GTM leaders across our Customer Value Community, from some of the world’s largest enterprise software providers to high-growth innovators, often face the same question: Should we build our own value management system, or buy one?
It’s an understandable impulse to build. You get control, flexibility, and the satisfaction of shaping your own solution. But what we’ve seen time and again is that teams who start by building usually end up buying — not because they failed, but because they want their time back to focus on customers, not code.
1. The Cost of Building is Time
Everyone is under pressure to prove the impact of AI. Boards are asking for results, not pilots. Yet internal builds can take months or years before users see any benefit.
In many organizations, internal MVPs take 6–9 months before users receive value.
In contrast, teams adopting a purpose-built platform go live in roughly 8–10 weeks, often tied directly to major sales moments like SKO.
With homegrown solutions, sales reps can spend 10 or more hours building business cases manually. That’s time they’re not spending engaging with customers or closing deals.
Teams that build also often underestimate what happens after launch. Integrations, data quality, security updates, and content refreshes require ongoing development cycles that drain time and resources. Many report spending hundreds of thousands integrating into CRM and CS tools — and even more maintaining them.
In contrast, organizations using Ecosystems have reduced that process to about one hour and reached measurable impact much faster by leveraging:
- Pre-built templates grounded in proven customer value frameworks
- Integrations with Salesforce, Gainsight, and key GTM systems
- Ready-to-use AI capabilities that help teams build, quantify, and revisit value stories
The outcome: a faster path from concept to customer impact.
2. Collaboration Is the Missing Ingredient in Most Internal Builds
AI can automate content, but it can’t build consensus. Customers want to co-create, not just consume, the business case for change.
That’s where most homegrown systems fall short — they aren’t designed for collaboration with customers.
Across our Customer Value Community, leaders have found that value co-creation builds trust and ownership. One customer described it simply: “We stopped selling to our customers and started building with them.”
3. Success Depends on Closing the Loop Between What’s Sold and What’s Delivered
Another key insight from our Community: the collaborative value conversation cannot just stop after the sale.
Organizations that built tools in-house often found they couldn’t connect presales value promises to post-sale outcomes. Sales and Customer Success teams ended up tracking different KPIs and using different systems — creating a fragmented customer experience. It’s like placing an order with one server, then having to repeat it all over again to another.
When those organizations adopted a unified platform, they gained a continuous feedback loop between what was sold, what was delivered, and what was achieved.
For example:
- A global enterprise software company that began with internal builds later scaled to more than 4,000 users on the Ecosystems platform, generating millions in measurable impact.
- Another major technology company reported that after launching the platform, its value advisory team achieved:
- 1.9× more opportunities supported per advisor
- 2× increase in won contract value per advisor per year
- 3× growth in value drivers created over 12 months
That’s what scalable value management looks like in practice.
4. Innovation Moves Faster Together
When you build internally, innovation depends on your bandwidth.
When you build as part of a community, you benefit from shared learning.
Our Customer Value Community brings together leaders from HP, Google Cloud, ServiceNow, HP, and 1,500+ other leading technology companies who shape the next generation of value practices — from AI-assisted discovery to outcome tracking and renewal plays. Their insights directly influence the platform’s evolution.
It’s not just software. It’s collective intelligence.
5. The Broader Data Tells the Same Story
Recent findings from the MIT NADA study reinforce what we’re hearing every day. GenAI adoption succeeded at twice the rate when companies partnered externally (67%) versus building internally (33%).
Why?
- External partners bring specialized expertise
- They accelerate time to value with proven infrastructure
- They’ve seen what works across industries
- They tie deliverables to outcomes, not technical milestones
It’s a pattern that applies well beyond AI.
The Takeaway
“Build vs. buy” will always be a strategic decision — but the leaders in our community are choosing to build value, not infrastructure.
They’re redirecting their energy from maintaining tools to scaling outcomes. And in doing so, they’re proving what every GTM leader is under pressure to show right now: measurable, repeatable customer impact.
Interested in hearing how other companies are approaching this decision?
Join the conversation in our Customer Value Community or contact us at community@ecosystems.io to connect with peers who’ve been there.
