Your Buyer Wants Outcomes, Not Software with Ryan Schultz

While most B2B companies obsess over lead enrichment services, CRM optimization, and the latest sales methodologies, they're completely missing the point. The real problem isn't your tech stack—it's that you have no idea how to communicate value. And according to customer success veteran Ryan Schultz, founder of DIVACS, this isn't just a sales problem—it's a fundamental flaw in how businesses think about their entire customer lifecycle.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Modern B2B Sales

Traditional B2B sales processes are built around outdated frameworks like BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timing) that completely ignore the only thing buyers actually care about: What's in it for me? As Schultz points out, buyers aren't making decisions based on your feature list—they're making decisions to avoid getting fired.

The statistics tell a brutal story: decision fatigue in enterprise buyers, complex buying committees, misunderstood buyer needs, and poor internal alignment dominate the landscape. Yet none of these address the core issue that buyers are fundamentally asking one question: "What value will this create for me and my business?"

Why Companies Get Value Wrong (And Keep Getting It Wrong)

The Early-Stage Trap

Young companies often try to "perfect value too early" instead of taking customers on a journey to discover what value actually means. They're handicapped by limited resources and don't yet have the data points needed to build comprehensive value propositions. But here's Schultz's contrarian insight: you don't need perfect data to have a value perspective.

"Having a perspective on your value is always important and critical, and you can always have a perspective on that even as you're continuing to figure yourself out. But you need to have the transparency with your customer or your prospect in that stage to get the feedback, have a conversation about it."

The Enterprise Paradox

Larger companies face the opposite problem. They've hired value engineers and consultants, but these teams only focus on the biggest deals—the strategic accounts, the high enterprise segment. This leaves 80% of their business conducting sales conversations without any value framework, essentially abandoning their core market to feature-and-function selling.

The DIVACS Framework: Value as a Continuous Journey

Schultz's approach through DIVACS (Digital Value and Customer Success) treats value not as a one-time sales tool, but as a continuous conversation throughout the entire customer lifecycle. The framework rests on three critical distinctions:

• Outcomes: A target you want to achieve by a certain timeframe
• Impact: What's actually been achieved as of a specific date—the measurable results
• Value: The holistic journey that encompasses the entire relationship

The Outside-In Value Discovery Process

The revolutionary aspect of Schultz's methodology is starting with an "outside-in view" rather than the traditional inside-out approach. Instead of leading with features ("I have AI to generate value drivers, I can export business cases"), successful value selling begins with understanding the business you're selling to:

• Are they looking to increase revenue?
• Are they investing in marketing or cybersecurity?
• What are their actual business drivers based on public information?

The value drivers don't come from your company—they come from your prospect's business.

Tactical Implementation: From Theory to Practice

Step 1: Identify the Biggest Lifecycle Problem

Schultz starts every engagement by identifying where the value conversation breakdown occurs. Is it on the sales side (deals taking too long to close) or post-sale side (declining NRR and GRR)? The approach varies dramatically based on this diagnosis.

Step 2: Build Transparency Into the Process

Whether you're early-stage or enterprise, customers need to be part of the value discovery conversation. This means getting prospects into your platform or process to evaluate how they think about the problems you're solving, creating a collaborative rather than prescriptive dynamic.

Step 3: Create Continuous Value Alignment

Value isn't a static PowerPoint presentation you dust off for CFO approval. It's an ongoing conversation that happens at the admin level, buyer level, CFO level, and champion level throughout the customer relationship.

The Strategic Implications: Why This Changes Everything

Breaking Down Organizational Silos

The most significant insight from Schultz's approach is that value-based selling requires complete alignment between pre-sales and post-sales teams. Too many companies create value narratives that the customer success team never sees, leading to misaligned expectations and eventual churn.

"When a business case is built, it's like this is what is true as of today, but the deal might not have been sold for six months later. The reality is I think that's a huge mistake. You're missing out on the trust and transparency that not only can you build with your customer... but also your own internal team."

The Competitive Advantage

In an increasingly commoditized market, the companies that will win are those that can demonstrate clear, measurable value throughout the entire customer journey. This isn't about having better features—it's about understanding your customer's business better than they understand it themselves.

The Role of Technology

Contrary to the prevailing wisdom that more sales technology is the answer, Schultz argues that AI should be focused on giving reps real-time ability to answer value-based questions, not automating more outreach. The future of sales technology should help representatives build collaborative business cases, not send more emails.

Looking Forward: The Value-Centric Future

The companies that will dominate the next decade won't be those with the most sophisticated marketing automation or the latest AI-powered prospecting tools. They'll be the companies that can demonstrate clear, measurable, continuous value to their customers at every stage of the relationship.

This requires a fundamental shift from transactional thinking to relationship thinking, from feature-based selling to outcome-based partnerships, and from ad-hoc value conversations to systematic value orchestration across the entire organization.

The question isn't whether your competition will adopt this approach—it's whether you'll implement it before they do.

EXCLUSIVE CONTENT