To Sell More, Stop Selling Your Product

01 /The Concept

Cuvama built a platform for B2B sales teams that helps them stop selling their product – and start selling the business outcome the customer will get from using it.

The platform automates a rigorous sales process and creates a searchable library of past business cases that can accelerate future deals. Here's what that process looks like.

It starts with discovery: understand which metrics the prospect uses to measure success, and which ones they're falling short on. The focus is on specific individuals within the account – the people who influence the buying decision. Each person has their own set of KPIs, measured in dollars, percentages, or days, and their own set of challenges – the metrics they find hardest to move.

The sales conversation then centers not on product features, but on a concrete plan: how does using this product help this specific person hit their specific numbers?

This turns a traditional product demo into a collaborative planning session. And the plan doesn't stop at the sale. Pre-sale, account executives own it. Post-sale, customer success managers take it over and track actual results against the projected ones. When something doesn't work, they iterate with the customer – proposing new approaches until the target metrics move.

As real results accumulate, the plan evolves into a case study – which goes into the library and becomes a template for the next similar deal.

The goal: every prospect in the pipeline should be covered by a business case – either an active plan tailored to their situation, or a proven example from a comparable account.

According to Cuvama, this approach doubles the number of deals closed, increases average deal size by 43%, and cuts sales cycle length by 30%.

Cuvama was founded in 2022 and has real paying customers. The startup just raised $2.75M in new funding, bringing total raised to $4.2M.

02 /Why It Matters

"Value selling" is widely cited as a best practice – selling the business outcome rather than the product itself. The word "widely" is doing some heavy lifting there.

B2B sales is genuinely hard. 61% of deals in progress stall with no decision at all. When deals do close, they close at an average of 21% below the originally projected size.

The root cause: 88% of decision-makers say they can't find a compelling business justification for buying a product they nominally want.

96% of B2B sales professionals say value selling addresses this problem. Practitioners report 48% higher close rates on average, 35% larger deal sizes, and 25% shorter sales cycles.

Yet adoption is strikingly low. In small companies – where founders and sales leaders still have time to dig into customer needs – about 51% of reps use value selling regularly. In mid-size companies, that drops to 25%. In large enterprises, 17%.

The pipeline coverage numbers tell a similar story. Small companies have business cases covering 36% of their pipeline. Mid-size: 32%. Large: 25%.

Part of the explanation is staffing. Value selling requires someone to build the business case. In small companies, Business Value Engineers (BVE) – the people responsible for this work, whether under that formal title or not – make up about 15% of the sales headcount. In mid-size companies: 5%. In large enterprises: 2%.

Even among companies that do practice value selling, only larger organizations use dedicated platforms like Cuvama. Smaller and mid-size teams rely on spreadsheets or skip the process altogether. In fact, only 33% of small companies use dedicated software for this – 30% use spreadsheets, 23% have no one specifically doing it, and 15% let individual reps maintain their own ad hoc tracking.

All told, just 19% of B2B sales reps use value selling with any regularity. The upside potential for adoption – and for the platforms that support it – is enormous.

Other startups are starting to notice. Last month's [review covered](/review/samyj-prostoj-sposob-prodat) Symbe, which built a platform specifically for creating, managing, and deploying business cases in sales. Symbe covers a subset of Cuvama's functionality and is still in beta – but already raised £1.2M in its first round.

03 /Opportunities

The average company today uses around 130 cloud services – and that number keeps rising. That means the number of B2B software vendors is growing, and each of them is facing tougher competition in a crowded market. They need better sales processes to stand out. Value selling tools help with exactly that.

The opportunity is clear: build value selling platforms for small and mid-size B2B software companies – the ones that need effective and simple tools, not enterprise-grade complexity.

Cuvama is a solid reference implementation. The market is real, the pain is documented, and adoption remains low – which means the growth runway is long.