This article is part of Bain's 2026 B2B Growth Agenda.

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If you ask 10 executives why customers buy from them vs. their competitors, you’ll get 5 different answers. Ask who the offering is truly designed for, and you’re likely to see the pattern repeat.

Many companies respond to slowing growth by pushing harder on commercial execution, by pulling the pricing lever, for example. But when growth stalls, the root cause is often upstream—namely, an unclear value proposition that forces every function and every seller to improvise.

A value proposition isn’t a tagline. It’s an integrated set of choices about:

• who an offering is designed for (the design target, including the buying committee that shapes the decision);
• why that customer chooses you vs. alternatives (your differentiation and proof); and
• what you deliver (the full offer, including products and services, customer experience, route to market, brand, and price).

Clarity on the value proposition creates focus. Clarity forces trade-offs about where you will compete, what you will not do, and what good looks like across the enterprise.

In a recent Bain survey of more than 1,000 global B2B leaders, companies with a value proposition that is both clear and consistently understood grew materially faster: 19% revenue growth in 2025 compared with 12% for companies with limited or inconsistently communicated value propositions (see Figure 1).

Unfortunately, only 4% of companies surveyed had a strong value proposition.

Figure 1

Companies without clarity fit a pattern: Innovations fall flat, features accumulate that don’t solve customers’ problems and that customers are not willing to pay for, and performance swings widely across sellers and regions. The result: lost customers and slower growth.

Consider one telecom provider that tried to repurpose its enterprise services bundle (unchanged) for small business customers. Small businesses didn’t need half of what was included and wouldn’t pay for it, making more tailored competitor offerings an easy choice. When the company resegmented around buyer needs (not just size), it uncovered insights that the sales team used to tailor offers, and it regained momentum.

Treat value proposition as a CEO- and board-level topic

Even when they can’t name the cause, executives are familiar with the symptoms of an unclear value proposition:

• product launches that don’t stand out from the competition because the product wasn’t designed for differentiation;
• sellers inventing the proposition on the fly, leading to inconsistent win rates;
• channel spending that doesn’t convert because the offer isn’t targeted;
• product investment misallocated toward features that customers don’t value;
• pricing drift and discounting that contradicts the intended position; and
• internal friction across product, marketing, and sales.

Top performers treat value proposition as strategy, not messaging. In our survey, companies with top-quartile revenue growth that also exceeded their own margin targets ranked value proposition differentiation as their No. 1 challenge, and they managed it deliberately. Meanwhile, laggards underweighted differentiation or treated it as a sales execution issue. Winners outgrew laggards 25% to 5%.

Value proposition belongs on the CEO and board agenda because it directly governs two of the hardest strategic questions regarding resource allocation and competitive advantage:

• Resource allocation: Where to invest, what to build, which bets to stop?
• Competitive advantage: What can you credibly win on, and how do you prove it?

Further, nearly half (49%) of companies say their biggest value proposition problems relate to the core product or service. That’s an existential issue, not a communications one (see Figure 2).

Figure 2

Start with who you sell to and why they buy

Many companies jump to the what—namely, features, bundles, and messaging—before aligning on the who and the why. In engineering-led organizations, that can create years of feature improvements with limited market pull. When results disappoint, the finger-pointing across product, marketing, and sales can become corrosive.

Even when companies try to define the who, they often default to straightforward firmographic characteristics such as company size or geography. But growth is typically won (or lost) on addressing needs, constraints, and barriers to switching.

Historically, needs-based segmentation could be difficult to maintain. Today, companies can use richer internal and external signals to identify needs-based segments earlier and refresh them faster. These can include usage patterns, customer feedback, win/loss insights, digital behavior, and market signals. Some B2B innovators are also experimenting with synthetic customer panels to design products, create a sales pitch, optimize messaging, and train their front line. The goal isn’t novelty; it’s speed and precision in defining the design target.

Once the who is clear, the next question is: Why do buyers purchase my products or services over competitors’ products or services? Leadership teams often fall back on convenience, distribution, or price. Those can matter and often are table stakes, but they can also be a surface explanation. If you’ve never seen share shift after matching a competitor’s price, you don’t yet know whether price is truly decisive.

Design the offer as a system, not as a list of features

When companies do face the facts on who and why, they often discover that they need to adjust more than messaging. The right answer might involve rethinking the core product or service, reworking the pricing or promotion strategy, updating messaging, or rebranding. To reap full benefits, all of these factors need to be considered together in an integrated, cross-functional way.

Who and why should be the guiding light for innovation and R&D teams, steering what they spend their time developing. Features, brands, pricing, messaging, and customer experience aren’t worth anything if they aren’t properly targeted.

Activate the value proposition through commercial teams

Commercial teams deliver the value proposition through conversations, proposals, and negotiations.

That activation must start upstream with a clear digital presence and commercial leadership involved in strategic choices, including:

• where to play and where not to play;
• offer design and innovation priorities; and
• pricing strategy.

That is then operationalized downstream with:

• messaging that sellers can use confidently;
• frontline enablement; and
• customer engagement.

When the value proposition is clear, sellers can stop improvising and performance becomes more consistent.

Make value propositions living, not static

Winning companies treat their value proposition as something to constantly test and refine.

In our survey, 40% of revenue and margin leaders have a process to track their value proposition’s relevance and refine it as needed compared with 26% of laggards. The head of product at a global financial services company noted that her company once refreshed market leading credit card value propositions every two years and now does so every six months. AI is further accelerating this with the most agile and innovative companies refreshing them every few weeks, days, or even hours.

Revisiting the value proposition isn’t a measurement exercise. Done well, it brings functions together, reengages customers, and pressure tests differentiation against competitors’ directions. Answers to basic questions such why customers buy from us and not our competitors can be surprising.

Leading companies embed customer feedback loops and competitor responses into their day-to-day workflows. They are significantly more likely to employ advanced research techniques to model choices, simulate demand, analyze wins and losses, and more. And they use AI and digital tools to automate testing, behavior analysis, real-time optimization, and even to refine their value proposition (see Figure 3).

Figure 3

Where to start?

Executives who want to get a better handle on their value proposition can start with three practical moves: picking one offer and aligning on the basics, testing and learning, and making one small change.

• Pick one offer and align on the basics. Choose an offering in development or one that’s struggling. Then, ask your leadership team the following questions.
  • Who is the individual decision maker we are designing for?
  • What are their raw needs or problems that we are solving?
  • Why will this design target decision makers to choose us over alternatives?

Measure the divergence in the answers you receive, and push to align the leadership team around a shared answer backed up by data. Then, use that to diagnose where your features, pricing, customer experience, go to market, or messaging don’t match. Push the team beyond commodity positioning and toward specificity.

• Test and learn. Pick a territory, region, or market, and test new messaging, pricing, promo, or feature sets using other regions as a control. Track, learn, pivot, and try again.
• Make one small change to how you operate. Institute a customer feedback loop or invite sales reps to your next innovation debate. Every journey starts with a single step.

A clear value proposition drives commercial performance and innovation success. If you can’t answer who this is for and why we win with conviction, your growth plan will stall out.

Read our 2026 B2B Growth Agenda

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