ELEVATE 2026, the customer value event Ecosystems co-hosts with TSIA, spent its morning on short talks called Value Signals. After the second round, the three speakers sat with attendee tables, then came back on stage to take each table's questions: Jeremy Aston, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Global Services and Solutions Sales at HP; Mari Cross, Chief Customer Officer at Infor; and Jay Allardyce, Chief Product Officer at Octave. Martin Dove, Founder and Principal Advisor at It's The Outcome, moderated.
How do you keep a business case current once the customer changes? How do you avoid building something custom for every account? Most of the panel's answers came back to proving customer value in small, measurable pieces.
Proving Customer Value Starts With a Current Business Case
A business case has to be revisited often enough to keep up with how the customer works. Octave reviews the business cases in its customer collaborations every month. "We can't do that annually and you can't do that quarterly. You need to be doing it monthly because it's a behavior change," Jay said. His engineering and construction customers run on margins of about 6% to 10%, he said, so every cost removed gets their attention.
When a customer's needs change a lot, Octave treats it like a scope change. The new need becomes its own use case with its own measurement, so it doesn't blur the results of the first one. That cadence works because the program is small: Jay called it "a controlled burn" of five customers with board and C-suite involvement.
Mari described how Infor makes this easier. Before an AI use case goes live, Infor takes a snapshot of the process, then measures it in the system over time. It has started building CFO dashboards and operational dashboards that surface results automatically, so reviewing value isn't a separate exercise. Mari was candid about the limit. Results are "always going to be impacted by the level of measurement that you can see in the system versus not," she said. "There's just always things outside."
Scope the Work Small Enough to Show the Outcome
The fastest way to prove value is to pick a piece of work small enough to finish and measure, with an end date set before it starts. Octave's customer collaborations, its version of forward deployed engineering, run on a fixed 11-week cycle. Jay staffs them from his product team, which most GTM leaders can't do.
HP's situation is closer to theirs. Jeremy said HP sends specialists close to the business unit leader who owns an outcome, because work like running AI workloads on the edge is customized to every customer. Some of those proofs of value (POVs) ran for almost a year without bringing in revenue.
"You have to have a demarcation point of when you cut bait to get them out."
—Jeremy Aston, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Global Services and Solutions Sales at HP
Mari added the advice for everyone else: "Scope the work small enough that you can actually show progress. Your customers will try to scope you left and right."
Lead With the Outcome the Customer Cares About
The panelists start conversations with the business result and bring in the products after. Mari said that's easier at Infor because the company "very intentionally became an industry-specific ERP, and that changes the conversation." Its teams talk about what a food and dairy company needs, and the products that support it come second.
Jay put it the same way: "We have to start with the outcome and the value they create and then dive into the solutions." Octave sells asset management, camera, and operator rounds products to three different teams at a rail operator, but the operator wants to see them together, valued by how often its rail cars are moving instead of sitting in the shop.
Jeremy described the harder version at HP, where a hardware company is learning to sell solutions. "I won't say transformed, I will say transforming," he said. Sellers who are missing their number, he said, will throw out solution and value selling altogether, so the message needs constant repetition. He has told HP's Chief Commercial Officer as much: "We can't just tell your team two and three times. We have to tell them six, seven, eight, nine times."
How Do You Avoid Building Something Bespoke for Every Customer?
Standardize around the persona and the use case, and treat true exceptions as exceptions. Jay said Octave's engineering and construction customers approach their work in very similar ways, which lets it build a standard case with guardrails. The exceptions come when a customer claims something as intellectual property, such as how a builder coils and ties copper wire into a design. Because Octave sees across all its customers, it often finds it's "not really unique," he said. "We try to avoid those, but we'll entertain it, but we just can't do that for everybody."
Jeremy tells his pre-sales engineers that they are not product managers. "You can't go out and just take every feature a customer throws at you and go take that back to the product team," he said. "It's untenable." Jay's check is simpler: when a team insists a request is unique, he asks them to "go ask five and see." Jeremy's fallback came from his first sales manager: "Jeremy, when in doubt, go see a customer."
Show Customers What They Already Have
Adoption numbers only matter once customers can see what the technology does for their business. Mari said measurement comes first, tied to benchmarks for the customer's industry where they exist, because "AI for its own sake really doesn't mean anything." "You literally are trying to solve their business problems, not just trying to get them to use more," she said.
In Mari's experience, "customers do not know what they have." Half the time, she said, they own a Ferrari and think they own a Fiat.
Mari applied the same thinking to attribution. She sees too much focus on ROI as the ultimate goal; small, specific changes measured over time are easier to prove, and they add up. "If you start too high, it gets to be a messy conversation," she said, one where a vendor claims a result was "one eighteenth of my ROI, and Lord only knows what else went into that calculation."
Record a baseline, measure specific changes over time, and claim only what the data supports. That loop is what Ecosystems is built to hold in one closed-loop system of record, from the business case built with the buyer to the value realized after go-live. HP is an Ecosystems customer, and Jeremy said in his own session that the two have "a long relationship" on business cases and value reviews.
Watch the Session
Watch the full Round 2 panel, and read our ELEVATE 2026 recap for the day's main themes.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you prove customer value after the sale?
Start with a baseline, measure a small outcome you can show, and update the case as the customer changes. Infor takes a snapshot of a process before it changes, measures it in the system, and surfaces the results in CFO and operational dashboards. Octave revisits the business cases in its customer collaborations monthly. Claim specific changes you can measure instead of a share of total ROI.
How long should a proof of value run?
Long enough to show an outcome, with an end date agreed before it starts. HP's Jeremy Aston said some of its proofs of value ran for almost a year without revenue, so HP now sets a demarcation point for pulling specialists out. Octave runs its customer collaborations on a fixed 11-week cycle. Scope the work small enough to show progress within that window.
How do you avoid building bespoke solutions for every customer?
Standardize the use case around a persona and treat true exceptions carefully. Octave tries to avoid bespoke work, and Jay Allardyce tells his teams to ask five other customers before treating a request as unique. HP's Jeremy Aston tells his pre-sales engineers they aren't product managers and can't carry every customer feature request back to the product team, because product teams can't keep up.
Why isn't product adoption enough to prove value?
Usage is the closest proxy many vendors have, but logins don't solve a business problem. Infor's Mari Cross said adoption has to be tied to what the technology does against the customer's KPIs and industry benchmarks, and that customers often don't know what they already own. She also advised measuring specific changes over time instead of claiming a share of total ROI.
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 measure and share the value customers receive, book a demo.
