When the Math Gets Cheap, Trust Gets Expensive
- Lolita Trachtengerts
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
In the Spotlight with Prateek Goel, Senior Director of Customer Advocacy and Business Value Advisory, Wiz
Most conversations about AI in sales focus on what gets automated.
The wrong question.
The right question is what becomes more valuable when the machine takes over the math. Prateek Goel has an answer, and it's not what most people want to hear.
In the latest episode of In the Spotlight, Roi Carmel sits down with Prateek Goel, who runs Customer Advocacy and Business Value Advisory at Wiz — the world's fastest-growing cybersecurity company, now part of Google. Prateek has been the first value hire three times in his career. He built the practice from scratch at Wiz when the company was a pure product-led motion. Today, his team of ten orchestrates value across a billion-dollar sales org.
His message is direct. Value selling is changing fast. The teams that win the next decade will not be the ones with the best spreadsheets. They will be the ones with the best champions.
You're Not Selling a Product. You're Selling an Outcome.
Prateek opens with a definition most sales leaders give lip service to but rarely operationalize.
Value selling is not features. It's not functionality. It's not even ROI. It's convincing a buyer that the outcome they will get is worth dramatically more than what they're spending. The job of the seller is to educate the buyer on what those outcomes can be — and how to put a handle on them.
Three dimensions matter every time. The outcome itself. The quantification. The personal impact on the buyer. Most teams nail one. The best teams hit all three.
And the best teams know they're never selling to one person. There is the audience in the room and the audience that will never be in the room. The CFO who reviews the deck without ever meeting the rep. The board member who hears about the investment secondhand. The procurement team that makes a final call on a deal they were never part of building.
The business case has to win all of them.
A Spreadsheet Is Not a Narrative
This is where most BVAs fail.
A traditional value assessment is a calculator. Inputs in, ROI out. That's table stakes. But a calculator doesn't survive a boardroom. A calculator doesn't get carried into a quarterly planning meeting by a champion who has to defend a budget. A calculator doesn't move a CFO who has never heard of your product category.
Prateek's framing is sharper. A business case is a narrative your champion takes into rooms you'll never sit in. It's the story they tell when you're not there. It's the language they use when finance asks why this and not something else.
Build the math. But build the story around it.
How to Know You're Ready for a Value Team
Prateek has been the first value hire at three companies. He's been asked the same question by every CRO he's ever worked for: when should we invest in this?
His answer is not what most expect.
You don't hire a value team because it sounds like a best practice. You hire one when you can feel the pain. You hire one when you're losing deals you should win, when buyers can't justify the price, when churn shows up because customers can't articulate the impact they got. Until that pain is real, the function will not get the support it needs to succeed.
For early-stage companies, the move is smaller and earlier. Build a lightweight value asset. Track whether sellers are using it. Make value discussion a baseline expectation in every deal. Get the muscle memory in place before you invest in the team.
The team comes when the pain is loud enough that leadership stops debating it.
The Maturity Journey: From Demo to Discipline
When Prateek joined Wiz at $50M ARR, the sales motion was simple. Buyer says they have a cloud security problem. Seller shows a demo. Seller proves value in the buyer's environment. Deal closes.
That worked. Until it didn't.
As Wiz scaled past $1B ARR, the sales talent got more sophisticated, and the deals got harder. Value selling stopped being optional. The sales leadership team made it a discipline. Not a tool. Not a process. A culture.
The vision Prateek's team operates under today is concrete: a business case with every pricing proposal. That standard is what separates teams that talk about value selling from teams that actually do it.
Why Cybersecurity Makes Value Selling Existential
This is the most distinct insight in the episode, and worth slowing down on.
Cybersecurity buyers are some of the most technical people in any organization. They live in a world of vulnerabilities, alerts, attack surfaces, and risk frameworks. They speak a language no one else in the company speaks.
But they are not the ones who approve the budget.
The CFO doesn't care about your alert volume. The CFO cares about business risk and capital allocation. And your technical buyer — the person who actually understands why your product matters — usually does not have the skills to translate technical depth into a financial argument.
That's the gap that kills deals.
The job of the value team is to arm the technical champion so they can win conversations they would otherwise lose. Coach them on how to talk to finance. Build the narrative they need. Hand them the asset they can carry into rooms where the seller will never be.
In cybersecurity, value selling is not a nice-to-have. It is the only way deals get done.
Scaling Ten People Across a Billion-Dollar Org
Prateek's team has ten people. Wiz is a billion-dollar ARR company with a global sales org. The math doesn't work without leverage.
Two levers matter.
First, focus. The value team works the deals that move the plan. Twenty percent of deals drive eighty percent of the revenue. The value team gets those. The rest get a self-service motion — tooling that lets growth and mid-market reps build their own business cases without a specialist in the room.
Second, AI. The legwork that used to take hours — pulling research, building calculations, drafting first-pass assets — is collapsing fast. The team that adopts those tools effectively scales without growing headcount linearly.
Top-down leadership matters too. Prateek credits the Wiz sales leadership for making value selling a qualification standard. When the head of sales asks every rep "what's the business case for this deal," the culture shifts. Reps stop treating the BVA as a separate workstream. It becomes part of how a deal gets qualified, just like discovery, just like champion development.
Why AI Makes Human Trust More Valuable
This is where the conversation lands, and it's the line of the episode.
Most predictions about AI in value selling focus on what gets automated. Calculations. Asset generation. Discovery summaries. All of it.
Prateek's read is the opposite. As the math gets cheaper and faster, the human parts of value consulting become more important, not less. The relationship with the champion. The trust behind the numbers. The ability to translate a technical pain into a story a CFO will believe.
That's not work AI does well. That's the work that decides who wins.
The same shift is happening across all of sales. The analytical layer collapses. The relationship layer becomes everything. The reps who survive the transition are the ones who use AI to handle the math and spend their newly free time being more human, not less.
What Leaders Should Take Away
Roi closes the episode with the throughline. Five things worth keeping:
A business case is a narrative, not a calculator. Build the math, then build the story your champion can defend.
Value selling has three dimensions: outcome, quantification, and personal impact. Hit all three.
Don't hire a value team because it sounds smart. Hire one when the pain is real and the deals you're losing are deals you should win.
In cybersecurity especially, value selling is existential. Your technical buyer needs to win a conversation they're not equipped for. Your job is to equip them.
AI is making the math cheap. That makes trust expensive. The teams that win the next decade will be the ones who use AI to scale the analytical work and double down on the human work.
About Our Guest
Prateek Goel is the Senior Director of Customer Advocacy and Business Value Advisory at Wiz, the world's fastest-growing cybersecurity company, now part of Google. He has spent over two decades in enterprise strategy and value consulting — helping executives quantify and realize the impact of cloud security investments.
Before Wiz, Prateek led business value functions at Aviatrix and Sumo Logic, and was part of the value team at Okta. His earlier career included financial planning and strategy roles at Capital One Auto Finance, and revenue management and strategic alliances roles at American Airlines. He also spent a summer at Bain & Company. He is a member of the Outcome Selling Advisory Ecosystem. Prateek holds an MBA from Emory University's Goizueta Business School.
🔗 Connect with Prateek on LinkedIn
Listen to the Full Conversation
🎙️ In the Spotlight with Prateek Goel
🎧 Available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Q&A
Q: What does Prateek mean by "value selling"?
A: Value selling is convincing a buyer that the business outcome they will get from a product is dramatically more valuable than the cost. It's not selling features or functionality. It's selling outcomes — and quantifying both the business impact and the personal impact on the buyer.
Q: Why is a business case more than an ROI calculation?
A: An ROI calculation is a number. A business case is a narrative your champion carries into rooms you're not in. The math justifies the decision. The story makes the decision possible.
Q: When should a company hire its first value consultant?
A: When the pain is real — when you can point to deals you should have won but lost, customers churning because they can't articulate the impact they got, or buyers struggling to justify the price internally. Until the pain is loud, the function will not get the support it needs to succeed.
Q: Why is value selling especially important in cybersecurity?
A: Cybersecurity buyers are highly technical, but the people approving the budget are not. The CFO doesn't care about alerts or vulnerabilities. The technical champion has to translate that into financial language, and most are not equipped for it. The value team's job is to arm them for that conversation.
Q: How does Prateek's team scale ten people across a billion-dollar sales org?
A: Two ways. They focus on the twenty percent of deals that move eighty percent of the plan, and they offer a self-service business case motion for everything else. AI is helping them scale further — automating the math so the team can focus on the human work that matters most.
Q: What does Prateek think AI will do to value consulting?
A: AI will make the analytical work cheap and fast. That means the human work — building trust, coaching champions, telling a story a CFO will believe — becomes more valuable, not less. The teams that win will use AI for leverage and double down on the parts of the job only humans can do.
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