ELEVATE 2026, the customer value event Ecosystems co-hosts with TSIA, ended with the hardest questions in customer value management. Martin Dove, Founder and Principal Advisor at It's The Outcome, asked the room which of three themes mattered most over the next 12 months. Embedding value across the whole organization came first. Agreeing on what success looks like up front came second, and clear ownership of the value promise after the sale came third.
Then he put the three themes to J.B. Wood, President and CEO of TSIA, and Chad Quinn, CEO and Co-Founder of Ecosystems. Together, the themes cover most of what the discipline asks of a company: defining the value customers can expect, delivering it, and proving it across the lifecycle.
Embed Customer Value Management Across the Organization
Start with one shared language of value that every team uses. Chad described how fast that gets complicated: dozens of products that keep changing, then bundles, industries, and AI use cases on top. A shared foundation gives everyone a common language for an outcome's value drivers, pain points, solution enablers, and evidence.
Without it, Chad said, "you have value anarchy." Marketing promises one set of value on the website, sales pitches another, delivery asks what the customer bought and relitigates the problem, and customer success runs a health check that matches none of it.
He gave the room what he called a thought experiment. Pick one top customer. Pull the pre-sales business case, the implementation plan, and the last two QBRs, and "tell me if there's a golden thread of an outcome anywhere there." J.B. agreed. "If you look at the disconnects that exist in the way we talk to customers across the functions of the company, it's brutal," he said. "We have to stop confusing the customer."
How Do You Agree on Success Up Front?
Start with the vital few outcomes you can predictably deliver. Chad's advice for a sales leader: take your customer success leader to lunch and ask which two or three outcomes the company can deliver across its accounts, and how it proves them. "We always go after the trivial many versus the vital few," he said.
He also warned about AI. The same prompts can get "radically different answers on outcomes" from an AI model, Chad said, and if sellers are allowed to "vibe code an outcome," value anarchy returns. Buyers lose trust when a case has no assumptions or traceability behind it. "It's just a polished dashboard that looks good," Chad said.
J.B. said the answer is a system of record for outcomes, standardized enough that teams don't build a new ontology for every deal. He also told a story about Siebel Systems. Tom Siebel calculated commission on deal size but paid it only once the customer reached a set satisfaction score. Reps started selling smaller deals that got to value faster and wrapping the right services around the technology. Sales and services worked together because the seller wanted to be paid. Later, J.B. pointed the room at its own incentives.
"The answer is clear, but read the salespeople's comp plans. How many are incented to think that way and work that way?"
— J.B. Wood, President and CEO of TSIA
Speed to Customer Conviction
Speed to customer conviction is how fast a customer becomes sure an outcome worked, and Chad expects it to be the next competitive advantage. "It's not happy, it's not delighted, it's not raving fan," he said. It means "I'm putting my name behind it, and I'm willing to scale it to the rest of the organization." The pressure comes from "anything our customer touches that gives them a different value experience," Chad said, including Palantir, where Senior Architect Siddhant Ekale said his team aims to prove an outcome in "a few days to a week."
J.B. framed it as money. If one vendor gets a customer to full value in two years and another does it in six months, the customer gets 18 more months at full value for the same price. For the customer, he said, that is "better than a discount." Time to value will become "a form of price," J.B. said, with customers telling vendors: "You take too long before I start getting my return from your solution."
J.B. added that customers aren't weighing you against the vendor they turned down. "They're comparing you to the other companies they did choose," he said. One fast vendor is like waxing one fender of a car: "It makes the rest of your car look like hell." Everyone else looks "really old and really slow," and their renewals are at risk.
Who Owns the Value Promise After the Sale?
The process should own the customer, J.B. said, and he called this theme, ownership across functions and P&Ls, "the hardest thing to go do." Every department has a role in that process. When it doesn't work out with a customer, "you don't go blame the people," he said. You look at the process and the tooling. A CSM may be able to run a light-touch account, but "a big, heavy and enterprise industrial situation" needs a process "and ultimately an agent that runs across it."
Ownership also runs into money. Professional services and customer success often have separate P&Ls, so the person talking to the customer may lack authority to make commitments. J.B. urged teams to look at the total margin of the deal. He also predicted a fight: whoever delivers the value becomes the customer's trusted advisor, and sales will want that role back.
Siddhant Ekale said Palantir runs steering committees much more often than quarterly, about every month or two. They bring together the champion "who gave us the budget to implement this" and that person's trusted team, usually for a demo of what Palantir has delivered.
Co-Creation Matters More Than the ROI Number
Deals where the customer helps build the business case win about three times as often, and the size of the ROI makes no difference. Ecosystems found this in 5,000 anonymized provider and customer conversations in its platform. Chad shared it when an attendee asked how to protect champions who take the business case to their CFO without the vendor in the room.
The team expected the most compelling ROI to have the strongest link to win rate. Instead, Chad said, there was "zero correlation" between the ROI number and the win rate. What correlated was how often the customer was in the case challenging assumptions, editing value drivers, and building scenarios.
The buyers panel earlier that day, where IT and finance leaders described how they approve vendor spend, explained why. One CFO said it "becomes very apparent very quickly if our own team believes in this business case or not." A team that has been through what Chad called "the hashing, the thrashing, the iteration" is a team that believes it. In the Ecosystems platform, the customer works in the same business case the seller started, which is how those edits show up in the data.
J.B. added that the more data a customer shares with a vendor, the more accountable the vendor can be for results.
Where the Conversation Goes Next
After ELEVATE, the Customer Value Community is turning the three themes into working groups. Members can join a group on any of the three, or one of three cohorts: the Revenue Leaders Group for CROs, Value Disruptors for leaders breaking down silos, and Value Practitioners for individual contributors in sales and customer success.
Read More From ELEVATE 2026
For more on these ideas, read our posts on J.B. Wood's keynote and Siddhant Ekale's look inside Palantir's forward deployed model [LINK: Palantir post], and our recap, Closing the Promise Gap.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is customer value management?
Customer value management is the practice of defining the value a customer can expect, delivering it, and proving it across the customer lifecycle. At ELEVATE 2026, the closing panel focused on three parts of it: embedding value across the company, agreeing on success up front, and owning the value promise after the sale.
What is value anarchy?
Value anarchy is Chad Quinn's term for what happens when every team describes value differently. Marketing promises one thing, sales pitches another, delivery relitigates what was bought, and customer success scores health on its own terms. A shared value model gives every team the same language for drivers, pain points, and evidence.
What is speed to customer conviction?
Speed to customer conviction is how quickly a customer becomes convinced an outcome worked and is willing to put their name behind it and scale it. Ecosystems CEO Chad Quinn expects it to be the next competitive advantage. TSIA's J.B. Wood added that faster time to full value works like a price cut, because the customer gets more value for the same spend.
Who should own the value promise after the sale?
J.B. Wood of TSIA said the process should own the customer, because delivering value is cross-functional. Every department has a role in that process, and when something goes wrong, teams look at the process and the tooling instead of blaming people. Separate P&Ls for professional services and customer success can get in the way, so J.B. said everyone has to think about the total margin of the deal.
Keep the Conversation Going
The conversations that started at ELEVATE continue all year with peers who are solving the same problems. Join the Customer Value Community to be part of them. And if you'd like to see how teams use Ecosystems to build a shared language of value and carry it from the first business case to renewal, book a demo.
