the only onboarding metric that matters?

Time to value (TTV). Subscription companies spend time and effort thinking about keeping and growing recurring revenues. We hear about subscription problems including churn in first and second year renewals. Beyond the metrics, the kind of problems we hear include:

“We want to be a partner for our customers but we’re only speaking with junior people or administrators. Senior level customers aren’t turning up for our business reviews.”

Substribe interview

We speak with customers/end customers of b2b subscription services. They want to know where they are on their journey. How you measure success. How you partner with them. How you will measure track and improve things along the way. How that works for them, their team, their business.

Time to value – the cut through onboarding metric?

Time to value (TTV) is something we’ve been tuning into for some time now. It feels right. It’s about the customer. It’s a measure of value your customer gets. It’s the opposite of having a bunch of internal processes and a tick box exercise.

Customers buy your service to solve a problem. But that decision to buy is often followed by a sequence of your internal processes. Onboarding is technical stuff about you. It’s rarely about the customer

>>> Press fast forward >>>>

You turn up to the first business review with a bunch of problems that need figuring out. Isn’t it obvious you’ll plummet from your senior most customer to a competent fixer?

Looking at the first moment of value focuses the mind of your team and your customer. Adding time to value into your team’s lexicon means there is a natural talk track to identify challenges in creating value. Wouldn’t it be great if the first business review was all about the value created?

Measuring key touchpoints with customers is a useful place to start. If you don’t know what the value is for your customer, start there. Want to know if a customer has reached a point of value yet? Ask your customer. Have you received value yet? If yes, move to next stage. If no, deal with it.

Other key touchpoints are things like days taken to handover from sales, fulfilment of service, kicking off the service, training, etc. Measuring tells you if internal processes are snagging things. Where you have control, you can make improvements.

In summary, view success from your customer’s perspective. See the Substribe must have score for a longer range metric.