What is Time to Value?
With Donna Weber, Customer Onboarding Expert
In this episode, Allan and Lauren talk with Donna Weber, a customer onboarding expert, about time to value and why it matters for customer success. Time to value is the speed at which customers achieve their desired outcomes after purchasing your product. Without delivering on this promise, you risk losing customers to churn and missing opportunities for expansion.
What is time to value?
Time to value is how quickly a customer realizes the benefit they expected when they bought your product. Whether they're looking to save money, make money, save time, or meet compliance requirements, your job is to help them reach those goals as fast as possible. If you're not delivering value quickly, you're not delivering value at all.
The challenge is that every customer is different. Some need hands-on guidance; others want to move fast on their own. "Companies need to think a lot more about the right touch at the right time to deliver value," Donna explains.
Why time to value matters
Time to value directly impacts customer retention and growth. Customers who experience value early are more likely to stick around, expand their usage, and recommend your product to others. Conversely, a long time to value creates friction, increases churn risk, and limits your ability to grow revenue through net revenue retention.
In competitive markets, the speed at which you help customers succeed can be the difference between a thriving account and a lost one.
Who owns time to value?
Time to value isn't owned by a single team. It's a shared responsibility across customer success, product, and sometimes sales. Success teams often drive the onboarding experience, but product teams shape the user experience, and sales teams set expectations during the buying process. Alignment across these teams is critical.
The most successful companies treat time to value as a core metric—one that's measured, monitored, and owned by leadership.
How to measure time to value
Measuring time to value depends on your business model and what "value" means to your customers. For some, it's the first time they see a result in the product. For others, it's completing a specific milestone or achieving a measurable outcome tied to their original purchase goal.
Common approaches include:
Time to first value: How long until a customer experiences their first tangible benefit
Time to desired outcome: How long until they reach the specific goal they bought your product to solve
Onboarding completion: How long until they finish key setup steps
Adoption milestone: How long until they've adopted core features at meaningful scale
Track this metric alongside net revenue retention and other customer health indicators to understand the full picture of customer success.
Learn more about the metrics that drive customer success and business growth on MetricHQ, a free library of metrics and KPIs.
Metrics mentioned in this episode: