Mastering Value Frameworks: Unlocking Retention and Fueling Customer Growth

At the 9th Annual Startup Boston Week, one question quietly threaded its way through a packed room of founders, operators, and customer leaders: If your customers like your product, why do they still churn?

Diane Gordon, a longtime SaaS executive and founder of Customer Growth Consulting, came with a direct answer - and a warning. Liking a product isn’t the same as understanding its value. And when renewal time arrives, that gap can cost companies everything.

With more than three decades spent in post-sale leadership roles - from implementation and customer success to renewals and support - Gordon has seen firsthand how the shift to subscription software fundamentally changed the rules of retention. In a SaaS world, she explained, value can’t be assumed. It has to be defined, measured, and reinforced continuously across the customer lifecycle.

The Real Reason Customers Renew

Customers come back, Gordon argued, only when two conditions are met: they believe they’re getting meaningful value, and that value feels commensurate with what they’re paying.

The problem? Most companies never give customers a clear way to articulate, or measure, that value.

Instead, value conversations often surface only at renewal time, when stakes are high and trust is fragile. “That’s not a strategy,” Gordon said. “That’s a gamble.”

To fix this, she introduced the concept of a value framework, a structured way to anchor every customer conversation to outcomes that matter.

The Three Pillars of a Value Framework

At its core, a value framework answers three deceptively simple questions:

1. Why did the customer buy? Not features. Not capabilities. The actual business reason they made the purchase.

2. How will they measure success? What will tell them, six months or a year in, that the investment was worth it?

3. What activities make that outcome possible? Not just what the software does - but what the customer must do to realize value.

Gordon emphasized that these elements must be explicitly defined before onboarding begins. Otherwise, teams risk training customers on everything except the thing they actually care about.

Why “Showing Everything” Kills Adoption

One of Gordon’s most resonant points came through a simple analogy: onboarding should not be a product tour.

Too often, she said, customers are handed the equivalent of a user manual, an exhaustive walkthrough of features that feels impressive but leaves them overwhelmed. “Stickiness dies there,” she warned.

Instead, onboarding should focus narrowly on helping customers achieve their first meaningful outcome as quickly as possible. That early win builds confidence, momentum, and trust, setting the stage for deeper adoption later.

Training someone on one-tenth of the product, Gordon argued, is far more effective than showing them everything and hoping something sticks.

Outcomes, Not Promises

Gordon shared examples from her consulting work where companies had to rethink how they framed value.

One fire safety software company had long promised customers lower insurance premiums - a claim that proved impossible to directly attribute to the product. The solution wasn’t to abandon value messaging, but to narrow it.

By focusing instead on measurable, product-driven outcomes, like reducing inspection-to-proposal time, the company could credibly tie its software to revenue growth without overreaching.

The lesson: broad value drivers are fine, but outcomes must be things you can reasonably own.

Leading Indicators Matter More Than Final Results

For startups selling into long-cycle or complex environments, Gordon acknowledged a common frustration: customers may not realize full value for 18–24 months.

Her advice? Stop waiting for the finish line.

Instead, identify leading indicators - early signals that customers can recognize as progress. Reduced errors, faster workflows, improved engagement, or clearer visibility can all serve as proof points long before a final business outcome materializes.

“If you can’t move the needle on something in the first three months,” she said, “you probably picked the wrong outcome.”

Value Is Everyone’s Job, All the Time

A recurring theme throughout the session was that value can’t live in one department.

Sales needs to capture the reasons a customer bought. Onboarding must reinforce those reasons. Customer success should track progress toward outcomes. And renewals should be grounded in evidence, not sentiment.

Gordon recommended treating value as a shared artifact - documented, revisited, and updated over time - rather than a one-time conversation. Whether tracked in spreadsheets or embedded into CRM systems, what matters most is consistency.

Customers, she noted, should hear their own goals reflected back to them again and again. That repetition builds clarity and trust.

Health Scores Aren’t Enough

When asked about customer health scores, Gordon was blunt. Usage data alone doesn’t tell the whole story.

Her recommended approach combines three perspectives:

• Machine-generated health metrics

• Human judgment from customer-facing teams

• Progress against customer-defined outcomes

Only by holding all three together, she argued, can companies truly understand risk and opportunity.

The Takeaway: Make Value Visible

As the session wrapped, Gordon returned to a simple but uncomfortable truth. Many companies genuinely care about their customers and still lose them.

Not because the product is bad. But because no one ever helped the customer articulate what success looked like, or showed them how far they’d come.

“Customers buy because they believe they’ll be treated well,” Gordon said. “And because they believe they’ll get value.” When that belief isn’t reinforced, even satisfied users can walk away.

For founders and operators building in a subscription world, the message was clear: retention isn’t won at renewal. It’s earned in every conversation before it.

To watch the full recording of this session at Startup Boston Week, visit this link or view the embedded video above!