Five Steps to Sell Anything: B2B Lessons From an Old Vase

Here is a confession. I had forgotten I owned something valuable.

Not metaphorically. I literally owned two pieces of highly collectable early twentieth-century art pottery, and for the best part of four decades I had been throwing my keys and packets of mints into one of them.

Let me explain how that happened, and why my flambé embarrassment maps, with uncomfortable precision, onto the biggest failure I see in B2B selling today: suppliers who are sitting on real value and have no idea how to sell it.

The box at the back of the pantry

My wife tidied our pantry recently. At the back of a cupboard she found a box of ceramics my late mother had given me. Bowls, vases, figurines, plates, jars: the accumulated evidence of a family with pottery in its blood.

And I mean that literally. I am from Stoke-on-Trent. My family worked for Royal Doulton, Spode, Wedgwood and Twyfords, and between the wars my grandparents ran a family business making roof tiles and bricks. Ceramics are not a hobby for us. They are who we are.

My wife did not see it quite that way. “If these bits are so precious,” she said, eyeing the dusty box with the expression she reserves for my more questionable decisions, “why are they at the back of my cupboard? And anyway, you forgot we had them.”

She had a point.

eBay and Facebook Marketplace looked like the obvious next step. But as I sorted through the pieces, something stopped me: a matching bowl and dish in a deep, lustrous, otherworldly red glaze. A memory stirred. About forty years ago an old friend had visited, spotted them, and said, “Those are flambé test pieces. You should get them valued.”

I remember my answer with some embarrassment. “Really? We throw our keys and mints in that bowl.”

“Dude,” he said. “Get it valued.”

I did not.

Enter the AI detective

Forty years later, bowl in hand, I finally did what I should have done in the 1980s. I asked an AI model. It told me straight away that Royal Doulton flambé test pieces are prized by serious collectors. They are the laboratory phase of the work, made while the potters were still wrestling with the chemistry of one of the most demanding glazes in ceramic history. Then it gave me a piece of advice that stopped me cold: look underneath for a signature.

The great Doulton flambé names are well known, among them Charles Noke, the art director, and Cuthbert Bailey, whose technical work helped make commercial production possible. I turned the bowl over. The name was none of those. It was Bernard Moore.

My first reaction was mild disappointment. Then I read on.

Bernard Moore was an independent Stoke potter and glaze chemist who had been perfecting flambé glazes through the 1880s and 1890s, before Doulton cracked the problem, and Doulton itself brought him in as a consultant while it did. The V&A has his work on display, and describes his red flambé glazes as experimental and highly accomplished. A Moore test piece is not just collectable. It may be genuinely significant.

Well. Hello, Mr Moore. Very pleased to make your acquaintance.

The five problems of hidden value

Now I was excited. And I had a problem. Five, actually, and this is where the story stops being about my kitchen shelf and starts being about your business.

The first problem is that I only get rich if somebody buys the pieces. Value is not intrinsic. It exists when it is exchanged. My bowl could be the rarest piece of English art pottery of the last century, and if nobody knows it exists, nobody wants it and nobody pays for it, it is worth exactly nothing. The same is true of your products, your services and your organisational capability. You may be sitting on extraordinary value, but until a willing customer recognises it and pays for it, it evaporates.

The second is working out who the buyers are. Flambé collectors are a specific, passionate, specialist group. They are not on the high street or idly browsing eBay. The wrong buyer will not just fail to pay the right price; they will not understand what they are looking at. In B2B, your most valuable customers are the ones who understand what you are genuinely capable of delivering and have a real need that matches.

The third is finding them. Collectors live in auction houses, specialist fairs and collectors’ circles, and you need to know how to reach them. That is not luck. It is segmentation.

The fourth is agreeing the right value. The buyer wants to pay as little as possible and I want as much as possible. Neither of us gets a good outcome unless we can both speak the language of value: what a Moore test piece means to a serious collector, comparable sales, provenance.

The fifth is trust. Both of us are nervous about being deceived, so the deal only works inside a framework of trust: verifiable provenance, transparent benchmarks, a credible reputation on both sides.

Which of those five would your own business trip over first?

Step 1: Segment the industries where you add genuine value

Not where you want to sell. Where you can make a material difference. Be ruthless. Most companies are far too broad in their thinking, chasing coverage when what they need is focus. Ask of each industry: do we solve a problem here that customers feel in their numbers, and can we prove it? If the honest answer is “sometimes”, it is not a priority segment.

Step 2: Segment the companies inside those industries

Within your chosen industries, which companies are big enough, sophisticated enough and motivated enough to collaborate? Who has the scale and the ambition to make your capability genuinely matter? Then, inside those companies, who has the authority and the vision to make things happen? This is how you identify your real key account targets, which are not always your biggest existing customers. I explore that distinction in what is a key customer, and the tool for it is portfolio classification. This is not sales. It is strategy.

Step 3: Build your Offer Development and Innovation capability

This is the step I care about most. Offer Development and Innovation is the most important capability in B2B, and most companies genuinely cannot do it. You may have clarity about the customer and the value they need. Can you consistently shape your capability to meet it, and then express it in a specific, compelling, customer-centred way? That is harder than it sounds, and it is where most value evaporates.

Most of what I write, in books and in these articles, describes how to build high-impact customer offers. The method has three stages.

Start with the customer. Understand them deeply and open your offer with a statement of intent about how you will improve their world, their business or their objectives. The better you understand what truly matters to them, the stronger that opening becomes.

Then state the value. Will the offer grow their sales, reduce their costs or remove risk? Say which, and say how much. The five sources of value give you a checklist for where to look.

Only then describe how you will deliver each source of value. Notice the order. You talk about your products last. Until that point, everything is about the customer and what changes for them. That discipline is what turns a brochure into a customer value proposition.

Step 4: Develop key account managers who talk value at the right level

Senior customers think in business outcomes, not product specifications. Transactional conversations with transactional buyers will never reach the real commercial opportunity, because the value is buried in the customer’s P&L, balance sheet and cash flow. Your key account managers have to be able to find it there and talk about it in those terms, with people who understand what value means to their business. A feature and benefit presentation to procurement does not count. Building that skill is what our KAM Development Programme is for.

Step 5: Deliver the promise, then prove it

If you sell a value-creating promise, deliver it. Then prove it. Not claim it: prove it, with measurement, evidence and communication. This is how trust is built, and trust is the foundation of every long-term relationship worth having. It is also how you get paid for the value you created, which is the whole point of value capture.

The best key account managers treat post-delivery value reporting as seriously as the original proposal. Most companies treat it as an afterthought, and then wonder why the customer only remembers the price.

The test pieces

B2B selling is hard, and the fundamentals get forgotten. Not because people do not know them, but because short-term targets and internal complexity make it easier to fall back on the comfortable world of the product pitch and the price negotiation.

My Bernard Moore pieces sat at the back of a pantry cupboard for years. Somebody, somewhere, will pay a significant sum for them. Finding that person, speaking their language, proving provenance and making the deal will take real, deliberate, structured effort. Worth it? Unquestionably. If I get it right, it pays for a weekend away with my family and grandchildren.

I think about my mother when I look at those pieces. She gave them to me not knowing what they were worth. But she came from a family of potters who understood craft, and who knew that the best work comes from the experimental phase. The test pieces. The places where mastery is forged.

She would, I think, be rather pleased with that as a return on her investment. And she would almost certainly agree with my wife that I should have got them out of the cupboard a very long time ago.