Is Speed to Value slowing your scale?

15 Nov

I once halved speed to value from 12 weeks down to 6, improved customer experience and streamlined sales handovers. How? Radical focus on onboarding.

Whether you call it onboarding or implementation, you need to make sure it’s shit hot and bloody fast. Why?

You’re likely selling on a recurring basis; your customer has only committed to a certain period. The longer it takes to get them going, the more time you lose to define your value.
Customer experience, obviously.

Let’s break down your annual contract;

Months 1-3 -> Onboarding
Months 3-9 -> Scale and Value definition
Months 8-> 12 -> Arguing about renewal

That’s from our perspective as software suppliers. What you don’t appreciate is that in the customer’s head, it’s probably more;

Months 1-3 -> Onboarding
Months 3-6 -> Does it work? Is it having an impact? Do my team like using it
Month 6 -> Is this worth renewing? If yes, drive adoption. If no, look for something else.

Most software companies make the mistake of thinking they have an entire year to define value to their customers; this is a misconception. In reality, your Champion wants to know whether or not they made a good decision at the 6-month mark so they have enough time to find something else.

When you look at it like this, those 3 months you allocate for onboarding seem like you could be using them better, don’t they?

Speed to Value, the metric that matters.

Speed to value is simple; it’s the average time it takes to get your customers using your software at some sort of scale. The scale you need depends on the software you have. If you’re selling by the seat, you’ll probably want to get to a % of seats allocated with a decent frequency of usage. If you’re selling capacity, you’ll likely want to see that they’re using about 75% of it.

Of course, usage does not equal value, but we must work with what we have.

Value is, of course, determined by whether the customer is seeing some impact on their business based on their goals when they bought your product. This data normally hides on their side of the fence. So, whilst I might say that speed to value can only really be inferred (and not measured) by utilisation, the truth is that I’ve had a much easier time getting customers to share sensitive data with me when I’ve spent the time during onboarding really getting to know them.

Either way, speed to value is actually “speed to usage”, and usage doesn’t equal value. Don’t forget that when you’re obsessing over this process. Always focus on the customer. Are you capturing their goals and how are you measuring this long-term, once onboarding has ended?

Most CS Leaders I know have no idea what their speed to value is, and I have, on many occasions, had absolutely no idea how long it takes a customer to get onboarded. In fact, in one of my roles, the answer was (rather nauseatingly) “depends on the customer”.

If you don’t know your speed to value now, you should probably try and measure it, but I wouldn’t spend too much time on this activity. Speed to value is the ultimate lagging metric; to get some measurement, you must painfully watch your customers get onboarded (at whatever pace your team is currently doing it). This is not worth the effort. Instead, speak to a good cohort of customers you’ve onboarded in the last 6 months and ask about their experiences. The steps I have for you below are designed to impact 2 things: absolute speed to value and customer experience.

So here we go;

1. Make the list

Make a painfully long list of every task that must be undertaken to get a customer onboarded to your product or platform. Every. Single. Task.

This list must be as specific as possible; think like a QA engineer. The more specific you make it, the more valuable it will be later in the process.

2. Categorise

Split everything in the list by persona, owner and deliverable. Place every step in one of the following categories;

Critical path - an action which must be completed; otherwise, it blocks any steps following.
Commonly forgotten - Something which is usually overlooked and takes time to fix.
Customer dependency - Information you need from the customer; otherwise, the project is blocked.

Link tasks together, which can be completed concurrently, and group tasks into phases where possible. Some standards would be “Scoping”, “Planning”, “Executing”, “Validating/Testing”, and “Go Live”.

3. Templates!

Start with the customer dependencies, and for these, we need templates. You know what’s really slowing you down? How configurable you are.

You might have 20 ways to do something, but there’s probably one good one, right? One configuration which works the best every time. Find it and make a template. I did this at Localz; there was one optimal configuration for the end user (customer’s customer) journey, which had the biggest impact, so that became the template.

If you’re asking your customer to pick from 100 different options, the likelihood is either they don’t know (because they haven’t done it before) or they don’t care. Either way, they want you to tell them the most valuable configuration because you’re meant to be the expert.

But wait, my platform isn’t configurable; what do I do?

Focus on your customer journey. Take all customer dependencies and plot them into a timeline of what you need and when. If you’re asking customers for data or information, congratulations, that’s a template. If your customer needs to go through two workshops and an onboarding session, create a simple outline of each session, including the personas of who needs to attend and how long it will last. If there’s a list of questions you need to know, make a template of them. Easy.

4. Standardise!

It just keeps getting better.

Now you have a template; you have a standard. This is a baseline configuration or journey. From now on, your new customer onboarding journey will always look like this as a first pass. There are many reasons for this;

It’s easier for you. Reducing the noise and options reduces the time it takes to execute and the likelihood of risk.
Having a bulletproof “this process works” to give to your customers during the final stage of their sales makes you look shit hot.
You’re setting your customers up to start off on a solid footing because you’re using the templates and standards of things that have worked for you before. You’re drastically increasing the likelihood that they’ll experience value more quickly because you’re reducing the risk that they’ll pick a less optimal option. Most people want to be told what works.

5. Automate, Automate, Automate

Now you have a standard onboarding experience and a heap of templates, automate anything that can be automated. Think welcome emails, nurture email chains, and scripts which set up environments and create or manage user accounts. This applies double for any of those steps you identified as once that are often skipped or forgotten.

The goal of this step is to reduce the overall number of tasks on your critical path, which are dependent on you to execute. By linking tasks together and automating wherever you can, you reduce the risk of missing things and the time it takes you to execute overall.

Need loads of stuff from your customers? Bundle it into a “here’s what we need welcome pack” and send it to them in one go instead of dripping questions and requirements over a few weeks.

This seems obvious. But seriously, two things;

It’s often easier and quicker (ironically) for us to execute against processes as they are rather than try to optimise. Especially when you’ve got a small team who are stretched for time, we default to doing what we’ve always done.
If you’re a much bigger team, your CS department (usually where onboarding lives) has become a somewhat miscellaneous department for “stuff”. It broadly relates to customers, so now it’s yours. Periodically reviewing all this stuff and seeing if it can be automated and improved both reduces the stuff but also helps you hold other teams (like product) accountable. If your onboarding is clunky and manual, it needs to be productised. Want to make a business case for this? Go back to your customer experience and time to value metrics. Find links in your data between a higher likelihood of churn correlated with a longer onboarding. I guarantee you have this in your data. Guarantee.

6. Document the shit out of it
A process is only as good as the documentation. You want anyone who currently works at your company to be able to understand the onboarding process for your customers. Who, what, where, when and how long.

Create one document, drop everything you have into a sequential lifecycle and link everything together. Make it easy for yourself; have a single source of truth.

7. Sell it

You know what’s brilliant about this? You’re making yourself look super good for all of the new customers coming through the door. A good onboarding process is gold star sales content because you’re showing all of your potential customers what a bloody good supplier you are. You’re also leading from the front, providing a project plan, all the dependencies they need to give you and a list of the people you need to talk to. Amazing.

Don’t forget your customers are spending money on your software. They’re buying into the dream. Having an amazing onboarding process really builds their confidence that you’ve done this before, you know what you’re talking about and those benefits Rachel in Sales is telling them about really exist.

If you want to go a step further, the more you operationalise and standardise your onboarding process, the easier it is to actually monetise it. Once you’ve gotten to the bottom of how you can make your customers successful with your product in the shortest amount of time possible, you can build on this to create onboarding plus if you’re in the services market.

It’s true that if something is broadly “not broken”, we tend not to spend any time fixing it. Spending time going through the steps and understanding why you do it that way will pay off long term. So, maybe you can’t speed up your onboarding process significantly; focusing on the customer experience and leading them through the process will pay off.

If you’re a newly appointed onboarding leader, you’ve been put in place because it’s taking too long, and it’s been noted as a point of friction. What you absolutely don’t want to do in any circumstance is create manual workarounds for all of the pain in your product. This might seem like a logical first step, but you’ll never be able to scale that process in terms of people in the team, so you’re only creating a value problem down the track. At some point, someone will ask you what your team's value is, and you’re going to have a nice story but not a lot of objective data

Focussing on building an engaging customer journey and directing through change will reward you with stronger relationships built more solidly on trust. Doesn’t that sound great? The more times you run the process and iterate your journey, the more time you’ll save.

Continuous improvements and marginal gains over perfect, every time.