Tracking Time-to-Launch in Baton helps SaaS teams deliver an effective and reliable implementation experience.
Because implementation and customer success roles are naturally customer-centric positions, they’re typically measured (and often scrutinized) by how quickly they can get new customers to experience the “value” of their purchase. Which means accelerating Time-to-Value (TTV) = 🎉. And any hiccups that delay value realization = 😬.
While this may seem pretty straightforward, the problem is “value” is often a subjective metric that can vary greatly from team to team and customer to customer. So, where does this leave onboarding teams? Short answer: in a tough spot.
Now, because TTV data is often based on customer usage and generally more representative of product efficacy…
Baton has introduced an implementation specific metric to the mix – Time-to-Launch (TTL)
Sorry to bury the lede, but TTL is the basis of a new feature that will allow Baton customers to easily track trends in implementation times in-platform and will, over time, provide tangible data points from project start to customer go-live.
So, what does measuring Time-To-Launch help solve?
Short answer: Calculating trends in time-to-launch will help implementation teams out of that tough spot we discussed above.
In more detail, because Time-to-Launch is an objective metric that will always precede Time-to-Value (you can’t reap the benefits of your investment if your project fails to launch), measuring TTL over time will provide a concrete way to track the performance of a keystone metric in the way your teams want.
With the addition of TTL metrics in Baton, you can now calculate, store, track, and report on a key metric in the customer journey–based on whatever your team’s individualized criteria – for start to end on a project, milestone, or task.
The start date can be configured based on the start or started date of a project, a specific milestone or task date within a project, a custom field, or custom date selected by your team. Similarly, the end date can be configured as the project due or completed date, a specific milestone or task date, a custom field, or a specified date chosen by your team. This gives Baton the flexibility to tailor TTL data to what matters most to your team.
Why does measuring Time-To-Launch matter?
Anyone who’s spent 5 minutes on LinkedIn this year already knows — software spend is under the microscope.
In a 2022 poll, Fifty-seven percent of IT teams told Workato they’re under pressure to reduce SaaS spend. Moreover, customers are putting 53% more toward licensing than they were five years ago, the survey found, with $1 in every $8 that enterprises spend today going into SaaS products.
Shrinking budgets put added pressure on implementation teams to get newly “closed” deals implemented as quickly as possible. We’ve all experienced buyer’s remorse in one way or another, and a complex and lengthy implementation process can cause buyers to question their purchase and back out of that “closed” deal before they waste more of their time and already scarce budget.
If you can get your implementation process running smoothly, you’ll be more likely to close new deals and less likely to experience failure-to-launch churn. Tracking time-to-launch is the key to delivering a consistent and reliable implementation experience.
Win the deployed dollars this year
Companies with a standardized and fast implementation process will win in 2023. That is because implementation (onboarding) is one of the most crucial parts of the customer journey.
It is no secret that decreasing Time-to-Value plays a huge role in retention and keeping the deals you win. And our experience over thousands of implementations has informed our opinion that measuring and ideally reducing Time-to-Launch is a critical step in your customers getting to “value.”
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Time-to-Value is difficult to define. If sales quotas, engineering points, and marketing leads are like lines and dots used to measure the effectiveness of those teams, “value” is like a shapeshifting blob used to measure services teams. So Time-to-Launch is Baton’s way of turning feel into real– or at the very least the start of something real.
You may know exactly what date, task, or milestone signifies the start or end of an implementation, or you may not. The point isn’t to be perfect right away. The point is to have a real way to get off the starting blocks and begin naming what your implementation team is solving for.
Now that you have named it, you can officially start to tame it.
Dr. Dan Siegel coined the phrase “name it to tame it.” It’s a simplified description of the science of naming emotions (anxiety, fear, etc.) in order to reduce or ‘tame’ their effects.
So, what does this have to do with customer onboarding and implementation? Well, besides the mental health benefit of implementing this strategy when diffusing stressful customer engagements, it’s a good metaphor for improving your onboarding process.
Once you’ve ‘named’ or identified any breakdowns or bottlenecks within your implementation process, it’s time to implement a solution to ‘tame’ the beast and win over your customers from the start. To help, we put together four strategies for improving your implementation process and decreasing Time-to-Value in a video linked here.
Baton is purpose-built to standardize, accelerate, and scale these practices.
