Value Creator Stage: Why “Closed Won” Isn’t the Finish Line

In this episode of Value First Data, Chris and Klemen unpack one of the most misunderstood moments in the revenue journey: the Value Creator stage. They explore why “Closed Won” is actually the most dangerous phrase in go-to-market, how data and AI radically change value delivery, and why organizations need to build parallel systems before they can truly evolve beyond MQL/SQL thinking.

What you'll learn

• Why “Closed Won” breaks alignment across marketing, sales, and customer success

• How redefining the stage as “Value Creator” unlocks better measurement and retention

• Why organizations fall into MQL/SQL ambiguity—and how to escape it

• What makes adoption, onboarding, and value delivery so inconsistent today

• How AI and unified data models finally enable end-to-end revenue visibility

• Why you need parallel systems before transitioning away from legacy funnels

• How signals (like leadership content or social posts) can reshape activation strategy

In this episode, we cover

00:00 — The challenge of defining value stages consistently
02:00 — Why teams still misuse shared terminology like MQL, SQL, hand-raiser
04:00 — The importance of building a parallel value system before replacing the old one
07:00 — Why the Value Creator stage is misunderstood and often mishandled
10:00 — The “closed won” trap and misaligned handoffs between sales and success
14:00 — How AI changes value delivery and redefines onboarding timelines
18:00 — The need for unified customer and revenue views
22:00 — Social and behavioral signals as activation triggers
26:00 — Value creation as a multi-level alignment challenge (ICs, managers, execs)
30:00 — Why adoption depends on trust, not timelines
34:00 — The opportunity that emerges once value data finally lives in CRM
38:00 — Preparing for the next episode: the Adopter stage

Tools and ideas referenced

• Value Path Framework (8 stages: Audience → Researcher → Hand Raiser → Buyer → Value Creator → Adopter → Advocate → Champion)

• HubSpot Signals

• Unified customer view and unified revenue view

• AI transcript analysis and signal detection

• Data models that support post–closed won revenue workflows

• Bow Tie / bowtie revenue model

Key takeaways

• The Value Creator stage is not the customer stage—it's where value delivery truly begins.

• “Closed Won” creates organizational blindness; renaming the stage reframes expectations.

• AI makes it possible to finally use unstructured data (emails, calls, signals) to guide activation and expansion.

• Adoption speed has nothing to do with timelines and everything to do with trust and involvement from the right people.

• Leaders have always wanted unified revenue visibility; now the tools exist to give it to them.

• The biggest unlock is recognizing that post-sale behavior is real data—unlike speculative pre-sale forecasting.

Transcript

Chris:
Good afternoon and good evening, Value First Nation LinkedIn friends. Welcome to another episode of Value First Data. We're here with episode six to talk about the value creator stage. Clemen, how are you doing, man? Happy Tuesday.

Klemen:
Doing good. Thank you, Chris. How are you?

Chris:
I am fantastic. I'm very excited about what's happening
Uh, right now, uh, in terms of getting to create some new tools to help teach this stuff, uh, having some conversation, we weren't live last week because we had a great conversation with, uh, Casey Hawkins, Joshua Oaks, uh, and Ryan Ginsberg, really trying to get some clarity, uh, on this value path and the stages that we've been talking about.

Um, and then. Just the power of being able to take that conversation and build a lot of what I'm going to share today in terms of visuals and just the clarification needed while not simplifying past the nuances. So I'm excited.

I would love to hear what you took away from our conversation. I'll share as a preface. Part of the reason for the conversation was Clement at some point saying, you know, it's interesting that we've all been talking about this framework and we've found a way to like fall into the trap of the problem that we're trying to solve, which is MQL, SQL leads, like all these things that mean different things to different people.

Somehow we found ourselves in the same place with audience research or hand raising. et cetera. So thank you for pointing that out. Yeah, what'd you learn last week?

Klemen:
It will take us a while. And this was my kind of main takeaway. Everyone on that call, I think we've all been thinking it, if nothing else, but even publicly speaking and elaborating on that value path and the stages and all that.

And still, I would say half of a year of teaching others and thinking about it, we are still, I mean, I would say we are aligned and on the same page, but not to the extent where, you know, it would be just, yes, we are exactly on the same page. We still are not, or at least we were not, which means even when you think about it weekly, if not daily, you still need to process that in your mind.

And still, different paths in our minds go somewhere. We're still kind of using the same verbiage in a different way. it's still more clear and aligned of, you know, what hand raiser means than what MQL means and SQL. And I think, you know, today's discussion, what close one or, you know, value creator will be another good example of how just the definition, the verbiage of naming something can help with clarity.

But to really implement that, And I think how to implement that in real world scenarios, two portals, it's just a lot of effort and thinking and convincing. And it will first happen in parallel. to the existing world of MQLs, SQLs, closed one and metrics and compensation and everything.

It's just, it's so far, it's not only a word, it's not so far in everything how companies work and do that to get to the point where you see a clear value of thinking differently and measure things differently and name things differently. You need to build both worlds or verbiages. And then you can slowly say, OK, the other version is way better. So at some point, you'll just switch there.

This was kind of the main takeaway. In terms of how to implement and how to think of implementing and talking with people is let's start building two parallel worlds and in transition, and then maybe transitional part of the group there, or, or, you know, one, two people maybe house, but I mean, and rev ops person to that.

So you can start building additional reports, which at the end, hopefully does the plan will turn out to be way better in a way, you know, clearer what you want to, to show with these reports. And then it will be more natural to just not switch it to, to the new system.

Chris:
Yeah. Yeah, it is that practicality kind of brick wall that it's hard not to run into and also hard not to allow bias of past experiences to figure out whether you're going to go through the wall, around the wall, up over the wall.

This is where SaaS. enables like getting just past the wall like in whatever way whether using a different software whether you're great at developing stuff whether you just decide not to like don't keep going in that direction right there's a wall there we're gonna we're gonna do this other thing instead like so many options.

But you can hear that and that's where like the practice of what we're used to starts to bleed into how we define these new things and that's where if for me, you know, it's constantly an effort to like, hey, like, what happened if we didn't overthink this, right?

And can we start there, and I'm going to share something that I was showing all day yesterday. Because really, what we're trying to accomplish here is creating the space for new data in actionable ways because we have access to it, and we have AI's help to understand it within context.

And this is in HubSpot. Signals. You can see signals here in the URL. This is a serious thing that HubSpot's starting to do. So signal recognition, signal-based scoring, signal, signal, signal. But this signal is leadership content.

Most people are not scoring anything like this. Most people are not taking action off of anything like this. The closest thing to action is when the SDR sees this and says, hey, man, I just saw you wrote an article. That's cool. Here's my product. Like, want to get a demo?

It has nothing to do with the article or what the person cares about, right? And can we help people through this, like, This series is about, okay, what stage is this? If this is audience stage, what does it mean to your business?

How are you creating the score that defines audience or research stage and helps your team understand what action to take or not take? And not just from sales, basically all of the customer facing organization is going to be involved here.

And some very interesting stuff has happened over the last week in terms of just helping me understand what the opportunity is. Because things like this, I never thought at the beginning of this year, if you'd have told me I would be talking about buyer intent in a positive way, I would have called you crazy. Like, no.

This is one of the worst offenders in terms of Prior to HubSpot's execution of it, in my opinion, data vendors latched onto this and said, oh, man, if they visited your website, they're a buyer. You need to be reaching out to them. No other context. You just knew they had their website.

You knew they searched for it on Google. Here, grab all this buyer intent data. And just this whole SaaS category came out of nowhere. And I was not a fan. Because I want you to use the data that you have, first of all, which is what we're going to get into today.

But things like this, like the whole goal with this content in the series, you have access to this stuff now if you're paying for HubSpot. And there's value here to be unlocked. And we're trying to help you unlock that instead of just sending it, hey, here's another. random signal sales team, like figure out how to use it, go ahead and throw it in your email, you know, things like that.

So, uh, that said, let's quick recap of where we've been. Um, we've got the eight stages and again, understanding that, uh, every human is capable of being in these stages. That was something that I learned from last week in terms of trying to communicate this part.

Audience, researcher, hand raiser, buyer. And then after activation, after money changes hands usually, then we've got value creator, adopter, advocate, champion.

This doesn't mean every business will care about all eight stages all the time. But when you know that they're available, that can allow for some, maybe a little bit more agile strategy, some more flexible strategy, understanding this journey, right?

And the first four episodes of this series, we went over, you know, audience, I am learning. Researcher, I am researching. Hand raiser, I need help. And the thing that we were talking about last week when we weren't live, the week before, this was called Hero, right? Now it's called Buyer.

But none of the other things about the stage change, right? It's literally trying to come up with terminology that's not ambiguous, not confusing, tries to align with current understanding where we can. But today, we're going to talk about Value Creator.

So, Clemen, what are the common challenges that we've seen when it comes to going from this stage, which most people probably know as opportunity, to closed one and customer stage?

Klemen:
Really good question. Part of it is, which goes back to how SaaS industry, I think, changed that mantra of leads and SDR teams and SDRs are, you know, prospecting and then AEs are closing. And then, you know, all teams are misaligned. Marketing is not aligned with sales and then, you know, sales to the customer success enough is broken.

Because closed one is single sided to account executives role of Hey, you have a deal opened. And end of your day is no closed one. Yes, for account executive touch points. you've done your part, you earned your commission, but from the broader company perspective, this is just, you know, bow tie model, I think, you know, people are familiar with.

This is the middle. Close one is sitting in the middle of bow tie or value path. This is where, you know, we handshake and say, yes, we'll do business together. If you don't care about the right part of we need to create the value that we agreed we'll have and deliver, you have churn problems.

You have unsatisfied customers who then after a month say, oh, I signed up for a year and now after a month I realized I'm not getting what I paid for because there is no alignment of what was happening before closed one and after closed one.

In terms of data, this is a clear proof why you need to store data and collect data in one place. All the meeting transcripts, all the notes, all the documents exchanged throughout the path to value can help you accelerate the path of value.

If you've done your homework, if you've been doing a good discovery after they raised their hand, when they're in the buyer stage, if you collected the right data, if you engage the right stakeholders, if you have a map of that, you know what they need, you know what their pain points are, you know how you bring value to them.

Just turn around and implement what you learned before and you documented. And then the path of value will be so much accelerated and so much easier. And then yes, you can have a sales team going to close one and then customer success or whatever you call that team or project implementation.

However you have the structure, it will be so much easier than no customer success person or a project owner He's not jumping in and saying, oh, so what do you need from us? But hey, this is what we've been talking. We agreed to implement that. And tomorrow you start with the implementation.

Hey, we have a kickoff call where we already have everything documented, structured and outline the timeline in more detail and so forth. So this is where, you know, the data comes in place. And if you think strategically that, the end game is not close one, but it's just the activation of value to start coming as we agreed, you will understand the value of the structure of the process.

Chris:
Yeah. I love that. So I'm hearing the notorious issue of handing off between sales and, you know, fulfillment, implementation, customer success, whatever you want to call it, like after closed one, right? And then all of the renewal, upgrade, cross-sell, resell, expansion, retention, however you want to describe it, the challenge of not only like realizing the opportunity that is there because you understand that customer marketing is a good thing, like it's easier to get people to buy more, but also the visibility in the systems.

We have not had the systems make this easy for any team. Usually what I've seen in HubSpot is before customer success workspace, we had to use the same stuff like deals, which got in the way of the sales team. So we couldn't call things the way that we needed to as a customer success team. So we really didn't own that part of the infrastructure.

So let's just put all the stages inside of a deal stage, and then we'll just run it out way past closed one. And it's just not meant to be right.

Um, and I'm going to give everybody a little bit of deer in headlights feeling here.
Uh, as I show this diagram, uh, that I'm working to make a better version of, but this, this is from.
Where. or twenty one, twenty ten.

Yeah, not that good, folks. That's when I started learning about all these problems. Twenty twenty. I just like six hours just pulling everything out of my head. that I felt was important to execute on, like to go to market and to serve the full lifecycle. And this in the middle here is decision.

So while I do have to sit down with smart people for at least fifteen minutes to get them to understand what's going on here, if I get that opportunity, understand the complexity immediately, right? And one of the easiest things to say is most of our diagrams end here, like end here, right?

So this whole section, there's no documentation, there's no plans We ask people to do customer marketing, to do retention, to do upsell, but there's none of this, right? And that's the easiest way to get somebody on board with like, we're wholly just missing.

Our goals are wholly disconnected from our systems and the way that we process things. And so if you bring it back, it's like, we literally call that last stage Closed one, like closed. We're done here. Like, of course, nobody's focused on what happened because it says closed.

Right. So that's where, uh, you know, in some systems, even before I came up with it, a lot of people start referring to that stage is activation. It's like, okay, let's go. Like the relationship started. This is the beginning. This is not closed. Right.

Um, And as I was building this framework, I kept on running into the issue of like, ah, customer stage. Like, I understand that's like, it should be the one that does not move. But all of these problems related to just throwing everybody into a customer stage, like, and calling it the customer journey.

And we want the customer journey to start like when people start engaging our brand and the customer experience. But why would you design for it if we don't call them a customer? And I know that people aren't saying these things out loud, but when you see like leads, MQLs, SQL, and then customers over here, you automatically like tie it to that part.

So when we talk about customer experience, it's like, oh, that's delivery, right? That's where we got to design for the experience. Meanwhile, the best of the best start as soon as there's an exchange of value, even if it's just an email.

That's when the customer experience starts, and we design for that.

Then the other thing that came to mind is handoffs, the challenge of handoffs. And why is it so hard? Often, in a bunch of this... This kind of shift in languages to try and to get us to stop taking things for granted, especially the customer label, right? To where, oh, you purchased this.

Like you must be bought in or you must be forced to do the thing. Like you've got to be in this room with me right now, or on this call with me right now. Like I don't have to get more buy-in. I don't have to build more trust. I don't have to build a relationship because it's magically already there because you're a customer.

And in reality, sometimes the people that show up both from the internal implementation side and the external like customer side have not been involved at all in any of the process. So like the rest of the framework, if we can define what their goals are during that process, like then we can start to understand how to serve them, right?

And so no matter who's involved, whether they've been involved or not, they show up, they've got to create value. They've got to take the thing that was purchased or invested in and the people that they're working with, and everybody's got to work together to create value.

And the other thing I'm going to highlight as you think about that, because another challenge I was feeling was The difference between like, if, and this is from me internally, like when I was bringing in HubSpot, I was an individual contributor basically, right? Building out a marketing department that never existed before.

So I could influence and champion the decision to get HubSpot, but I'm an individual contributor. Maybe I can be manager as I build out a team, but the difference between me
uh, wanting to create value with this, this new platform versus a president or an executive saying we're bringing in HubSpot, right?

There's two completely different lanes of what value looks like for those individuals. So breaking this down as we move forward to, um, individual contributors, managers, and executives, all They need to be involved whether you want them to be or not.

And that's the last challenge, right? The reason ninety-day onboarding plans don't work anymore, check the boxes don't work. If you don't take the time to get those three levels involved, And have everybody aligned.

One of them will show up at some point and just derail like the whole process, right. And if you promise ninety days at that point and that happens, you cannot move forward. It's going to take longer than ninety days or it will end.

Everybody hates the mess that was created because you did not know that was coming. And when an executive comes in. and does not understand the value that's being created while also maybe having some good ideas of how they think value could be created and not necessarily with you, that's the kind of stuff that just blows up in your face.

So trying to help you understand these different levels. Again, this is not easy, but it can be simple to understand And that's where if you can set these guardrails, AI can help manage the complexity in ways we've never been able to before when you're bringing call transcripts and emails in and we don't miss the random comment.

Well, I don't know if we want to bring that guy in yet. It's like, that's a, That's a red flag and that the response needs to be, yeah, we need to bring him in ASAP then. Right. Instead of like figure out ways to not bring them in because they're coming in at some point. Right.

And this is again, from experience trying to bring in HubSpot is like the Trojan horse. That's just going to like create collaboration. We're just going to gorilla market this way into this thing. And then people are just gonna start working together, work to work to a point and then. didn't work. I won't go into the details. But all of a sudden, very abruptly, no longer worked. Right.

Klemen:
So I would add to the three levels of people. Also, all the teams should be involved. Yeah. So you have, you know, single contributors, managers and executives at marketing, at sales, at customer success, at all the functions.

You don't need to have regular things and then touch points with each and everyone, but you should understand what kind of value they expect, how you can get them aligned, then things will be easier. Even if you don't know and you're not present in discussions, those discussions will happen. without you at their internal calls, at their internal executive discussions.

So you better have them aligned, understand who is who, what they need, what's their point of view of expected value. And then when you get to the point of expansion or renewal, you won't need to justify expanding that and then keep declaration going. Everyone will already be aligned on what the path of value was and what's next.

Chris:
Yeah. And is it fair to say that this stage, uh, it probably is the stage under like the most under your control as an organization across like versus any other stage, right?

Because you just engaged, there's a contractual obligation probably. to work together, even if there's new people involved, like they're coming in, you know, play with the blank slate.

And trust can be built in that moment and versus all the other stages where this is as close as it gets to like really tight knit collaboration potential.

And So you kind of got to force yourself to want to control making sure that everybody gets involved, making sure that there's trust and not just usage.

That's why with AI, the timelines no longer make any sense at all because the difference between using AI or not is trust. And as soon as you trust it and can learn how to use it, months become weeks and days and hours, right. To get stuff done.

Um, and that's been a real eye-opener as I worked through this to help understand like, why doesn't the ninety day onboarding plan or the thirty day onboarding plan make any sense? Right.

And literally one of the recent conversations I had is, you know, sales leader saying, okay, I get it. I want to be more involved. right? I'm going to be out of town next week.

It's like, okay, if I tried to suggest that we could get it done in thirty days, like, nope. Like, and instead, because we've scoped it out that way, it's like we make so many decisions to try and fit it in the thirty days and ninety days when it just doesn't, like, it doesn't make any sense.

And nobody, like, wants it even to be that way, like in reality.
Um so kind of what you're saying like at the start of the show related to our conversation like trust building trust and progression is about you know like comfort level and do we have time to digest these things and like and nothing to do with oh it usually takes about two weeks oh it usually takes four weeks.

Like the one thing i've learned about organizations is that Every organization has a different set of humans and who's in charge of what and when and why and all the baggage related to inside and outside the organization.

That determines how fast you can go in most cases. And of course, getting alignment and understanding of these things leads to moving faster, but it's a lot of work up front to make sure everybody is in the room that needs to be in the room.

So just as an example of some touch points, again, so this is where if it is fully under your control, you should be able to have the most detailed touchpoint information than anywhere else in the process. And then when you can do that, since this is a point past when they've paid you probably, that becomes the richest resource in the organization for how to do things before and after.

Like, what works? Like, what is working? Like, why was it so smooth this time? And you can see these touch points where they say, like, oh, yeah, a couple weeks ago when we had the demo, you said this and this and this. That allowed me to say this person got them involved.

And you can have that level of granularity now thanks to AI. And so I really think it comes down to understanding the control that you have, right. And like the importance of the data capture, right.

Not taking it for granted, not assuming that, um, you know, just because they call the customer just because they signed the contract that's in that, that locks them in for a year. It doesn't like, don't take any of that for granted. Right.

Okay. So we've got the usual stuff, implementation kickoff workshop, right? Thirty day check in, ninety day milestones, right?

And that was for a scenario called researcher who became a champion, nonlinear PLG journey, right? kind of flipping it around a little bit so that value needs to be created upfront. Like as soon as they start, you know, sign up for the product, get into usage, then maybe they buy a buying committee, got some different people involved, right?

And then manufacturing has been fun to play with just because there's so much revenue like expected and also lost after closed one because sales teams are incentivized only on closed one.

Right. Um, so it's been interesting, but this shows a good, this is a good example of right. When we start tracking this stuff,
Um, right. Cause this is. So this is the unified revenue view. So the goal of making space for this data through these stages with the right objects of the data model is to create a unified customer view, unified revenue view, unified context, and unified enablement.

When you make the space for it, now we can see, OK, in a traditional CRM, We wouldn't be reporting on a hundred and fifty nine thousand dollars worth of worth of value that would be in the ERP or the accounting system.

And the CFO is trying to pull that out of the systems and put it together. Right.

Got revenue by category here. But also like revenue by stage. Right.

And what. really just kind of punched me in the face last week when i was going over this with with oaks uh last thursday is like since we've made the space for it right this is real this is real data this was the stage that they're in this is the dollar amount of transactions that happened while they're in that stage we don't need to because it's real data real behavior because they're a customer and we can ask them directly if we need to, right?

And we have more permission than anywhere else in the journey to have that conversation if we want to, especially when we're serving them with value, right?

So this is real dollar information, right? Meanwhile, we have created this system Where we put dollars, we put dollar amounts on leads, like lead value, right? And like, it's made up numbers, right?

We report more on that dollar amount than we do on this dollar amount. How crazy is that, man?

Klemen:
Yeah. And then all the way to whatever random percentages for all the deal stages and everything, which is just tell me why it needs to be.

And it will be that much. That's always my point of view on those numbers, which is right.

Chris:
And Again, like when you ask leaders, they want these types of numbers. They've been wanting visuals like this forever. This is why I'm excited about HubSpot because you can create the space for this kind of visibility in ways that we just haven't been able to before.

It's not replacing the ERP or the accounting system, but we have a place to bring that data over into HubSpot. This is why we start with a unified customer view. it's likely the only system that you have access to that can actually connect that initial touch of downloading the thing to the end of the process, the whole journey.

And as you add revenue data and things like this, Right? The example I love yesterday, because all of this is in an effort to inform the team on when to activate resources, how to activate resources across the organization.

And imagine if every time like an article like this was published, you knew that there was likely a LinkedIn post to go with it. And if you were there to be the first person to comment, and try to start a conversation.

That if you started a conversation there, it was like, eighty percent win rates. We have the system now that can put those pieces together and tell you that information in a very real way.

We've got social signals related to lead scores that we can do now and the whole thing. So can we help you make the decision? Like if you can prove without a doubt that that's happening and that every time something is written or posted about this kind of topic and we show up, like we're starting conversations and we get that business.

Can you move away from, I have a list of twenty-five people that I need to call and If I'm calling people on that list, if I've decided that this hour of my day, I'm going to do all these calls. If any of these signals come in during that time and you have to be calling and you can't respond to that signal and go and like, that's real data that you're denying the value of.

And can we give ourselves permission to make that kind of shift? Right? Because that Like the context of what we're talking about today, it's like if this signal comes from somebody where the company is in value creator stage or other people in their company, it's another avenue to say, oh, we can help with that thing too.

And that's how you get to these dollar amounts in these other stages.
right and again it lines up with every business goals renewal retention expansion like all the things we say that we care about so all you're doing is helping leaders connect their goals to what's possible in this in the crm.

Klemen:
Yeah and all those signals even if you know part of it is yeah you go and respond and comment on a post that you you just got as a signal You don't necessarily need to then engage with a CTO in a real conversation, but take that insight for the CTO, your comment, make a screenshot and go to the person who is leading the project on their side internally.

Hey, your CTO was commenting. This is how I think we can help. Let's just talk about that topic. It seems your C-level executive is talking about it publicly. Let's have a chat about it.

Chris:
Oh, that's such a good example of how a signal that's seemingly disconnected could be a canary in the coal mine or just an opportunity signal of like, hey, this thing that's happening over here, it's either very much aligned with what we're doing and represents more opportunity or represents there's not alignment like we thought there was.

And we need to get out in front of this, right?

So it's interesting the conversation that we're having between proactivity and reactivity. It's really proactive understanding of the signals and the journey and putting yourself in a place to react very, very quickly instead of thinking you can use proactivity to kind of force your process onto the market.

But I imagine if we were to apply this in most portals right now, value creator is probably negative, negative value. Because if they never get to Adopter, I've got to develop those examples to understand.

But we've heard things like clawbacks and all these things where it's like, oh, they canceled before we expected. How are we tracking that?

So I'm excited, as I always am, to talk about this stuff. I don't know, any key insights for you as we kind of rolled around in this madness today?

Klemen:
My main takeaway is if ever now it's important to collect data, and and think beyond okay i'm forced to log data into the crm and if ever now is is a good opportunity to to see that the whole picture of go beyond close one this is you know, AI changed a lot.

And in part of that, I think is also how you treat the close one people and deals and everything. With all the unstructured data that you can have in one system, AI can help you make use of it.

So you better support and deliver value and create value for the ones who agreed to receive value from you. This is then the beauty of combining all that together. And we are really now in the era where that is possible.

Chris:
Yes, indeed. So next week, we'll be talking about this coveted adopter stage and the power of, OK, we want people to get to adopter stage. Maybe we should have a stage called adoption an adopter like something where we can say like oh they're there right um so we'll get into that next week uh hopefully this was helpful uh thank you so much uh for your time today clemen uh thank you everybody have a great rest of your week we'll see ya take care everybody see you next week