THE VALUE TRANSLATION PROBLEM

The last deal you lost on price was not lost on price. The customer simply never understood what your higher number was buying them — and chose the cheaper option because it was the only value they could actually see.

Walk into most sales reviews in Accra and you will hear the same post-mortem on a lost deal: “They went with someone cheaper. The market is price-driven.” It is the most comforting sentence in business, because it puts the loss outside the building. It is also, most of the time, wrong.

Here is the claim your sales team will want to argue with: there is no such thing as a price-sensitive customer. There is only value you failed to translate. When a buyer reduces your offer to its price tag, it is rarely because price is all they care about. It is because price is the only thing you made clear enough to compare.

I call this the value translation problem — the gap between what your company knows it is worth and what the customer actually understands. Your team is fluent in a language the market does not speak: quality, excellence, innovation, customer focus, end-to-end solutions. Inside the building those words carry years of meaning. Across the table they carry almost none. The customer does not buy what you assume is obvious. They buy what has been made clear, relevant and credible in the context of their own problem. The failure is not effort; it is direction. Value that is not translated becomes invisible — and invisible value always loses to a visible price.

Why Our Market Punishes It Harder

In Ghana and across much of Africa, this is expensive precisely because our buyers have earned their caution. They compare carefully, consult widely and test your seriousness because too many have paid for promises that quietly evaporated. In banking, insurance and professional services, the offers on the table often look identical on paper — same products, same jargon, same laminated claims of excellence. So the buyer does the only rational thing left: they sort on the one variable that is unambiguous. Price. In family-owned firms and scaling SMEs, where the founder often is the sales function, the sharpest value frequently dies in a pitch that never left internal language.

The Model: The So-What Ladder — Claim, Capability, Consequence

One test simple enough to take into Monday’s meeting. Behind every claim your team makes, the customer is silently asking one question: so what? Value translation is answering it until there is nothing left to ask. Run every claim down three rungs.

• Claim — what you say: “We offer quality service.”
  So what?
• Capability — the specific thing behind it: “Our team resolves faults within four hours, not four days.”
  So what?
• Consequence — the outcome the customer can bank: “You stop losing a day’s revenue every time something breaks.”

Stop at the claim and you sound like everyone else. Reach the consequence and you have given the customer a reason to pay more — in their language, measured in their money. A team that cannot climb from claim to consequence is not underpriced. It is under-translated.

Four Things to Do This Week

1. Take your three strongest offers and run each down the So-What Ladder until it lands on a consequence measured in the customer’s money, time or risk.
2. Ban four words from your next proposal — quality, excellence, innovative, world-class — unless the very next sentence proves them.
3. Read your last losing proposal and mark every line that describes you rather than the customer’s outcome. If most of it is about you, you have found the leak.
4. Ask each salesperson to state your value in one sentence. If you get five different sentences, the market is hearing five different companies.

What It Means for the Organisation

Value translation is not a marketing task; it is a commercial discipline that runs through the whole company. Sales must convert features into outcomes, marketing must turn capability into relevance, service must reinforce confidence after the sale, and leadership must ensure the value proposition is not trapped in boardroom language. Execution beats ambition — and translating value is the execution most companies assume they have already done. The businesses that grow are rarely the ones with the best product. They are the ones that made their value easiest to understand, strongest to believe, and hardest to reduce to a number.

Your Move

So before you discount again, ask the harder question: the last deal you lost on price — was the customer really cheaper than you thought, or did you simply never make “expensive” make sense?