Every salesperson is trained to sell on value. It anchors the strategy decks, names the methodologies, shapes the training. And the whole practice is built on a single word that no one, not the rep, not the VP who mandated it, not the scientist who studies it for a living, can actually define. The word is value.
Consider where the confusion runs deepest. A doctoral student two years into a dissertation named for achieving clarity on value went to their advisor and admitted they no longer knew what values were, then left to go work at a nonprofit. They meant values in the moral sense, and that is the trap: a listener can go minutes before realizing the word has quietly changed categories. Six letters doing the work of both what a buyer will pay and what a buyer believes is right, so that a scholar who studies value and a seller who invokes it talk straight past each other without either noticing.
And the two senses do not even stay cleanly apart, because what a buyer believes is right moves what they will pay. Greenwashing exists precisely because buyers care about the moral kind, even while they buy the thing anyway. If the word will not hold still long enough to keep to one category, the rep invoking it across a conference table is gesturing at fog and calling it a number.
The fog is not the same fog for everyone at the table. Sit four buyers down and the word splits into four things. One wants a partner they can trust, and reads a fair price as the proof of it. One wants the cutting-edge thing, the integration that is genuinely new and still slots into the systems they already run. One is buying the seller’s character, the reputation, the civic record, the sense that these are people worth standing next to. One is a product manager who has spent years boxed in by restrictive terms and wants, before anything else, a contract that lets them move. Each will nod at the word value and mean something the others would not recognize, and each meaning is blended, part professional and part personal, carrying an emotional charge that does not switch off just because the thing being bought is technology.
Value is not a property of the offering. It is a reaction in the buyer, and it lands, or fails to, in them, never in the script. That is the deepest reason no rep can deliver it: there is no single thing to deliver, only a different one behind each face. The good ones stop trying to deliver value and start reading which one this person means.
Something real is happening in the room, and it deserves its actual names. What gets mislabeled as adding value is really two separate jobs, and only two.
Compression
The first job is translation. The rep takes a technology and compresses it into something the buyer can hold, the way you would explain a genuinely new idea to a smart person who has simply never met it. This work is real, and it scales with how new the thing is. The frame comes from the economist W. Brian Arthur, who showed that all technology, new and old, emerges the same way, by combining technologies that already exist.
Nothing arrives from nowhere; the laser and the jet engine were recombinations of things that came before. So new does not mean alien. It means a combination the buyer has not yet absorbed. A database or a cloud service needs almost no compression, because the buyer already carries the combination in their head. A genuinely unfamiliar recombination, computing physical molecules from digital code, or encryption built to outlast a quantum computer, needs a great deal, because the buyer has to be walked across the gap. The seller is the one who compresses that distance, and the newer the technology, the more of the work it is.
Fit
The second job is fit. Does this thing solve the particular, specific problem in front of this particular buyer. Not is it good, not what is it worth, but does it belong here. Fit is the rational gate, and it is a real question with a real answer, which is more than value ever was.
Notice that the two things reps actually say are each one of these jobs wearing the wrong label. “Our data is over a terabyte, a hundred and fifty million parcels, twenty years of history” is compression, scale translated into terms a buyer can weigh. “A hundred and fifty million records for five hundred thousand, unrestricted license” is compression too, the same facts arranged toward a decision. Neither is value. They are the honest work of translation, with the word value slapped on top at the last moment as if that added something. It did not. The word was always the emptiest thing in the sentence.
Drop the word
So drop it. You are not there to deliver value, because there is no such object to deliver. You are there to compress the unfamiliar into the understood, to find the fit, and to say the price and let the buyer weigh it against a problem only they can see in full. Name the two real jobs and do them well, and the fog you were told to sell burns off. What is left is a technology, a buyer, a problem, and the question of whether the one fits the other. That was the whole conversation the entire time. Value was just the word we used to avoid having it.
Touchstones: the formal axiology of Robert S. Hartman, an attempt to make value a science; and Somik Raha’s Stanford dissertation, Achieving Clarity on Value, whose author confessed, two years in, to having none. A companion to “Nobody Asked You for an ROI”: ROI puts a false number on the sale, this puts a false word on it, and both hide the same two real jobs, compression and fit.