How companies buy technology often mirrors how B2B SaaS companies sell, or vice-versa. In the past, and still for many today, both sides focus on features. Suppliers promote the excellent features their products provide and how they are better than the competition. Procurement teams reflect this with Requests for Proposals (RFPs) with long, complex lists of required features, with weightings to reflect importance. Let battle begin.

Professional buyers (I was one in my early career) tell you a focus on feature comparability reduces subjectivity and simplifies the process. Sellers (and I was and still consider myself to be one) will tell you its easy to show how their feature set is better than the competition. And anyway, it's what everybody does.

The problem is the focus on selling and buying features misses the purpose of B2B SaaS software: delivering measurable results in metrics that matter to the customer. A product can have the most and best features, but if it doesn't produce the results companies need, it's worse than useless. It's very likely to be a cost without a return for the buyer and selling expense with flaky lifetime value for the seller.

There may however be signs of change.

Many sellers are recognising the importance of not just selling value but building their entire customer lifecycle around measurable results that matter to their chosen customers. Helping more companies understand and implement this is why I started the Customer-Led Growth Forum.

Value-led buyers are fewer on the ground but there are green shoots here too according to research by Hank Barnes, Chief of Research-Tech Buying Behavior at Gartner. In his research, Barnes looks at what he calls High Quality Deals, of which Barnes says "HQDs occur when respondents feel strongly that their expectations have been met and the either purchased a premium solution or did not settle for something less ambitious than originally planned."

An outcome, aka results-based buying approach, is used in more High Quality Deals than more traditional procurement methods, as the chart below shows.

Basing buying on results and not features aligns better with the buying companies need to deliver improved performance. What does results-led buying look like. I don't consider myself an expert but here's a few thoughts.

Buyers will no longer issue RFPs with long lists of the features needed. Instead, they will describe the company context, the business challenge and the metrics they want to improve and essential infrastructure requirements such as the existing tech-stack, security. This approach does not assume a particular solution category or specific requirements. Rather, it provides the opportunity for suppliers to suggest novel solutions; things a buyer may not have considered at all.

Suppliers will respond with considered business cases showing how they address the challenge and deliver results. This will include how features enable the required results. Sales pitches will broadly set out the path to the results promised in the business with details of the activities to

The really good suppliers will be ahead of the curve, some already are. Their value proposition and marketing focuses on the measurable improvements in metrics that matter, putting themselves on the buyer's agenda, perhaps even shaping it. The best suppliers recognise it goes beyond sales and marketing. The results promised in the business case become the link between selling and delivery with a focus on the first results milestone rather than something that is ditched by both buyer and supplier when the deal is done.

Longer term, the future of B2B SaaS will see two fundamental changes.

First, the product will be purposefully designed to allow key customer roles to pick a metric(s) to improve, be guided in goal setting, provided with contextually rich guidance to achieve their goals and be able to track progress, including off-track reporting.

Second, the growing understanding of customer results and confidence in helping to achieve them will increase adoption of results (value) based pricing. Building this confidence will take time. Buyers will be concerned about overpaying and sellers will worry about buyers not doing what is needed and agreed to achieve results. I suspect we will begin with hybrid pricing, where only an element is results-based.

Is this a utopian dream? Some will think so but I see signs of companies doing elements of all I have described. I don't see companies doing all of it but I don't think it's a pipe dream.

The lesson? Whether you're a buyer or a seller, it's time to sharpen your value skillset.