Chris Mills is on his fourth CRO role in ten years. "I tend to work myself out of a job," he told the room at ELEVATE 2026. His track record explains the joke. At ServiceChannel, the value selling playbook he brought from ServiceNow helped take revenue from about $55 million to $110 million during his 18 months there, before the company was acquired for $1.2 billion. At ID.me, the same playbook broke a two-year revenue plateau. Chris said ID.me hit its annual number by the end of Q3 and expects to finish the year more than 60% above where it had been stuck.
In his session at ELEVATE, the customer value event Ecosystems co-hosts with TSIA, Chris walked through how ID.me runs value selling, from the seller's first conversation to a value check 90 days after go-live.
Value Selling Starts With the Seller
Chris builds value selling from the frontline seller up, because the seller is the one who has to run the value conversation, one step at a time. Buyers, Chris said, want to make money, save money, and stay out of the newspaper. They want to see the ROI and the time to value, because they have to clear the CFO's hurdle rate against 300 other projects, a lot of them AI.
Chris, who served in the military, calls himself "a little militant" about it. His teams know what the first meeting looks like and which questions to ask for each industry and persona. He hires for it too, asking candidates what sales process they've used before.
""In the old days, the best sellers, the guys who were killing their number, knew all the right answers. Today my best sellers are trained on how to ask the best questions."
— Chris Mills, Chief Revenue Officer at ID.me
Where the Playbook Came From
Chris learned the playbook at ServiceNow, which brought him in during 2016 to help launch new product lines. Those products sold to buyers ServiceNow had no relationships with yet, so the company moved to value selling. It pulled every seller out of the field for a four-day workshop and set clear expectations for every manager. Sellers had to talk in terms of value before they could bring in a solution consultant or product manager, and every opportunity had to prove value before it moved stages.
Chris led customer service management, one of the new lines, which had a single customer when the workshop happened. In his 36 months there, it grew to more than 1,100 customers, while ServiceNow overall went from $1.4 billion to more than $3 billion.
After 15 years in sales, Chris said, it opened his eyes. MEDDPICC, BANT, and Challenger are good for forecasting, but value selling showed him, as a seller, what to do at every step. "You've got to dumb it down," he said. "You've got to make it super simple."
A Value Prompter for Every Persona
At ID.me, no opportunity moves past stage 3 in Salesforce without a value prompter. The term comes from ValueSelling Associates' ValueSelling Framework®, where a ValuePrompter® captures a buyer's business issue and the value they expect. A value engineering office helps sellers build them. ID.me is an Ecosystems customer, and Chris called Ecosystems "a great partner" in that work. Because an enterprise deal can involve seven or eight stakeholders, each persona gets its own.
Chris said the number of prompters on a deal tracks with ID.me's close rate, conversion rate, and deal size. He hopes to see at least three.
"The more value prompters I have, the more personas we've touched, the more multithreading we've done. I know that deal's going to close, and I know it's going to close fast, and it's going to close big."
—Chris Mills, Chief Revenue Officer at ID.me
Chris said it "starts way at the top." When a seller asks ID.me's founder and CEO to join a customer meeting, his first answer, which Chris trained him on, is to ask for the value prompter.
Sign, Baseline, Verify
ID.me tracks value through three milestones it calls sign, baseline, and verify. Sign is the hypothetical value, built before the deal closes from what ID.me has seen with similar use cases and personas, which the customer then makes their own. Baseline happens at close and covers the customer's current processes, workflows, and costs tied to the metrics that matter. Verify comes 90 days after go-live.
Putting a check-in on the calendar before the contract is signed sounds like a risk for the seller. Chris said it helps close deals, because buyers "know they're not going to be dropped on their head."
ID.me is now using AI to automate those steps and draft more of the hypothetical value up front. It's also building telemetry so customers see the value of every transaction, without anyone rebuilding it by hand.
At ID.me, sign, baseline, and verify is the loop Ecosystems is built to hold in one system of record: the value case built with the buyer, the baseline at close, and the realized value after go-live.
The AE Owns the Promise
At ID.me, the AE who sells the value is responsible for delivering it. ID.me sells on pure consumption, with no contract minimums and no seats, so a customer can stop using it at any time. One customer, Chris said, could remove the ID.me button tomorrow and take more than $100 million in revenue with it. "I have no stickiness unless I'm delivering," he said. He replaced customer success with an account manager model, and AEs now carry each deal for a year after launch instead of handing it off.
"It's the AE's responsibility to deliver on that deal the way they sold it. That keeps me out of a lot of trouble."
—Chris Mills, Chief Revenue Officer at ID.me
Chris was candid that this may not fit every company. "Is that possible for a lot of you guys at high scale, Cisco, ServiceNow? I don't know," he said. The part that travels is ownership: whoever makes the value promise answers for it after the sale.
Watch the Session
Watch Chris's full ELEVATE 2026 session to hear how the playbook worked at ServiceNow, ServiceChannel, and ID.me. For the themes that ran through the whole day, read our ELEVATE 2026 recap, Closing the Promise Gap.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a value prompter?
A ValuePrompter® is part of the ValueSelling Framework®, the sales methodology from ValueSelling Associates. It captures a buyer's business issue and the value they expect from solving it. At ID.me, sellers build one for each persona in an enterprise deal with help from a value engineering office, and no opportunity can move past stage 3 in Salesforce without one.
How does ID.me measure value after the sale?
ID.me tracks value through three milestones: sign, baseline, and verify. Before the deal closes, the team builds a hypothetical value from similar use cases and personas, and the customer makes it their own. At close, ID.me baselines the customer's current processes, workflows, and costs. Ninety days after go-live, it comes back to verify the value it sold.
Why do ID.me's AEs own the value after the sale?
ID.me sells on pure consumption, with no contract minimums and no seats, so customers can stop using it at any time. Chris replaced customer success with an account manager model and made the AE who sold the value responsible for delivering it. That's also how AEs get paid, which keeps the promise with the person who made it.
How do you get sales leaders to buy into value selling?
Chris's answer is to make value selling part of how the whole company works. ID.me screens for it in hiring by asking candidates what sales process they've used. It also starts at the top: when a seller asks ID.me's founder and CEO to join a customer meeting, his first answer is to ask for the value prompter. Chris said everyone from product to first-line leaders uses the same value language.
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 ID.me and other teams use Ecosystems to build value into every stage of the sale, talk to our team.
