One story, four tellings,
four break points.

I spent 40 minutes with an enterprise leadership team earlier this month trying to get them to explain one simple thing: how their offer actually connects to an outcome their customers really care about.

They couldn't do it. Not consistently or coherently.

Honestly? That's the norm. It's rare that a company has this well articulated.

Which is wild when you think about it, because it's a story told four times by four different groups.

• Marketing tells it to create demand.
• Sales tells it to make it believable, and win deals.
• Services inherits it and has to figure out what to deliver.
• Success has to prove it to secure expansion and renewal.

Same story, four tellings. And it breaks in the exact same four places in almost every company I've worked with.

1. The chain doesn't exist

Very few companies can articulate the outcomes, KPIs and processes their solutions genuinely impact. Everyone downstream is building a jigsaw without the picture.

2. Sales can't tell it effectively

General sellers are comfortable selling features and benefits. Giving them a value playbook doesn't automatically make them confident.

3. It degrades at the handoff

What was promised when the deal closes loses definition on the way to the team delivering it.

4. Nobody can prove it

The supplier says value landed. The customer verifies independently. The renewal happens in the gap between those versions.

Every one of these costs you win rate, deal size, expansion, or renewal.

A lot of companies effectively do this with value engineers on high-value opportunities, but rarely is it operating at scale.

And now there's a new pressure. AI-native services companies are turning this on its head. Their pitch: we'll prove all of this using your data before you give us a dollar. The client sees value demonstrated and outcomes delivered from day zero.

Which is why ELEVATE 26 opens the way it does

When I built the opening, I didn't want a standard keynote. I wanted four leaders on stage who are actively solving these exact break points.

Four Value Signals. Short, TED-style talks focused on the front lines.

Jeremy Aston (HP) on building the chain from scratch: evolving GTM strategies by anchoring customer relationships to target outcomes first.

Albert Caravelli (Talkdesk) on fixing the sales bottleneck by putting value selling into the hands of every quota-carrying seller, and their partners.

Mari Cross (Infor) on fixing the handoff with a Value Realization Harness: using micro-vertical benchmarking to fix configuration debt before layering on AI.

Jay Allardyce (Octave) on solving the proof problem by embedding value engineering directly into the product so outcomes are instrumented from day one.

More speakers to reveal in the coming weeks, and the room is starting to fill up.

19 October, ARIA Resort and Casino, Las Vegas, the same week as TSIA's Technology & Services World.

Get in touch if you'd like to attend. It's free, but places are strictly limited.

Martin Dove is the founder of It's the Outcome, and has spent the last decade helping technology and services companies make the shift to outcome-based client engagement.