Stop Calling It “Live” Until It’s Alive
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Most SaaS companies treat Time to Live (TTL) as a sprint — deal closes, logins created, integrations connected, checklists ticked.
I’ve watched it play out over and over: the onboarder races through 20 tasks, finance pops the champagne, sales gets paid, and a cheery“Congrats, you’re live!”email goes out.
The customer? Still waiting for their first win.No demos booked. No time saved. No customers engaged, or whatever your value prop is.
That's not a successful handoff —That's the moment the value promiseflatlines.
💡What TTCV Really Means
Time to Customer Value (TTCV) = the number of days from deal close to the customer’s first realized win — the earliest measurable outcome tied directly to the promise you sold them.
TTCV (days) =
First Win Date – Deal Close Date
If your pitch was “We’ll triple your booked demos,” they’re not live until they’ve booked one. Technical setup and configuration alone don’t count — value isn’t delivered until the win is real.
📈 Why Shift to TTCV
Time to Customer Value (TTCV) = the number of days from deal close to the customer’s first realized win — the earliest measurable outcome tied directly to the promise you sold them.
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🛠 Three Low-Friction Ways to Track TTCV
- Keep TTL for finance; add a simple First Win Date field in your CRM or analytics tool.
- Formula: TTCV = Deal Close → First Win Date
- One small field turns TTL into an outcome-driven metric — no extra admin.
- Tag the product action that signals a first win using (Pendo, Amplitude, or Mixpanel etc)
- Auto-sync to your CRM so it’s captured without manual updates.
- AI assist: Gainsight, Planhat, Statisfy can spot the event, update records, and trigger alerts instantly.
- At handoff, Onboarding answers one question: “Has the first win happened?”
- If yes, log the date. If no, CS owns driving to that win and recording it.
- AI assist: Gong, Ask Elephant, Avoma can scan calls for milestone mentions, track next steps, and push them into your CRM.
✅ The Payoff
When you track TTCV alongside TTL, you:
- ✅ Keep finance’s metric intact and reporting clean.
- 🎯 Give CS a finish line tied to retention, expansion, and customer advocacy — not just revenue recognition.
- 🚨 Build an early-warning system to catch lagging accounts before they churn.
