For years, SaaS companies had a relatively straightforward way of proving that customers were getting value.
Show that people are logging in. Show that adoption is increasing. Show that teams are using more features. If engagement is moving in the right direction, the assumption is that value must be moving with it.
That assumption is becoming increasingly dangerous.
At SaaSiest 2026, Anika Zubair, Founder and CEO of The Customer Success Pro, argued that SaaS has entered what she calls the “ROI era.” In a tougher economy where software is easier to replace and every subscription is under greater scrutiny, customers aren’t simply asking whether people use your product.
They’re asking what it actually does for their business.
Your Customers Don’t Care About Your Adoption Metrics
One of the biggest problems in SaaS is that vendors and customers often speak completely different languages when discussing value.
Customer Success teams talk about features adopted, integrations completed, dashboards created and support tickets resolved. Product teams talk about usage. Sales teams talk about implementation milestones.
Executives care about something else entirely.
Did we make more money?
Did we reduce costs?
Did we become more efficient?
Did we reduce risk?
Anika argued that almost every software purchase ultimately connects back to one of those outcomes. Yet many SaaS companies still struggle to explain how their product contributes to them.
That becomes particularly dangerous at renewal.
When a CFO is reviewing software spend, telling them that 80% of employees logged into your platform last month isn’t necessarily a compelling reason to keep paying for it.
Usage tells you what happened inside your product.
ROI tells the customer what happened inside their business.
The Value Conversation Starts Before the Customer Signs
One of the most common mistakes Customer Success teams make is waiting until renewal to start talking about value.
By then, it’s often too late.
Anika argued that the ROI conversation should begin in the very first customer interaction. Sales, Product and Customer Success should establish what the customer expects to change before implementation even begins.
That means asking questions that many SaaS companies skip.
Where is the customer today? What business problem are they trying to solve? What would success look like in six months? What about twelve months? What does leadership inside their organisation actually care about?
Without that baseline, proving ROI later becomes surprisingly difficult.
If you don’t know where the customer started, you can’t convincingly show how far they’ve travelled.
You Don’t Need Perfect Data to Prove Value
This is where Anika challenged another assumption that holds many Customer Success teams back.
Companies often believe they can’t talk about ROI because their product doesn’t contain the perfect analytics, attribution model or ROI calculator.
But perfect data isn’t required.
You can build a reasonable value estimate by combining the information you already have with information from the customer.
Start by identifying a few important activities your product enables. Then move beyond measuring whether customers use them and estimate what those activities actually change.
How many hours did they save?
What manual work disappeared?
Did they avoid hiring additional people?
Did they increase sales?
Did they reduce a particular business risk?
The estimates should be conservative, particularly when renewal budgets are under scrutiny. But a thoughtful estimate connected to the customer’s own objectives is far more useful than another dashboard showing feature adoption.
Keep Asking “So What?”
One of the simplest frameworks from Anika’s session may also be the most useful.
Take any feature in your product and ask:
So what?
Imagine your product provides automated reporting.
So what?
It saves the customer ten hours every week.
So what?
Those ten hours allow managers to spend more time on strategic work.
So what?
That additional capacity helps the team contribute to a business objective the company already cares about.
That final connection is where the value story begins.
Most SaaS companies stop one or two questions too early. They describe what the product does rather than following the chain until they reach an outcome an executive actually cares about.
The interesting part is that you don’t necessarily need sophisticated product analytics to find that final answer.
You can ask the customer.
Your Product Should Have a Three-Step Value Story
Anika also challenged SaaS companies to explain the value of their product in three steps or fewer.
Not what the product does.
What value it creates.
She used LinkedIn as an example. Build your presence, engage with the right people, and ultimately generate outcomes such as recruiting candidates or creating sales opportunities.
The exact journey will obviously differ between products, but the discipline is useful.
If your company needs fifteen slides to explain why the product matters, customers are going to struggle to communicate that value internally too.
And that’s important because your champion isn’t the only person you need to convince.
At renewal, they may need to justify the investment to procurement, finance or an executive who rarely interacts with your product.
Your value story needs to survive that conversation without you in the room.
Customer Success Is Becoming More Commercial
There is a broader shift underneath all of this.
For years, Customer Success was often measured through relationships, satisfaction and adoption. Those things still matter, but they’re no longer enough.
Customer Success teams increasingly need to become commercially confident.
That doesn’t mean turning every CSM into a salesperson.
It means understanding the customer’s business well enough to connect product activity to financial and operational outcomes.
When a CSM can walk into an executive conversation and explain how the product saved hundreds of hours, avoided additional headcount, increased revenue or reduced business risk, the renewal conversation changes completely.
They’re no longer defending software usage.
They’re demonstrating business impact.
The Biggest Risk Isn’t Low Adoption. It’s Invisible Value.
Software has never been easier to replace.
New competitors appear constantly. AI is lowering the cost of building products. Procurement is becoming more involved in buying decisions, and CFOs are scrutinising subscriptions that once renewed almost automatically.
That makes invisible value dangerous.
Your customers may love your product.
They may use it every day.
They may even tell their Customer Success Manager they’re happy.
But if nobody can explain what that usage is worth when the renewal reaches the CFO’s desk, none of those signals necessarily protect the account.
The companies that win in this new era won’t simply build products customers use.
They’ll make the value of that usage impossible to miss.
