The Customer May Not Be
Buying What You Think
They Are Buying.

One of the most interesting business questions I have heard recently came from a discussion about football shirt sponsorship. Why would a global financial services company spend tens of millions of pounds putting its name on the front of a Premier League shirt when most of the people wearing that shirt will never become customers?

At first glance, it can look like an extraordinary amount of money for little more than brand awareness. But that misses what is actually being bought. The sponsor is not simply buying space on a shirt. It is buying access, association, credibility, emotion and distribution. And I think there is a useful lesson in that for anyone involved in complex B2B sales.

The Obvious Value Is Not Always the Real Value

The discussion used Standard Chartered and Liverpool as an example. The bank's services are not necessarily relevant to the average supporter sitting in Anfield on a Saturday afternoon. Yet the Liverpool shirt is seen around the world — worn by players with enormous international followings, appearing on television, social media, advertising campaigns and merchandise. It provides a route into markets where establishing a brand independently could take years.

The sponsor is borrowing something the football club already owns: trust, attention and emotional connection. That is a very different proposition from simply buying advertising space.

What Does This Have to Do with Sales?

Quite a lot. Because in complex B2B sales, we can become overly focused on the product we are selling. We explain the features. We demonstrate the functionality. We talk about integrations, dashboards, automation, workflows and technical specifications. But the customer may not actually be buying any of those things.

The technology might be what appears on the purchase order. But the technology is not necessarily what drove the decision.

The Same Product Can Mean Different Things to Different People

This becomes particularly important in enterprise sales because there is rarely just one buyer.

It is the same solution. But they are all buying something different. That is why selling purely around product functionality is rarely enough.

Value Exists Outside the Transaction

There was another useful example in the podcast. The media exposure generated by Crystal Palace's FA Cup run was calculated as being worth substantially more than the amount paid for the sponsorship itself. Whether you agree with every methodology behind those calculations is almost secondary to the wider point — the value did not simply sit inside the original sponsorship agreement. It appeared elsewhere.

The same thing happens in B2B technology. A customer might invest £500,000 in a platform. If we only justify that investment by identifying £500,001 of direct savings, we are probably looking at value far too narrowly.

Some of the most important outcomes never appear as a neat line on an ROI spreadsheet. They are still real.

Emotion Matters in B2B Too

We often like to pretend that B2B buying decisions are entirely rational. They are not. Football sponsorship works partly because clubs generate extraordinary emotional loyalty. Sponsors gain some degree of association with that emotion — connection with belonging, something that goes beyond a purely transactional relationship.

Enterprise technology is obviously very different from football. But people still make the decisions. And people care about things like this:

Those questions are often more influential than whether one product has three additional features buried somewhere in a comparison spreadsheet.

Selling the Product Is the Easy Bit

This is why good discovery matters so much. The job of the salesperson is not simply to understand what the customer wants to purchase. It is to understand why they need to purchase anything at all.

The Lesson from the Shirt

A football sponsor might appear to be buying a logo on a shirt. In reality, they could be buying global market access, legitimacy, customer hospitality, digital content, emotional association and millions of moments of exposure.

Your customer might appear to be buying software. They could actually be buying confidence, transformation, reduced risk, organisational credibility, or the ability to deliver something they have been struggling with for years.