Interesting, I spoke to a client at length the other day about this.

1. Firstly, there is 'perceived' value.
2. Secondly, there is actual value.

It sounds like you are trying to build the latter. I also need to make a second inference here, you say we are 'trying' to close deals - so i'm going to assume you are still pre or in the early stages of revenue.

So it sounds like you are hitting the procurement buffer. The biggest danger here is - to get a high valuation you will most likely have to sell your investors on 'potential clients', but then they will stall discussions until those deals are sealed. So you would have to be incredibly careful if doing that.

Firstly if you want to understand what creates strong valuations look at companies in your sector that you respect, or relevant start-ups in other industry verticals and ask yourself what made them sky rocket. As any potential investor will be measuring you by the same stick.

It's a bit hard to know how to advise you without knowing what industry vertical you are in. However, Slack who refer to themselves as B2B has been a runaway success it's probably worth looking at why, because everyone was astounded when it hit a $1bn valuation in approximately 1 year.

"Slack is a team communication tool. It brings together all of your team communications in one place, instantly searchable and available wherever you go. Launched in February 2014, it is now the fastest growing B2B application ever and is used by over 500,000 daily active users."

What made Slack strong:
1. 8,000 companies create accounts in the 1st 24 hours.

18 months later:
1. 500,000 people now use Slack daily, including users in 60,000 teams
2. 135,000 of those people are paying for Slack, adding up to $12 million in annual revenue
3. Slack users send 300 million messages to each other a month
4. The average Slack user is connected for more than nine hours a day and spends more than two of those hours in active usage, such as reading and writing messages

Basically the valuation was pumped because Kleiner Perkins, Accel, Index, Marc Andreesen realised if you put money in one side the user growth boomed on the other side.

So to make this actionable if I was interrogating your business for value:

- I would want to know what your pipeline was like?
- Which clients you were talking to and where those discussions currently were?
- What your anticipated procurement cycle was like?
- The anticipated contract lengths?
- The infrastructure required to onboard new users/make new sales? (in the instance of Slack they relied on viral spread)
- Testimonials about your product?
- Genuine IP sat behind your software?
- Churn + expected churn?
- Exposed to one or two large enterprise clients?

The list goes on really, but high valuations are because companies can see the 10x, 100x potential and that is because it's basically an arbitrage exercise or money in one side and user growth, customer acquisition and retention out the other.

I hope that helps a little?