Are you measuring the value your clients receive?
Assuming it matters (and it does), how do you find out?
August 2026
In 2005 (yes, I know, a while ago, but bear with me), Bain asked 362 companies whether they delivered a superior experience to their customers, and 80% said yes. In contrast, when their customers were surveyed, only 8% agreed. Bain called the difference the "Delivery gap", and to many it's a striking finding.
This article is about a related gap, where the differences between the value we think we are delivering and the value the client thinks they have received are as great. Value is a word many talk about, but what does it actually mean? It's harder to nail down, not least because it's so subjective. We think it refers to everything the client gets from working with you, set against the costs (not just financial). The research shows that the ability to quantify and communicate value created for clients is an "Achilles heel" for B2B supplier organisations (2013 Industrial Marketing Management).
If 80% of organisations can be wrong about the experience they deliver, how many of us are wrong about the value we add, which, after all, is a harder concept to get your head around?
Why these gaps exist
Good relationships are hard to build. It's genuinely difficult to understand what clients really want, keep your promises, and maintain the necessary dialogue, especially between projects when things are quiet and competitors are knocking on your door. A complication is that clients and suppliers don’t measure the same thing. Suppliers measure what they deliver, whereas the client assesses the outcome (objectively and subjectively). So the work can have been done well, the quality scores high, and you still don't have a client who sees that you have delivered the value they need. This is important, not least because if you do meet their value needs, client loyalty increases.
You could be delivering exactly what was asked for on paper and still not be seen as meeting all their needs.
If you consider an accountancy practice, it counts the accounts filed on time and the audits signed off as evidence that the service has succeeded. But the client takes that as read; they are more appreciative of the discussion that flagged a tax liability while there was still time to manage it, and the confidence that nothing arriving from HMRC will shock them.
Bain's later research on the elements of value (Almquist and colleagues, 2018) mapped around forty distinct things B2B clients think of. Some of them are, of course, commercial outcomes like revenue growth. 70% of them (28 of the 40) concern ease of doing business, reassurance, and what the relationship does for the individuals involved; a couple are even about hope and inspiration. None of this excuses weak basics. Price and quality of work are the entry ticket; get those wrong and nothing else matters. But they only qualify you; they won’t differentiate you.
There's a bigger idea underneath all this: a supplier can't deliver value because it only exists once the client evaluates it.
The academics call it service-dominant logic. A supplier delivers the raw material for value, but if the ease of doing business is low, no matter how good the work is, it's entirely possible that the contract will end. And this puts a premium on something not even written in the contract: knowing what these value criteria are and then delivering against them.
And it adds weight to the Symbioss view that you need strong relationships to answer these important questions. And you won't know them if your relationship is transactional or perfunctory. Having a strong client relationship enables these intangibles to be known, understood and developed, which in turn leads to greater client retention, a virtuous circle.
It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking a quick survey will sort this out. But these value questions will not be captured by a satisfaction score, which, along with NPS, measures something different. So asking the right questions needs much more careful thought than just sending your clients a "Were you satisfied?" survey.
So, what are the right questions?
Start with their business, not yours. What is your client’s commercial engine, and how well is it working? What drives their margin, what keeps their leadership awake at night, and what are their own clients demanding of them? Until you understand what your client is trying to achieve, you can't judge anything they tell you about your part in it.
You then need to ask them about your contributions to their work and how well you did. This is not a tick-box exercise but a genuine attempt to understand.
You need to know what their value criteria are and how well you delivered against them.
It's important to ask different teams, as well as the main contact. Recent research on B2B client experience (De Keyser and colleagues, 2025) makes the point that, in most instances, because teams have had different experiences with your business, their views will differ.
And make sure that for all key clients, their importance to your business and the values that matter to them are consistently understood internally.
Those four questions give you a far better insight than a satisfaction survey: four answers worth having and sharing.
Set those answers against what you thought you were delivering, and this splits out into:
● Value that's real and recognised, which you should be talking about far more than you are.
● Value that's real but invisible to the client, which is a communication need.
● Value you believed in, but the client doesn't, which is a service design issue.
Communicating value so it's actually understood
Where most businesses are weak is in the value that's real but invisible, so make sure, even if it's not a contractual clause, you agree up front on how you describe the desired outcomes of your work and relationship. And once you have asked them what they value and that is understood, you can share the good news:
State your achievements in numbers. "We closed 4,000 tickets" is your number. "Your downtime cost fell by around £180,000" may be theirs. The value-based selling research states that value needs to be expressed in the client's own outcomes and demonstrated with evidence rather than asserted.
Add the intangible elements of value that you have delivered.
Say it during delivery, not just at the pitch. Most of us don't articulate our value add enough, and value is realised in use.
Help the team tell the story. A 2017 study across 43 sales organisations found that communicating value well requires both people who can tell the value story and an organisation that provides the tools to do so. Be careful to keep the story alive in the heads of several people, not just the account director who suddenly leaves.
What you can do with this now
None of this needs a transformation programme. Select your most important clients and, for each one, write down the value you believe you're adding in their terms (both objective and subjective). Then ask the client. When comparing what they told you with your views, don't expect the two to match. When they do, make the most of it. When they don't, you've just found a gap, and there's still time to do something about it. Better now than at renewal.
There's a risk in asking, of course. You may hear things you'd rather not, and once you've asked, the client will expect a change. Ask and then do nothing, and you've made the position worse. So don't start until you're prepared to act on what you hear. But the gap, if there is one, is there whether you look or not, and the defection research says clients rarely voluntarily tell you; they leave.
About the author
Symbioss helps B2B services companies optimise their client relationships by bringing a systematic commercial capability to managing these valuable assets. Symbioss delivers these improvements through a tailored programme that incorporates the RelaValue System. www.symbioss.co.uk. If you'd like to talk about the gains you might make from this approach, do get in touch.
Liz Ashton, Director
Sources: Bain & Company, Closing the Delivery Gap (2005); Bain & Company client defection research; Almquist, Cleghorn & Sherer, The B2B Elements of Value, Harvard Business Review (2018); Keränen & Jalkala, Industrial Marketing Management (2013); Terho, Haas, Eggert & Ulaga, Industrial Marketing Management (2012); Terho, Eggert, Ulaga, Haas & Böhm, Industrial Marketing Management (2017); De Keyser et al., Journal of Business Research (2025); Vargo & Lusch, Journal of Marketing (2004, 2016); de Matos, Henrique & Rossi, Journal of Service Research (2007).
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