Second in a short series on the Future of Selling. The first article argued that ROI alone no longer carries the deal. This one names the six dimensions that now do.
When a sales team is told that value is now multi-dimensional, the first reaction is often to ask which dimensions. The instinct is reasonable. If the financial case alone is insufficient, then what specifically has been added? The answer that the research programme has converged on is that B2B buyers are now evaluating six dimensions of value in parallel. Not all six matter in every deal. But the supplier who cannot recognise which ones are activated, articulate value in each, and surface the hidden risk-of-inaction where each is being ignored is operating in a thinner conversation than competitors who can.
Each dimension answers two questions in parallel: what is in it for the buyer? and what does the buyer have to sacrifice? Gains and sacrifices coexist in every dimension. A dimension left unmapped is a sacrifice the buyer is paying for without anyone naming it.
1. ROI / Economic
Will this make or save money? The dimension every supplier already argues. It anchors the financial case and remains necessary. The evidence required is familiar: cost reductions, revenue uplift, payback period, total cost of ownership. The sacrifice side is also familiar: capital outlay, switching cost, time to payback. What has changed is that the financial case is no longer load-bearing on its own. It is the entry ticket, not the argument.
2. Risk & Resilience
Does this protect operations against shocks? Operational risk has moved from a peripheral procurement concern to a board-level scorecard item, accelerated by the pandemic, by supply-chain weaponisation, and by the regulatory rebalancing that followed both. The argument here is about supply continuity, vendor resilience, single-points-of-failure, cyber exposure, and regulatory compliance failure. The evidence is rarely a number on its own; it is the structure of the supplier’s own operations, the redundancy in the offer, and the demonstrated behaviour under prior stress. The sacrifice side is the cost of insurance, redundancy, and reduced flexibility — real, but often smaller than the cost of being caught without them.
3. Life-Cycle & Circular
Does it reduce waste, downtime, or disposal costs? The dimension is often misread as a sustainability argument. It is partly that, but its sharper edge is operational: extended useful life, lower maintenance cost, simpler refurbishment, designed-for-disassembly, take-back schemes that reduce end-of-life cost. The evidence is empirical — mean time between failures, repair-versus-replace economics, residual value at end of contract. The sacrifice is the higher up-front cost that often accompanies durable design, and the supplier’s job is to put that sacrifice in proportion to the multi-year saving it produces.
4. Strategic
Does this fit where we are going as a business? The least quantifiable of the six dimensions and often the most decisive. The argument is about positioning: does the purchase support the buyer’s declared strategic direction, or does it lock them into a model they are trying to leave? The evidence is qualitative — reference customers in the same strategic move, alignment with the buyer’s public commitments, configurations that preserve optionality. The sacrifice side is the road not taken: every purchase forecloses some alternatives, and naming that honestly is more credible than pretending it does not.
5. People
Will people actually use it? Does it make work easier? The dimension that determines whether the financial case ever materialises. Adoption is not a deployment problem; it is a value problem. If the people who have to use the solution find it adds work without obvious benefit, the projected savings never appear, the renewal does not happen, and the buyer concludes — not always wrongly — that the procurement was a mistake. Evidence here is workflow change-impact analysis, user research, training design, and the supplier’s record on adoption rates in comparable deployments. The sacrifice is the disruption of changing existing ways of working, which is real and often understated.
6. Planet & Societal
Does this reduce harm to society or the environment? The dimension whose return to the invoice is most visibly driven by regulation: CSRD reporting, the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, sector-specific transparency requirements. The argument is about Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions; about labour conditions across the supply chain; about community impact and biodiversity. The evidence is increasingly auditable rather than aspirational. The sacrifice is the cost of measurement, disclosure, and the supplier’s own upstream sourcing changes — all of which now sit inside the deal, not outside it.
A diagnostic, not a checklist
The most common misuse of the six dimensions is to treat them as boxes to tick. They are not. In any given deal, some dimensions are highly active, others are dormant, and one or two may be irrelevant. The salesperson’s task is not to argue all six. It is to identify which of the six are activated for this buyer, at this moment, and to build the case around those.
Three diagnostic questions help. First: which stakeholders in the buying coalition are involved, and which dimension does each one weight most heavily? The CFO weights ROI; the COO weights risk and resilience; the chief sustainability officer weights planet and societal. Second: what regulatory, market, or customer pressure is currently active on this buyer that would not have been active five years ago? The answer almost always reveals a cost that has moved onto the buyer’s scorecard from somewhere it used to sit unseen. Third: where is the buyer’s competitor seen to be moving? Strategic-dimension arguments often hinge on this.
Once the activated dimensions are identified, the work shifts to articulating value within each one — with specific evidence, named stakeholders, and an honest accounting of the sacrifice side. The structural device that holds the resulting argument together, and lets it be defended to a coalition of stakeholders weighting different dimensions, is the Layered Business Case. That is the subject of the next article.
Previous in this series: Why ROI alone no longer carries the deal. The Methodology page sets out the framework, the discipline, and the method in one place.
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