Wait a minute. Value?
You thought it was beauty that lived in the eye of the beholder. It is. But so is value. We each look at the world through our own lens and measure everything against our own priorities, which means the same thing can be worth a fortune to one person and nothing at all to the next.
Here is proof you already know. You can save fifteen percent on your car insurance by calling the company with the little gecko. The British accent. The one whose ads you have seen roughly ten thousand times. Fifteen percent is real money. So why haven’t you called?
I haven’t either. Not because the offer is bad, but because switching car insurance is nowhere near my list of priorities. The gecko can be charming and relentless, and it does not matter. He is not selling to anything I actually care about right now.
Every seller should tattoo that on the back of their hand. (Enterprise software is my world, but this holds for selling anything.) If you push a product at someone that has no connection to what they care about, why on earth would they engage? We forget this constantly, even though it is one of the most basic facts about people. They act on their own priorities, not yours.
So before you go after an executive, do the unglamorous work of finding out what they actually care about. There are two ways in.
If the company is public, they have already told you. Their priorities are sitting in the annual report, the investor presentations, and the interviews their executives gave. The things with real money and executive attention behind them are not secrets. Let your fingers do the searching. With AI, it’ll take you seconds.
If the company is private and the well comes up dry, widen the lens to the industry. With your favorite LLM, figure out what is keeping executives across their sector up at night, because your prospect is almost certainly wrestling with the same thing.
Find the trend and you have found a door.
Now connect your solution to that priority, and do not skip the ROI. This is where a lot of deals quietly die. A priority is not the same as a budget. Even funded initiatives get the spend re-validated right before the money goes out, so the business case has to hold. Attach yourself to something that genuinely matters to them, prove the return, and your odds of success, however you define it, climb dramatically. When it is their priority, they have to see it through. You just made yourself part of how they do.
Which brings us back to the gecko. Fly blind, skip the research, and lead with how great your product is, and your message lands exactly where his does. Background noise. Charming, maybe, but ignored.
Value really is in the eye of the beholder.
The whole job of a sales team or a marketer is learning to see through their eyes before you ever ask them to look through yours.
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