The Only Three Reasons Any Business Buys Anything

What every startup pitch should be based on

Founders build their pitch around what feels impressive and what they're proud of. The product, the AI capabilities and the roadmap.

Reality check, none of this alone gets a deal signed. Sure, you need to be proud of what you're building and the journey you've taken. But the truth is, just talking about technical specs and product is vanity. It's what makes you happy, not your buyer.

It's also a far less efficient way to earn a buyer's interest than talking about the outcomes the product gives them.

Buyers only ever buy for one of three reasons:

1. It makes them money
2. It saves them money
3. It protects them from something going wrong

Everything else is decoration.

1. The three points of the Value Triangle

Increase revenue. Reduce cost. Reduce risk.

Every credible value proposition sits on one or more of these three points. You can get customers to sign for other reasons (trust me, I've done it myself), but without at least one strong value driver you don't have a strong deal, and you'll always be fighting for the renewal (I've done that too).

The strongest solutions hit all three at once, but almost nobody proves all three equally well, especially early on. Most founders default to whichever one sounds biggest, without checking whether it's the one they can actually back up yet.

2. Revenue is valuable, but the hardest to prove

Revenue claims need a real dataset behind them to be credible. In practice, that means something closer to a year of results and a real customer base, not a pilot or two.

Early-stage founders who lead with "we'll grow your revenue" are usually making a promise the business can't back up yet, and buyers can tell the difference between a claim and a proof point.

If you have strong proof that your product or service directly and repeatedly increases revenue for customers, congratulations. Go forth and sell. Until then, read on.

3. Cost and risk are where early proof actually lives

One of my clients' early customers put it plainly, unprompted: the product "saved 2-3 weeks of hardcore strategy work."

In this case, the customer saved a minimum of 2-3 weeks' worth of labour cost (let alone the headache and stress). For your product, they may be saving cost in the form of specific departments, consolidating outdated software, or simply doing the thing they did before at a cheaper price.

Any cost saving a business can make is a powerful driver to any buyer, and their CFO, especially if the sacrifice and effort required is small in comparison.

Risk works the same way. Take any European company, where a breach of GDPR results in a fine up to €10m or 2% of company turnover. This gets C-level attention.

This is why your early-stage value drivers are likely to be cost or risk. Not because revenue doesn't matter, but because you can't yet prove it, and an unprovable claim is worse than a smaller provable one.

4. How to articulate your value

There's a difference between knowing you have value and being able to articulate it to your buyers effectively.

Here's a structure I use, which you can steal and adapt:

"[Company] [increases revenue / reduces risk / reduces cost by X] by giving [ICP] the ability to [benefit], so they can stop [problem]. We do this without [the sacrifice they fear], in [timeframe]."

The "without" and "in" clauses aren't filler. They pre-empt the two objections every buyer is silently running through: this will cost me effort, and this will take forever. A value statement that doesn't answer both leaves the buyer to fill in the worst-case assumption themselves.

A real example that I created for a recent client: "STRGY reduces risk by giving enterprise executives a way to flag employee actions that don't align with company strategy, so they can stop strategy drift and execution delays. We do this without daily meetings or manual checks, in under 2 weeks." Notice it names one driver, one audience, one benefit, and closes both objections in two sentences.

5. Value + Cost of Inaction = Urgency

In highlighting the value, you're also drawing attention to the pain, i.e. the cost of inaction resulting from not solving the problem they have.

The bigger and more measurable the cost of doing nothing, the faster the buyer moves, and the higher the price you can hold.

This is exactly what the economic buyer in any deal is quietly calculating in the background, whether or not anyone's said it out loud. If you haven't made the cost of inaction explicit, you've left the buyer to underestimate it, and you start to lose control.

If the cost is explicit and the value is clear, then "doing nothing" becomes a ticking time bomb that the buyer will struggle to ignore.

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