The first few months of a customer’s journey with your product can make or break your relationship. Yet, many companies miss the mark by focusing solely on the full implementation rather than delivering immediate benefits. Customers often experience delays and frustration during onboarding, leading to the "trough of disillusionment." This period of doubt and disengagement is the number one reason customers leave within the first year—they fail to gain value from your product.
Quick wins are the antidote. By delivering achievable nuggets of value early, you build trust, momentum, and loyalty while ensuring customers stay engaged throughout the onboarding process. This article explores what quick wins are, why they matter, and how to implement them effectively.
The Trough of Disillusionment
The consequence of long and rigid deployments is that customers fall into the “trough of disillusionment” during the most important part of the customer journey: during onboarding. Even though expectations may start high from a great experience during the buyer journey, when implementations drag out, your customers quickly fall into the “trough of disillusionment,” shown in the image below.
Customers don’t want to fall into troughs. And you can’t afford delayed value delivery, and frustrated customers that end up ghosting you at best, and pausing and canceling their subscriptions at worst. The costs are huge when new customers pause and cancel their subscriptions. Not only do you pour money into acquiring and onboarding new customers, but you also lose the potential compounding revenue your company relies on over a customer lifetime with you. Since speed is of utmost importance during onboarding, it’s important to rapidly drive customers to value with your product, even when the product isn’t fully implemented.
What are quick wins?
Rather than just going live with your product, what if you focused on delivering value as quickly as possible? Quick wins are achievable nuggets of value you deliver to customers within days or weeks after the contract is signed. Quick wins make your solution useful to new customers even before everything is fully integrated, migrated, customized, and deployed.
Starting with quick wins sets your teams and your customers on the right footing from day one, even when your products take months to fully deploy. Quick wins are so important because accelerated time to first value reduces churn, increases revenue, and improves revenue recognition.
Quick wins benefit both customers and the teams supporting them. They deliver immediate satisfaction at the beginning of the customer relationship where it’s most needed and most expected. Quick wins help your customers look good and celebrate initial successes with your product, even during the implementation stage. They allow teams on the customer side to show progress to their stakeholders. As a result, buyers are grateful they purchased your product, rather than stuck in buyer’s remorse and doubt. You gain by keeping customers accountable and staying strategic. When customers feel accomplished with your solution right away, you’re on the road to customer loyalty and success.
5 Benefits of Quick Wins
Every time a person receives meaningful value, their brain releases a feel-good chemical, called endorphin
When customers feel good about working with you, they stay engaged even throughout long and complex implementations
Since customers don’t fall into the trough of disillusionment, you don’t have to fight to win back their love
Customer teams demonstrate immediate value to their sponsors and stakeholders, reducing paused and cancelled payments
Customers are more loyal, with increased retention and expansion
Examples of Quick Wins
Quick wins can be as simple as comparing the customer’s legacy system to your solution and articulating to the users how and why to make the change. During my Orchestrated Onboarding® Masterclass, participants devised these quick wins: posting the first job description during the Kickoff meeting, setting up initial workflows and projects rapidly, and providing meaningful reports within two weeks of deal close. Supplying prototypes of the branded and customized solution are also quick wins, as well as anything that gets people excited and grateful to be working with you.
Here's a use case from a software company I worked with. Leadership brought me in because their customers, real estate agents, were pausing and canceling payments during the first 30 days, costing my client over $500,000 every year. During the sales journey customers were promised access to their customized website and CRM in 30 days but often waited twice as long. Rather than delaying customer engagement until the end of implementation, we deployed a quick win, during the implementation. Value now starts in week one. New customers unite with their dedicated Customer Success Managers, and immediately receive strategic coaching and access to exclusive content to ensure they thrive the moment they log in. The result: No more paused and canceled payments.
How to create quick wins.
Consider the concepts, contexts, and mindsets your customers crave when they transition to your solution. Start by defining one quick win that aligns with what you learn. Then, pilot the quick win with a small group of new customers to find out how it works for them. Once you have a functioning quick win, create assets and playbooks to make it consistent across all CSMs and customers. Eventually, you can build out a menu of quick wins, leveraging what you learned from the first one.
After quick wins are working well, scale the approach. Consider aligning training—self-paced or instructor led—to guide users to common quick wins, to avoid CSMs having to do all the work. For example, if a quick win is to create a report that drives actionable insights, make sure your content covers how to create the reports. An additional service might be a consulting package to customize reports.
What’s the difference between quick wins and first value?
I get a lot of questions asking about the difference between quick wins and first value. While quick wins are morsels of value, ideally delivered in days or weeks, first value is a measurable deliverable, usually within your product, like an initial use case once your product is deployed. Quicks wins are about producing an emotional impact and creating wins for teams to celebrate. Since first value usually relies on the product being live, they take longer to deliver than quick wins and less time than delivering a full return on investment.
How to roll out quick wins
Listen to your customers. Find out where they are struggling in the first days and weeks of working with you and what would help them flourish the moment your product goes live
Define one quick win. Create a win that aligns with the wins your customers need.
Design the new win: Pilot the quick win with a small group of new customers.
Execute with all your customers. Build assets and playbooks to make it consistent across all CSMs and customers.
Scale the approach. Produce scalable content to enable new customers.
Ready to thrive?
Quick wins are transformative for both customers and your organization. By delivering meaningful value within days or weeks, you foster trust, engagement, and satisfaction while avoiding costly churn. Listening to your customers’ needs, starting simple, and scaling proven wins ensures success at every stage of the onboarding journey.
The secret to customer loyalty isn’t just about going live—it’s about delivering success early and often. Quick wins set the foundation for long-term partnerships that benefit both your customers and your company. Start today, and watch your customers and business thrive.
Need help creating and deploying quick wins? Let me know. I’m here to help you.
DONNA WEBER is the world’s leading expert in customer onboarding. For more than two decades, she has helped high-growth startups and established enterprises turn new and existing customers into loyal champions. Her award-winning book is Onboarding Matters: How Successful Companies Transform New Customers Into Loyal Champions. Learn more at donnaweber.com.