✨How CS Pros Help New Customers Find Value Faster (Part 1)✨
TL;DR: By aligning early with sales and defining what “first value” truly looks like, James and Veronica helped customers take meaningful actions faster, turning early momentum into long-term success.
First impressions matter. And in Customer Success, so does first value.
This week on Cracking the CS Code, I asked CS pros Veronica Iermieri, James Quinlan, Andrea Bumstead, Vice President of Customer Success and Parul Vij Chopra to share one winning strategy they’ve used to shorten time-to-first-value and build lasting momentum with new customers.
This is what I learnt:
Aligning with sales and starting onboarding prep before the deal is signed can significantly reduce time-to-first-value by removing early blockers and building early momentum.
Defining meaningful first-value actions, then guiding customers to take them faster, can turn early engagement into long-term product adoption.
PS: This week, the focus will be on James & Veronica’s strategy. Next week, Parul and Andrea’s strategy will be the focus.
Veronica
One strategy Veronica used to reduce Time-to-First-Value (TTFV) was to begin implementation planning before the deal was officially signed:
“When we had strong signals that a deal was closing—like procurement being the only step left—I’d align early with the account executive to kick off onboarding prep. This included scheduling the onboarding call, sharing pre-read documents, and identifying the core project team on both sides: our internal experts and the customer’s key stakeholders.
By the time the contract was signed, we had already removed blockers and made meaningful progress, so the customer could begin realizing value almost immediately.”
This approach helped address one of the most common causes of delayed value: a lack of ownership or resource constraints on the customer side. In industries like banking, where internal approvals are rigorous and timelines stretch, every week counts. Early engagement allowed Veronica and her team to spot potential bottlenecks—like change management, IT readiness, or legal reviews—before they became roadblocks.
She notes that this strategy required close cross-functional alignment:
“Collaborating with sales during the pre-sales phase ensured we weren’t duplicating conversations and had a shared understanding of the customer’s environment and success criteria. I also worked closely with solution consultants to anticipate technical hurdles and design the right onboarding experience.”
The result? A smoother implementation, less friction, and faster activation. More importantly, customers saw value sooner, which built confidence, deepened engagement, and laid the groundwork for long-term success.
James
When building the onboarding program for new customers at Hotjar, James and his team made reducing Time-to-First-Value (TTFV) a key focus. They partnered with product and data teams to identify early feature adoption patterns that correlated with long-term engagement and meaningful value.
“Our ‘first value’ metric went beyond just viewing an insight. We looked for signs of deeper engagement with the product, like:
Sharing a heatmap highlight
Sharing a recording highlight
Sending a message from Slack or Zapier
Sending User Attributes to Hotjar
Sending an Event to Hotjar
Any of these actions showed that the customer didn’t just find value—they acted on it, either by sharing insights with their team or connecting Hotjar to other tools.”
This became the foundation for their first iteration of defining ‘first value.’ From there, the team created onboarding playbooks to help CSMs guide customers toward the specific actions most relevant to their use cases.
They also tracked how long it took for new customers to complete one of these key actions after onboarding began. With that insight, they looked for ways to shorten the time it took to reach those milestones, ultimately creating a measurable approach to reduce TTFV and build stronger product adoption from day one.
See you next week for the final part of this series on TTFV.
