What B2B can learn from selling an old vase
What a dusty box of ceramics taught me about B2B selling
Here is a confession. I had forgotten I owned something valuable.
Not metaphorically. Not in some abstract, philosophical sense. I literally owned two pieces of highly collectable early-twentieth-century art pottery, and for the better part of four decades, I had been throwing my keys and packets of mints into one of them.
Let me explain how this happened. And more importantly, let me explain why the story of my Flambe embarrassment maps with uncomfortable precision onto the single biggest failure I see in B2B selling today.
The Pantry Revelation
My wife tidied our pantry recently. At the back of one of the cupboards, she found a box. Inside: a collection of ceramics gifted to me by my late mother. Bowls. Vases. Figurines. Plates. Jars. The accumulated evidence of a family with pottery in its blood.
And I mean that literally. I am from Stoke-on-Trent. My family worked for Royal Doulton, Spode, Wedgwood, and Twyfords. Between the wars, my grandparents ran a family business making roof tiles and bricks. Ceramics are not just a hobby in my family. They are our heritage. They are who we are.
Fast forward to 2026..
My wife did not see it quite this way.
"If these bits are so precious," she said, eyeing the dusty box with the particular expression she reserves for my more questionable decisions, "why are they at the back of my cupboard? And anyway, you forgot we had them."
She had a point. Ha.
eBay and Facebook Marketplace seemed like the logical next step. But as I sifted through the pieces, something stopped me. A matching bowl and dish, both in a deep, lustrous, otherworldly red glaze. Something stirred in my memory. An old friend had visited our house about forty years ago, spotted these pieces, and said something I had promptly ignored: "Hey, those are Flambe test pieces. You should get them valued."
I remember my response with some embarrassment. "Really? We throw our keys and mints in that bowl. It is just a tatty thing to keep stuff tidy."
"DUDE," he had said. "Get it valued."
I did not.
Enter the AI Detective
Fast forward four decades. Here I am, bowl in hand, finally doing what I should have done in 1985. I turned to AI. A quick search using Gemini flagged it immediately: Royal Doulton Flambe test pieces are prized by serious collectors. The experimental pieces, where the masters were still working out the chemistry of the glaze, are especially sought after. Unlike standard production ware, these are the laboratory phase of the work. They reveal the struggle to master one of the most technically demanding glazes in ceramic history.
Gemini then offered a piece of advice that stopped me cold: look under the bowl for a signature.
The great names of Royal Doulton Flambe are well known. Charles Noke, the Art Director. Fred Moore, master of the thick Chang glazes. Cuthbert Bailey, whose technical breakthroughs made commercial production possible.
I turned the bowl over.
The name I found was not any of those. It was: Bernard Moore.
I confess my first reaction was mild disappointment.
Oh well.
Back to Gemini. What came back changed everything.
Bernard Moore was not a Royal Doulton man at all. He was an independent master who ran his own studio. He is considered by historians to be the first Englishman to truly master the Flambe glaze, predating the great Doulton names. His test pieces are extremely rare. A Bernard Moore Flambe test piece is not just collectable. It may be genuinely significant.
Well. Hello, Mr Moore. Very pleased to make your acquaintance.
The Five Problems of Hidden Value
Now I am excited. And I have a problem. Actually, I have five problems. And this is where the story stops being about my kitchen shelf and starts being about your business.
Problem One: I will only only bocome rich if somebody buys my pieces.
Value is not intrinsic. Value is transactional. It only exists when it is exchanged. My bowl could be the rarest piece of English art pottery produced in the last hundred years. If nobody knows it exists, if nobody wants it, if nobody pays for it, it is worth exactly nothing. The same is true of your products, your services, and your organisational capability. You may be sitting on extraordinary value. But until it is recognised and exchanged by a willing customer, it evaporates.
Problem Two: Who are these people, anyway?
Flambe collectors are a specific, passionate, specialist group. They are not on the high street. They are not idly browsing eBay for ornaments. They inhabit auction houses, specialist fairs, and collectors' communities that you need to know how to find. The wrong buyer will not just fail to pay you the right price. They will not even understand what they are looking at. The same is true in B2B. Your most valuable customers are the ones who understand what you are genuinely capable of delivering, and who have a real need that matches.
Problem Three: How do I find them?
This is not accidental. This is deliberate. It requires segmentation. First, identify the industries where your capability is genuinely relevant. Then identify the companies within those industries that are big enough, sophisticated enough, and motivated enough to collaborate. Then identify the individuals within those companies who have the authority and the vision to make things happen. This is not sales. This is a strategy.
Problem Four: How do I negotiate the right value?
The buyer wants to pay as little as possible. You want as much as possible. Neither of you will get to a good outcome unless you can both speak the language of value.
For me, that means understanding what a Bernard Moore test piece means to a serious collector, speaking their language, referencing comparable sales, and demonstrating provenance. In B2B, it means your key account managers need to have conversations in the language of P&L, balance sheet, and cash flow. Not feature-benefit presentations to procurement. Real value conversations with people who understand what value means to their business.
Problem Five: How do we trust each other?
I want the most I can get. The collector wants to pay as little as they can. Both of us are nervous about being deceived. This negotiation only works if there is a framework of trust: verifiable provenance, transparent pricing benchmarks, credible reputation on both sides. In B2B, the equivalent is your ability to demonstrate that you have delivered on your promises before. Not to claim it. To demonstrate it. Measured, evidenced, communicated.
The best key account managers treat post-delivery value reporting as seriously as the initial proposal. Most organisations treat it as an afterthought.
So.. what to do?
Five Steps to Stop Value Evaporating
This is not abstract theory. This is the practical challenge facing almost every B2B organisation I work with.
Step One: Segment the industries where you can add genuine value. Not where you want to sell. Where you can genuinely make a material difference. Be ruthless here. Most organisations are far too broad in their thinking. The goal is focus, not coverage.
Step Two: Segment the companies within those industries. Who are the organisations significant enough to want to collaborate? Who has the scale and the ambition to make your capability genuinely matter? Identify your real key account targets, not just your biggest existing customers.
Step Three: Build your Offer Development and Innovation capability.
ODI (Offer Development & Innovation) is critical. In B2B it is the most important thing.
And yet.. most organisations genuinely cannot do it. If you have clarity about the customer and the value they need, can you consistently align your capability to meet it?
Can you articulate it in a compelling, specific, customer-centred way? This is harder than it sounds, and it is where most value evaporates.
Most of my writing, books and Newsletters describe methods to create and write high-impact customer offers. They follow 3 core stages
- Understand the customer deeply, and start your offer with a statement of intent that will improve their world/business/objectives. The more you understand what is truly important (and resonates) with the customer, the stronger this will be
- Articulate your offer by stating the value it will add to the customer's business. Will it grow sales, reduce costs and/or eliminate risk?
- Finally, describe how you will deliver each of the sources of value. Note you state this last, not first. So you talk about your products last. Until that point, it is all about the customer and adding value to their world.
Step Four: Develop your key account managers to have value-based conversations at the right level. Senior customers, demanding customers, customers who think in terms of business outcomes rather than product specifications. Transactional conversations with transactional buyers will never unlock the real commercial opportunity. The value is buried in the financial statements, and your KAMs need to be able to find it and speak to it.
Step Five: If you sell a value-creating promise, deliver it. And then prove it.
Measurement. Communication. Evidence. This is how trust is built, and trust is the foundation upon which all genuinely valuable long-term relationships are constructed.
The Real Point
B2B selling is hard. The fundamentals are often forgotten, not because people do not know them, but because the pressure of short-term targets and internal complexity makes it easier to revert to the comfortable world of the product pitch and the price negotiation.
My Bernard Moore Flambe pieces have been sitting in a box at the back of a pantry cupboard for years. Somebody, somewhere, will pay a significant sum for them. But finding that person, speaking their language, demonstrating provenance, and making the deal will take real effort. Deliberate, structured, intelligent effort.
Worth it? Unquestionably.
Because if I get this right, I can pay for a weekend away for my family and grandchildren. I think about my late mother when I look at those pieces. She gave them to me, not knowing what they were worth (Bernard Moore, woo-hoo?). But she was from a family of potters who understood craft and who understood that the best work comes from the experimental phase.
The test pieces. The places where mastery is forged.
She would, I think, be rather pleased with that as a return on her investment.
And she would almost certainly agree with my wife that I should have got them out of the cupboard a very long time ago.
Mark Davies is MD and Founder of Value-Matters, a Visiting Fellow at Cranfield School of Management, and a Board Member of the Association of Key Account Management.
If you have development needs in KAM, Offer Development & Innovation or Strategic Selling - drop me a line for a free chat...
Interested? Email: [email protected]
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