The Value Path - Jun 4, 2026

Two weeks ago, Chris Carolan and Joshua Oakes opened up the Adopter stage of the Value Path — the sixth stage, "I Realize Your Value," and the most under-tracked moment in the entire customer journey. They spent Part 1 establishing why the stage even needs a name: because the language we inherited — onboarding, implementation, maintenance, managed services — quietly trains us to treat adoption as a finish line instead of the place where value actually gets made real.

Part 2 gets tactical. This is the "here's a thing you can do" episode the show has been building toward. Chris and Joshua move from the philosophy of the Adopter stage into the specific moves that separate great execution from the status call that gives an hour back and calls it a win.

The center of gravity is one deceptively simple skill: hearing a closed door and choosing to knock on it. When a stakeholder says "yeah, people are using the workflows, it's looking good" — that is a complete sentence and a dead end at the same time. Part 2 unpacks the questions that open it, the signals to listen for (expansion exploration, advanced-capability access, success amplification, optimization partnership), and the way value realization travels two degrees out to the stakeholder you're not even on the call with.

It's also the AI episode — not AI-as-replacement, but AI pointed at the feel-good: a sub-routine that listens for emotionally-charged customer quotes and pings them into a channel the moment they happen. And grounded in the real work: a HubSpot training call where the honest answer to "do you think any of this is going to help you?" was an immediate, unguarded "no" — and what it looked like to give someone permission to say that, and then watch them find the value themselves.