This is Part I of a five-part series about the life-cycle of value in B2B selling and marketing. Part I is an introduction and a summary four phases of the value life-cycle.

Whether you’re in sales or marketing, it is obviously in your best interest to understand what value you offer to customers. What most sellers and marketers don’t realize is that value has different meanings depending on where you are in the marketing/sales cycle. The “value life-cycle” has four distinct phases (listed below) – as you’ll see, different phases require input from different roles in the company.

A signed contract signals the start of the final step in the Value Lifecycle: Deliver and Measure Value. This step not only strengthens your relationship with your customer, but enhances your capacity to develop new offerings and improve existing ones. Here are the top three objectives in making it work.

Does your value proposition articulate how your offering solves a customer’s business challenges or is it a jumble of features/benefits? The sophistication of a value proposition ranges from being stuck on feature selling to one that’s fully developed and helps win business. To find out if you’re at square one or doing pretty well, think about your value proposition in terms of the continuum below.