Introduction to Value Realization

In crowded SaaS markets, adoption metrics alone won’t keep your customers. Only companies that demonstrate real financial impact will thrive with seamless renewals and massive expansion opportunities. Value Realization helps you measure and communicate the actual financial benefit your product delivers to customers over time—transforming projected improvements from the business case into customer-confirmed results.

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Why track value realization?

Account managers can no longer rely on simple adoption or usage metrics to prove the value of their SaaS to customers. Markets have grown too crowded, tech stacks stuffed to the brim. The winners tell a continuous story from pre-sales to post-sales, connecting projected value to realized value at every step of the customer journey.

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From projection to proof

Before the deal closed, your team focused on projected improvements and Before/After estimations. But once the contract was signed, the real work began: rolling out the product to a new organization with all its messy politics, cumbersome processes, and complex tool ecosystem. Value Realization measures those processes at a regular cadence to offer specific, customer-confirmed numbers. Where business cases rely on case studies and TEI reports to suggest potential impact, Value Trackers measure actual impact with real customer data.

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What is a Value Tracker?

A Value Tracker answers one simple question: What did the customer actually buy? In the business case, you selected Use Cases to describe problems you’d solve. The Value Tracker shows how those use cases activate over time and what changes they’re driving in the organization.

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How Value Trackers work

Like a business case, a Value Tracker is built around use cases—starting with the ones your customer selected before signing. But where business cases are broad, Value Trackers are highly specific:

• Use case name and description detail what is done to solve a problem
• Benefit Calculation measures how effectively that problem has been solved, quantifying reduced costs or increased revenue
• Improvement metrics track the key measurements over time that drive the calculation

Your job as an Account Manager or CSM is to activate these use cases as features roll out, then measure improvement metrics at regular intervals.

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Example: From business case to value tracker

Let’s see how this works with a real example. Acme Co. builds a SaaS platform for customer support teams that automates responses to tickets. After customer interviews, they’ve determined their platform increases the number of tickets each rep can handle by 50%—meaning a smaller team can get more work done.

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The business case setup

For customer Delta Corp, Acme set up a use case called “Increase Support Team Efficiency” with these inputs:

Input	Value
# of Reps	10
Avg. Tickets per Day (baseline)	100
Expected Rep. Efficiency Gain	50%
Projected Annual Benefit	$100,000

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The value realization measurement

Once Delta Corp became a customer, Acme tracked the actual improvement over the 1-year contract:

Input	May	July	March	Total Benefit
Avg. Tickets per Day (measured)	88	115	158	-
# of Reps	10	10	10	-
🟰 Rep. Efficiency Gain (calculated)	0%	15%	58%	-
🟰 Monthly Benefit (calculated)	$0	$6,000	$9,000	$109,000

Result: Acme demonstrated $109,000 in realized benefit—exceeding the projected$100,000 and proving clear ROI to Delta Corp.

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Understanding the Value Tracker interface

Your Value Tracker has four main tabs, each serving a specific purpose:

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Key concepts

Before diving into the details, understand these core elements: Improvement Metric
The key metric you’ll log over time to track value. This is often a measurable business process like “Avg. Tickets per Day” or “Time to Complete Task.” Unit
A multiplier of a business process, like # of employees, facilities, or transactions. Units help scale individual improvements to organizational impact. Percentage Improvement
A derived value showing the change from baseline to current performance. Calculated automatically based on your recorded improvement metrics. Activated Use Case
A use case with an active calculation that’s being measured over time. Activation happens when a feature or product gets rolled out to your customer. Milestone
A checkpoint representing a key moment in realizing value—like “All Teams Onboarded” or “75% Monthly Active Users.”

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Next steps