Customer onboarding
The phase between signed contract and first realized value, in which the customer sets up, learns, and reaches the outcome they bought the product for — the stretch where much future churn is decided.
Customer onboarding is everything between the signed contract and the customer demonstrably getting the value they bought: setup, configuration, data connection, training, and the first real business outcome. It deserves its own name because it behaves differently from the rest of the lifecycle — expectations are at their peak, goodwill is finite, and impressions formed here harden into the relationship. A customer who never reaches value rarely announces it; they quietly stop showing up, and the churn arrives a year later looking like a renewal problem.
The difference between strong and weak onboarding is usually not effort but repeatability. Improvised onboarding — each CSM running their own version from memory — makes time-to-value a lottery based on who got the account. Repeatable onboarding runs on a template: standard objectives, owners, and target dates, a clean handoff of context from the sales cycle, and progress that the customer themselves can see, so silence never reads as stalling. Measured well, its headline metric is time-to-value.