How To Reduce Time-To-Value When You're Not In The Room Where It Happens

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Reminder: most onboarding happens when you’re not in the room.

It doesn’t matter if you have an onboarding CSM or a PLG experience…

So if you want to reduce time-to-value ask yourself this:

🤔 Can my customer make progress if we aren’t together?‍

(Generally, there is more progress they could make than we are enabling)

Imagine this common scenario:

CUSTOMER: Completes the action item we discussed on our kickoff call, at 4 PM and emails you asking what to do next.

YOU: Check your inbox at 8:30 AM the next day and reply with the next thing they need to do to make progress

CUSTOMER: Is out of the office and doesn’t see your message until the following week.

YOU: Are blocked from helping them make progress because you’re missing information they would have provided in that next step.

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Maybe this scenario was unavoidable, but maybe they had blocked time from 4 PM to 5 PM to make progress on their onboarding and they got blocked after completing one task that took just a few minutes.

So how can we avoid delaying time-to-value unnecessarily?

1. Lay out the steps to be completed during onboarding in a collaborative action plan‍
2. If you are collecting information in a form, add the next step to the success page shown on submission
3. Consider the order of tasks in your plan to reduce the times you or the customers are “blocked” by the other
4. If there are tasks that you currently guide customers through on a call, identify “why” that is the norm and look for ways to enable them in a self-serve way
5. Do it for them - if there are tasks that take customers an hour that could be completed in a few minutes with the right training, consider building an internal process to do them

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The more you can enable customers to make progress when you’re not in the room…

…the more you can spend your time together understanding their problems and building a strategy to solve them.

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