Operationalizing Customer Value at Scale: Turning Outcomes Into the New Growth Engine

# CSS Executive Forums

Santa Clara, CA – October 29, 2025 | CSS Executive Forum – Silicon Valley

November 7, 2025

At the CSS Executive Forum in Silicon Valley, we hosted an engaging and collaborative workshop on Operationalizing Customer Value at Scale, to help leaders bridge the gap between vision and execution in building outcome-led customer lifecycles. The two-hour, hands-on session brought together executives from Customer Success, Product, Services, Sales, and Revenue organizations to explore how to design measurable value frameworks that scale across the enterprise.

The workshop was facilitated by Ross G. D. Fulton, Founder & CEO of Valuize, whose consulting firm is widely recognized for advancing the science of customer value realization. Supporting the session were Mary Catherine Plunkett of Autodesk and Grazyna Wicik of Red Hat, who shared practical insights and guided small-group discussions based on their deep experience.

Shifting Toward the Customer Outcome Economy

The discussion began by recognizing a major market shift in B2B technology: customers today, especially in an Agentic-powered world, no longer buy access to features—they invest in outcomes. These outcomes must be measurable, repeatable, directly tied to business value, and attributable to the customer’s usage of the product.

As Ross explained, we are entering what Valuize calls the Customer Outcome Economy, where recurring revenue success is driven by verified customer value, not just the promise of it. Participants agreed that while many companies aspire to be centered on customer outcomes, few have the strategy, operational infrastructure, or organizational competencies to make it sustainable at scale.

This focus on investing in customer outcomes is especially timely given the rise of agentic AI — autonomous systems capable of driving, measuring, and optimizing value delivery. Agentic AI pushes organizations to rethink how outcomes are defined, monitored, and monetized—making outcome-based pricing not just desirable but inevitable.

Inside the Workshop: Defining and Delivering Value

Participants explored Valuize’s Customer Lifecycle Design Framework, a structured approach to integrating all frontstage and backstage customer-focused functions around customer outcome delivery. Through small-group work, executives designed their own Value-Based Outcomes (VBOs)—measurable definitions of customer value mapped directly to specific product capabilities, customer personas, and strategic customer goals.

Teams also assessed their readiness to operationalize these outcomes. Common challenges included:

Fragmented definitions of "customer value" across functions

Limited access to outcome data after the sale

Misaligned handoffs between Sales and Success

Insufficient enablement for outcome-based customer conversations

Mary Catherine and Grazyna helped translate frameworks into next steps — connecting outcome definitions to data, roles, playbooks, and systems.

From Workshop to Forum: Sharing Insights and Engaging the Community

After the workshop, Ross presented the key insights and outcomes to the entire CSS Executive Forum audience. His presentation sparked an engaging Q&A session in which participants explored how to scale outcome-driven value delivery, apply AI for predictive insights, and evolve toward outcome-based pricing models.

The discussion reinforced a key realization: achieving customer outcomes is not a post-sale function—it is a company-wide growth strategy for the AI era.

Key Takeaways: Building a Scalable Outcome Engine

By the end of the day, participants left with a clearer roadmap for transforming their customer value practices:

Unify around outcomes: Establish a standardized customer outcome framework across teams.

Design for recurring value: Map outcome journeys that guide customers to continuous outcome achievement..

Operationalize systematically: Align people, processes, and technology to deliver outcomes consistently.

Measure what matters: Use leading and lagging indicators to validate and communicate value.

Embed accountability: Make success planning a shared responsibility with customers.

As Ross summarized, “When companies design and operationalize around customer outcomes, they stop managing touchpoints and start driving measurable impact.”

The Road Ahead

The workshop concluded with a forward-looking discussion on the implications of agentic products and outcome-based pricing, signaling how B2B business models are evolving to monetize measurable results rather than access or effort.

For many attendees, the roundtable served as both a mirror and a roadmap—revealing how far they’ve come in their customer value journey and where the next leap forward lies.

My Reflection

What stood out most was the depth of collaboration and co-design. Leaders debated “customer value" and built tangible pathways to instrument it. Yet, most organizations still lack the structural scaffolding to sustain outcome-driven execution: a shared language of value, pervasive telemetry, AI-powered orchestration, and tight product feedback loops.

Three convictions I’m taking forward:

Outcome Operating System. Treat outcomes like a product: define VBOs, wire telemetry, automate playbooks with agentic AI, and review value with customers on a consistent cadence.

Agentic AI and FDE as accelerators. Combine agentic AI with Forward-Deployed Engineering (FDE) to close the loop faster—capturing edge cases, strengthening automations, and shortening the path from insight → shipped improvement → verified outcome.

Price the proof where outcomes are objectively measurable, lean into outcome-linked pricing to align incentives and de-risk adoption.

The principles explored in The Customer Outcome Era (eBook Link) laid a strong foundation, and the collective insight and engagement of the CSS community transformed them into a practical blueprint for growth — powered by verified customer outcomes and agentic AI.

Join the conversation: Subscribe to CCO Perspectives, my newsletter exploring how AI and leadership are reshaping customer success and support, and join our community, community.successlab.us.

I look forward to continuing this dialogue with peers and leaders shaping the future of customer value.

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