Customer onboarding and implementation

The period between signature and first real use is where the largest share of preventable churn is created, and where a customer's opinion of the product is formed permanently.

Agree what live means before the contract is signed

The most common implementation failure happens in the sales cycle: nobody wrote down what success would look like, so the project has no finish line and every party quietly holds a different one.

Define the go-live criteria concretely, which teams, doing what, with what data in place, along with the date, who does what on each side, and what the customer must supply. Put it in the contract or an agreed plan before the deal closes, not after.

Sales commitments become implementation scope. If a deal was won on something the product does not do yet, the implementation team inherits it. Route that decision back to whoever can make it rather than absorbing it silently.

Plan the implementation as a project with a customer-side owner

Nothing predicts implementation failure like the absence of a named, empowered owner on the customer side. They need authority to make decisions and time genuinely allocated. If the customer cannot name that person, the project is at risk before it starts, and saying so early is a service.

Set a cadence from the beginning and hold it, a stalled implementation almost never announces itself; the calls quietly stop being attended.

Sequence for early value, not for completeness

Get one team doing one useful thing quickly, then widen. A phased approach produces a customer who has seen the product work, which changes every subsequent conversation.

The alternative, configure everything, migrate everything, launch to everyone, pushes all the value past a long window during which nothing works and the sponsor is defending the purchase.

Data and integrations are where the time actually goes