table above.

1. **"When your team builds a list for a campaign, roughly how long does that take one person in a week?"** Confirms or corrects the hours assumption, which is usually the largest single lever in the calculation.
2. **"I saw six open sales roles. Is the plan to grow the team, or to replace people who left?"** A verified fact used as an opener. Growth and churn lead to completely different value arguments, and the answer tells you which one to run.
3. **"Of the eighteen people in the function, how many actually do this task?"** Narrows a verified fact. Being corrected downwards here costs you nothing and buys you enormous credibility.
4. **"What did you put in place for this last year, and what did it not solve?"** Tests the technology fact, and surfaces the sunk cost you will have to work around.
5. **"If this stayed exactly as it is for another year, what breaks first?"** Converts a cost into a consequence. A number is an argument; a consequence is a deadline.
6. **"Who else would need to agree that this number is real?"** Names the committee and tells you which version of the case to write next.

The ordering matters. Lead with a fact you verified, not with a question. Opening on something true about their company signals that the meeting was prepared, and it sets the tone for a conversation about numbers rather than feelings.

Each seat on the committee needs its own version of the same arithmetic, because they are not buying the same outcome. Our guide on [how to sell to decision makers](https://derrick-app.com/b2b-marketing/sell-to-decision-makers) breaks down what each seat asks for.

## Value-based selling vs solution selling vs consultative selling

These three get used interchangeably, and the difference is genuinely small, but it shows up in what the seller is expected to produce.

| Approach | The seller's job | What lands on the table |
| --- | --- | --- |
| [Consultative selling](https://derrick-app.com/glossary/consultative-selling) | Ask good questions and diagnose the problem with the buyer. | A shared understanding of the problem. |
| [Solution selling](https://derrick-app.com/glossary/solution-selling) | Map your capabilities onto the diagnosed problem. | A configuration that fits the problem. |
| Value-based selling | Quantify what solving the problem is worth to this specific company. | A number, with its inputs shown. |

In practice they stack rather than compete. Consultative technique is how you run the meeting, solution mapping is how you scope the deal, and value-based selling is what you put in the business case that has to survive a room you will not be in. The distinguishing test is simple: if the deliverable at the end of your process contains no arithmetic, you were not selling on value, whatever the deck said.

There is also a boundary worth respecting. Not every deal deserves this treatment. Below a certain contract value the research and the arithmetic cost more than the margin, and a transactional motion is the honest answer. The threshold is wherever fifteen minutes of preparation stops paying for itself, and most teams set it far too low.

## Running value-based selling at account scale: Sheets, an AI chat, or the API

The method above is one account. The operational question is what happens when there are 300, and the answer depends on how you work rather than on which tool is best.

**Preparing a single account before a call.** Use Derrick from your AI assistant over [the MCP server](https://derrick-app.com/mcp?utm_source=seo&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=bm-value-based-selling-en&utm_content=surfaces). You ask for the company, the hiring signal and the committee in the chat you are already in, and you read the answer in the same window where you are drafting the call plan. This is the right reflex when the need is exploratory and one-off. MCP is available from the paid plans.

**Researching a list of target accounts.** Use the Google Sheets sidebar. One column of company names in, the six facts filled down beside them, and a value calculation in the next columns using ordinary spreadsheet arithmetic. This is the surface for the quarterly account plan, and it works on the free plan.

**Keeping the value case fresh inside your CRM.** Use [the REST API](https://derrick-app.com/data-enrichment-api?utm_source=seo&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=bm-value-based-selling-en&utm_content=surfaces), so that headcount and hiring signals refresh on a schedule rather than on the day a rep remembers. Available from the paid plans. A web app is coming soon as a fourth way in.

Whichever surface you pick, the discipline is the same: the facts have a date on them. A headcount you pulled in March is not a fact in September, it is a memory. Re-run the company layer before any meeting that matters, because six credits is cheaper than being corrected in front of a CFO.

At list scale this is the same machinery as any target account programme, which our guide to [account-based marketing](https://derrick-app.com/b2b-marketing/account-based-marketing) covers, and the same list hygiene described in [how to build a prospect list](https://derrick-app.com/b2b-marketing/build-a-prospect-list).

## Five ways a value argument falls apart in the room

Even a well researched case can be lost in the delivery, and value-based selling fails in five recognisable ways.

**The number is too big.** An annual value of two million euros presented to a manager with a forty thousand euro budget does not impress them, it frightens them and it strains belief. Scale the claim to the decision being made.

**The assumptions are hidden.** If the buyer has to reverse-engineer where 145 800 came from, they will assume the worst about it. Show the chain.

**The facts are stale.** Quoting a headcount that was accurate two quarters ago, to someone who lived through the reorganisation, ends the credibility of everything else you brought.

**The value accrues to someone who is not in the room.** You quantified savings in an operations team while pitching the marketing director. The arithmetic can be perfect and still belong to a different budget.

**Nobody owns the number after the deal.** A value case that no one commits to measuring was a sales device, and renewal conversations remember that. Agree at signature which figure gets checked and when.

The common thread is that four of these five value-based selling failures are failures of preparation rather than of technique. They are fixed before the meeting, by research, which is the argument this whole page has been making.

If several of these are familiar, the diagnostic in our guide to [B2B sales challenges](https://derrick-app.com/b2b-marketing/b2b-sales-challenges) helps rank which one is actually yours.

## The three numbers that tell you it is working

Adopting value-based selling is easy to declare and hard to verify, so measure three things and ignore the rest.

**Share of deals with a written value calculation.** Count opportunities above your threshold that carry an actual chain of arithmetic in the CRM, not a sentence claiming value was discussed. This starts embarrassingly low in most teams. Measure your own starting point before you set a target, rather than borrowing a benchmark from somewhere else.

**Discount depth at close.** The honest scoreboard for a value approach. If the average discount has not moved after two quarters, the calculations are not reaching the people who sign. Price pressure is the symptom this method exists to treat.

**Stage-two-to-three conversion.** Value work done properly shows up early, where a prepared first call earns a second one. If the win rate moved but this did not, something later in your process is doing the work and it is worth knowing what.

Pair those with the stage definitions in our guide to [the steps of a sales process](https://derrick-app.com/b2b-marketing/sales-process-steps), so everyone is counting the same thing.

The summary of the whole page fits in one line. Value-based selling is not a tone of voice, it is arithmetic with sourced inputs, and the reason it fails in most teams is that nobody funded the research that produces the inputs. Six credits an account is what that funding looks like.

## Use Derrick in Claude (MCP) or via API

Derrick isn't only a Google Sheets add-on. The same B2B data enrichment runs as an MCP server (use it directly inside Claude and other AI agents) and as a REST API:

- **Claude / AI agents (MCP)**: connect the Derrick MCP server, then enrich from chat. Setup: /mcp
- **REST API**: call the same enrichment endpoints from your own stack (PLUS plan and up). Docs: https://app1.derrick-app.com/api/v1/docs/

## FAQ

### What is value-based selling?
Value-based selling is a sales approach that anchors the conversation on the measurable business outcome the buyer gets, expressed in their own numbers, rather than on product features or price. The seller builds the calculation before the meeting, shows the working, and invites the buyer to correct the assumptions. Price is then compared against a figure the buyer has already accepted.

### What is the difference between value-based selling and value-based pricing?
Value-based pricing sets what you charge, based on the worth of the outcome to the market. Value-based selling decides how you justify that price in a given deal. They are independent: a company can publish list prices and still run an entirely value-based sales motion, and many do.

### What information do you need about a company before a value-based selling call?
Six facts cover almost every case: headcount and how it splits by function, the direction of growth over the last year, which roles are open right now, the technologies running on their site, recent news or funding, and who sits on the buying committee. The first three are the load-bearing ones and also the cheapest to collect.

### How do you calculate value for a specific account?
Write the calculation as a chain and label every link as either a verified fact or a stated assumption. For example: 18 people in the function, times 4 hours a week on the task, times 45 working weeks, times a fully loaded hourly cost, gives an annual cost. Apply the share of that task your product removes to get the value at stake. Showing the status of each input is what makes the total survive scrutiny.

### What does the research behind a value case cost?
On Derrick, the company layer costs 6 credits per account: 1 credit for Enrich Companies, 1 credit for Company Hiring Signal, and 1 credit per committee member imported. All three are available on the free plan, which gives 100 credits a month with no card, so around 16 accounts a month, provided LinkedIn is connected through the Chrome extension; without that connection, Enrich Companies and Import Leads from Target Companies do not run. A fuller dossier adding news, a technology lookup and two verified emails is 21 credits per account at most, since Email Finder is billed per email actually found, and it requires a paid plan because those three features are paid-only.

### Can you do value-based selling research on the free plan?
Partly, and the plan is not the only condition. Enrich Companies, Company Hiring Signal and Import Leads from Target Companies are available from the free plan, and those three produce the facts a value calculation actually rests on. Enrich Companies and Import Leads from Target Companies also need LinkedIn connected through the Chrome extension; without that connection, only Company Hiring Signal runs. Google News Scraper is paid-only, Website Technologies and Email Finder are paid-only from the Mini plan, so free credits cannot be spent on those three at all and no free-plan budget produces a full dossier.

### Is value-based selling the same as consultative or solution selling?
No, though they stack in practice. Consultative selling produces a shared understanding of the problem, solution selling produces a configuration that fits it, and value-based selling produces a number with its inputs shown. The test is what lands on the table at the end: if your process delivers no arithmetic, it was not a value sale.

### When is value-based selling not worth it?
Below a certain contract value, the research and the arithmetic cost more than the margin, and a transactional motion is the honest answer. The threshold sits wherever roughly fifteen minutes of preparation stops paying for itself. Most teams set that line far lower than the numbers justify.

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