Late in the day at ELEVATE 2026, we asked the room a simple question. When you hand a customer a business case, how much of it do they actually believe? The most common answer was about half.
More than 140 customer value leaders from 85 companies spent October 19 in Las Vegas at ELEVATE, co-hosted by Ecosystems and TSIA. CROs, customer success and product leaders, researchers, and the buyers who approve the spend all kept circling the same problem: the distance between the value we promise customers and the value we can prove we delivered.
These are the five lessons we heard most often.
1. Most companies can't say whether they kept their promises
Sales teams make value promises on every deal. What happens to those promises after the contract is signed is much less clear. At one TSIA event, 2,000 people were asked whether the last closed-won opportunity in their CRM documented the customer's business outcome objectives. Not one hand went up.
TSIA’s answer is a metric called Net Outcome Realization Rate, or NORR. It measures the share of value promises a company actually delivers within the contract term. Tracking it starts with something simple that most teams skip, which is writing the promise down. NORR is still a new measure, and few companies track it. That helps explain the poll. When nobody checks whether past promises were kept, trust erodes and customers learn to ignore vendor promises.
2. Value selling sticks when it's built into the sales process
The CROs who spoke at ELEVATE run very different businesses, and none of them treat value as an optional step.
At ID.me, Chief Revenue Officer Chris Mills won't let an opportunity move past stage 3 in Salesforce until it has a value prompter. His team builds one for each persona in the deal, since an enterprise sale can involve seven or eight stakeholders, and he watches those numbers closely.
"How many value prompters are in every opportunity is indicative of our close rate, our conversion rate, and our deal size."
— Chris Mills, Chief Revenue Officer at ID.me
At Talkdesk, Chief Revenue Officer Al Caravelli built the business value assessment into the sales stages themselves. With about 150 sellers and four people on the strategy and value team, he had no other way to scale it. AEs, SEs and CSMs take an assessment 80 to 90% of the way, then the value consultants review it and present it to the customer.
During the CRO panel Q&A, Chad Quinn, CEO and Co-Founder of Ecosystems, pointed out what the panelists had in common. They simplify, they instrument, and they aren’t bashful about mandates.
Al Caravelli, CRO at Talkdesk, presents at ELEVATE @ TSW.3. The business case that wins is the one the customer helps build
Ecosystems went into its own platform data expecting a simple answer. The team analyzed 5,000 anonymized business case conversations to see whether the strongest ROI predicted which deals closed.
"Our hypothesis was that the most compelling ROI would have a causal link to win rate. We totally got it wrong."
— Chad Quinn, CEO and Co-Founder of Ecosystems
The size of the ROI had zero correlation with win rate. That sounds backward, since a bigger number should make a stronger case. But the bigger the ROI story, the harder it is for a buyer to believe, especially when they had no hand in building it. What did correlate was how often the customer got into the business case to challenge assumptions, edit value drivers and build their own scenarios. Those co-created deals won about three times as often. A buyer who helped shape the numbers can defend them to their CFO.
The buyers panel described the same thing from their side of the table. One CIO's advice to vendors was to "listen more, listen longer," and to show how they use what they sell. He asks every vendor the same question: "How do you drink your own champagne?"
4. Start small enough to prove it
A big ROI number is easy to put in a deck, but it’s hard to defend a year later. Several speakers argued for proving something small first.
Mari Cross, Chief Customer Officer at Infor, works with customers who want to become agentic enterprises while sitting on years of customized systems. She compared it to putting a smart thermostat in a 100-year-old house. Without the walls, wiring and windows, "literally nothing is going to happen."
"Scope the work small enough that you can actually show the outcome. Your customers will try to scope you out if you don't."
— Mari Cross, Chief Customer Officer at Infor
Starting small also makes it possible to go back and check, and that’s where the proof comes from. Talkdesk returns to each customer six to nine months after its business value assessment and reviews what was actually realized with the customer’s executives. On the first accounts it measured, Chief Revenue Officer Al Caravelli said the original assessments had underestimated the value by 75%. A modest estimate that the customer later beats builds far more credibility than a big number nobody revisits, and Al said that cycle is what lets Talkdesk expand further.
Mari Cross, Chief Customer Officer at Infor, presents at ELEVATE @ TSW.5. The promise has to outlast the signature
For a lot of companies, the value conversation ends when the contract is signed. Jay Allardyce, Chief Product Officer at Octave, described what usually happens next: someone builds a slide after the fact to show what the customer got. "We call that value realization," he said, "but I think it's more like forensics."
"We sell outcomes, we ship features, and then we try to measure something."
— Jay Allardyce, Chief Product Officer at Octave
His fix is to make the business case the spec, so the product itself produces the evidence of the outcome. If you can’t instrument it, he said, it shouldn’t be promised. The goal is for customers to see the promised outcomes in the software they use every day, instead of in a slide someone builds after the fact. As he told the room, “I don’t want you to build a business case. I simply want you to ship it.”
Jay also has an advantage most GTM teams don’t. As Chief Product Officer, he can decide what the product measures, while most sales and customer success teams have to work with the product they already have. The lesson still applies to them. Bring product into the conversation early, so the outcomes you sell are ones the product can actually track. TSIA’s keynote made the same point: if the data you need doesn’t exist, ask your product team to build it in.
Ownership came up just as often. ID.me sells on pure consumption, with no contract minimums and no seats, so Chris made one person responsible for the promise from start to finish: "The AE who sold it is the AE who owns it, and that's how they get paid." That puts real weight on how clearly the AE articulates value up front, since they'll be back 90 days after go-live to validate it with the customer, a commitment Chris said helps ID.me close deals.
Pricing is also raising the stakes. TSIA's session on outcome-based pricing showed that much of the opportunity sits in outcome-aligned pricing, which companies can build into the contracts they already have. It came with a warning, too. Procurement teams are starting to check whether claimed outcomes were ever measured.
Chad closed the afternoon with a story David Foster Wallace told in his 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, about two young fish who don’t know what water is. For this industry, adoption, logins and active users have been the water, "and the water has frankly changed." Keeping the promise now takes a system of record for customer outcomes, one that holds the base case, the target, the actual and the validated value for every customer. That's what we're building at Ecosystems, along with ViViEN™, our Virtual Value Engineer.
One thing to try this week
On the closing panel, Chad gave the room a simple exercise. Pick one of your top customers. Pull the pre-sales business case, the implementation plan and the last two QBRs, and lay them side by side. Look for a golden thread that connects the outcome you promised to the outcome you delivered.
If you can't find one, you've found your promise gap.
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 carry the value promise from business case to renewal, talk to our team.
