What is Time to Value (TTV)?

Time to value (TTV) is the time between a customer signing up or signing a contract and the moment they get the first result they bought the product for, and customer success teams use it to judge onboarding.

At a glance

• Formula: TTV = date of the first value event minus date of signing (or signup, for self-serve products).
• The hard part is defining the value event. It should be an outcome the customer cares about, not a setup step.
• Gainsight’s guide calls it the time to “first meaningful outcome”. Appcues suggests tracking it next to activation rate and onboarding completion.
• It’s a leading indicator. A customer who never reaches first value is unlikely to renew.
• Gainsight wrote in 2020 that it cut its own TTV by 66%, based on more than 1,000 implementations.

How to measure time to value

Pick one first-value event per product or segment, and make it something the customer would recognize as a result. For a payments product it might be the first payment processed. For a fleet tracking product, the first week of trucks reporting location. For a sales tool, the first meeting booked through it. “Account created” or “training completed” are steps on the way, not value.

Then log the date of that event on the customer record and report TTV as a median by cohort, segment and onboarding owner. The median matters more than the average, because a few stuck accounts can drag an average out by months.

Example (illustrative): a software company signs 20 customers in March. Fifteen reach the first value event, their first invoice sent through the product, with a median of 24 days. Five still haven’t after 60 days, and four of those never got their accounting system connected. The fix is a connection call in week one, not more training.

Common time-to-value mistakes

• Measuring go-live instead of value. A customer can be fully set up and still get nothing from the product.
• No agreed definition at the sale. If sales and the customer never agreed what success looks like, onboarding has no target.
• One TTV for every customer. A 10-seat account and a 500-seat rollout need different value events.
• Reporting it once a year. TTV is most useful weekly, by cohort, while there is still time to help the accounts that are behind.
• Ignoring the stuck accounts. The customers who haven’t reached value yet are your next logo churn.

How time to value shows up in a revenue system

TTV sits at the handoff between sales and onboarding, and it shapes churn rate and net revenue retention later. At AtoB, after we built and ran the small-business sales organization, AtoB asked us to build the customer-facing side too: support, collections, onboarding and QA. Read how the AtoB customer team runs.

Terms that sit next to time to value

TTV is one of the inputs to a customer health score. In product-led growth, where users try the product before talking to anyone, it often decides whether a free user becomes a paying one.