If you're in the technology industry, you’ve likely felt the pressure to prove the value of your service offerings, beyond just features or service level agreements. You might know your services deliver results, but when it comes to defining, communicating, and defending that value to your customers, it’s not always easy.

That’s where TSIA’s latest Research Journey, Holistic Value Defense: End-to-End Strategies in Technology Service Offerings, comes in. This Research Journey is designed to help you tackle one of the toughest challenges in services marketing: proving your worth in ways that resonate with customers and drive business results.

Most companies focus their marketing efforts on the technology product rather than the service experience. When services do get promoted, it's often in the final stages of the sales cycle or narrowly framed in terms of features. This leaves a significant gap between the actual value you provide and what your customers understand.

The question we’re answering in this Research Journey is simple—but essential: How can your organization define, communicate, and defend the value of your services across the customer lifecycle?

You’ll be part of a collaborative effort to uncover the risks of not addressing this issue and discover proven strategies to close the gap. Together, we’ll walk through a structured process to guide the industry forward.

So jump in as we: 

• Define the Problem: Identify where and why value communication breaks down in service offers.
• Launch Discovery: Participate in polls, surveys, and interviews that dig into the challenges you’re facing.
• Develop the Theory: Our team analyzes your input to build or refine frameworks that better represent end-to-end value.
• Guide the Industry: We’ll connect the dots between value definition, customer outcomes, and financial impact, giving you tools you can use.

By participating in this journey, you won’t just follow along—you’ll help shape the future of how service value is understood, marketed, and protected in your business and across the industry.

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Define the Problem: Why You’re Struggling To Defend the Value of Your Services

You’ve likely put a lot of effort into building value into your service offerings, but that’s only half the battle. The real challenge is defending that value to your customers in ways that resonate and drive action.

While there’s plenty of research available on designing value into offers, there’s a noticeable gap when it comes to proving value throughout the customer journey. At TSIA, we’re now shifting our focus to uncover what the most successful companies—what we call pacesetters—are doing differently to defend value effectively.

This research is especially relevant if you work in or with:

• Service marketing or product marketing.
• Sales or partner teams.
• Product or service offer management.
• Portfolio or offer leadership.
• Customer success.

If that sounds like you, this journey is your opportunity to gain new strategies and tools that directly impact your role.

Why This Is a Growing Problem

The move to as-a-service (XaaS) models has changed everything. Your customers now expect continuous value, not just during onboarding or at renewal. They want measurable outcomes, frequent engagement, and clear proof that your services are worth the investment.

Several significant shifts are fueling this challenge:

• A rise in digital-first engagement.
• Rapid changes in technology and customer expectations.
• A growing focus on business outcomes over technical features.

In this environment, your ability to clearly define and defend your service value isn’t just helpful—it’s essential for sustained growth.

What Happens if You Don’t Solve It

Failing to address this problem can have serious consequences for your business. Without a strong value defense strategy, you risk:

• Losing potential customers who don’t see the return on investment.
• Failing to retain existing customers who can’t justify renewals.
• Falling behind competitors who are better at proving the value they deliver.

If your teams can’t consistently communicate the tangible benefits of your service offerings, you’re leaving money—and customer trust—on the table.

Related: Holistic Value Defense: End-to-End Strategies in Technology Service Offerings

How This Research Journey Works

If you're ready to rethink how your organization defines and defends service value, it helps to know how this Research Journey will unfold—and what you’ll gain by joining us. We’ve built this journey to be collaborative, data-driven, and highly actionable. You're not just observing the research. You’re helping shape it.

Here’s how we’ll explore value defense together:

• Industry interviews: We’ll kick things off with in-depth interviews featuring leaders across service marketing, product, and customer success. These conversations reveal real-world challenges and best practices that lay the groundwork for further exploration.
• Comprehensive survey: Next, you’ll have the chance to contribute to a survey that digs deeper into how different companies define and defend value. This is where patterns and performance gaps start to emerge.
• Ongoing insights: As we gather data, we’ll regularly share our findings through blog posts, webinars, and expert interviews. You won’t have to wait for the final paper to start seeing actionable takeaways.
• Final deliverables: The journey will culminate in a full research paper, a strategic framework, and a collection of digestible insights to help you take immediate action. We’ll also present the findings at an upcoming TSIA World ENVISION conference.

By participating, you’ll gain early access to best practices, data-backed recommendations, and frameworks to help your organization better align marketing, sales, and success teams—and confidently communicate the value of your services.

Related: Introducing the TSIA Research Journey: Holistic Value Defense: End-to-End Strategies in Technology Service Offerings

What You’ll Gain From Joining This Research Journey

When you participate in the Holistic Value Defense Research Journey, you’re doing more than contributing data—you’re unlocking insights that can directly impact how your organization defines, communicates, and defends services value.

Thematic Insights

You’ll discover key trends and patterns shaping offering management today, find out what’s working (and what isn’t) across the industry, and understand where service marketing and value communication are headed next.

Proactive Guidance

You’ll receive both reactive and proactive recommendations based on rich insights from interviews and surveys with technology companies like yours. These findings will help you address real challenges with practical, field-tested guidance.

Strategic Empowerment

This journey equips you—and your teams—with a practical framework that focuses on:

• Communicating value based on customer outcomes, not just features.
• Enabling service marketers, offer managers, and customer success teams to align on messaging.
• Creating practical sales tools and value-led content.
• Improving cross-functional collaboration and customer engagement.
• Driving measurable impact and revenue growth.

By joining us, you're not just participating in research—you’re helping redefine what it means to defend value in a fast-evolving technology services market.

Related: Elements of Value in Technology Service Offers

Your Key Takeaways

• Value must be defended, not just defined: Building value into your service offerings is only half the equation—your teams also need the ability to communicate and prove that value across the customer lifecycle.
• XaaS models demand continuous value demonstration: As customer expectations shift toward measurable business outcomes, companies must move beyond feature-based messaging to articulate service value related to outcomes.‍
• Participating in the TSIA Research Journey provides practical, data-backed strategies: By joining this journey, you’ll gain early access to insights, frameworks, and tools that help align marketing, sales, and customer success teams around value-led growth.