How Does CLG Improve the First 90 Days?
Customer-Led Growth (CLG) turns your first 90 days with a new customer into a guided path to value, not a scramble to implement. By grounding onboarding in customer insight—goals, use cases, and success metrics—you shorten time-to-value, increase adoption, and set up long-term revenue growth from day one.
CLG improves the first 90 days by building onboarding around the customer’s definition of success, not your internal handoff checklist. You use customer insight to clarify outcomes, prioritize use cases, and design a 90-day value plan that orchestrates marketing, sales, CS, and product. With CLG, every interaction—from welcome emails to executive check-ins—is tied to clear milestones, adoption behaviors, and revenue goals, dramatically increasing activation, satisfaction, and expansion potential.
What Matters for CLG in the First 90 Days?
The CLG First 90 Days Playbook
Use this sequence to turn the first 90 days into a predictable engine for adoption, value realization, and long-term revenue impact.
Discover → Define → Design → Orchestrate → Measure → Optimize → Scale
- Discover customer truth: Capture why they bought, what success looks like, timelines, risks, and constraints. Use CLG methods—interviews, discovery workshops, existing customer patterns—to form a clear success hypothesis for the first 90 days.
- Define a 90-day value plan: Co-create a simple plan with your customer that includes business outcomes, key use cases, roles, and milestones (e.g., go-live date, first reporting insight, first executive readout).
- Design journey-aligned experiences: Map the first 90 days into phases (kickoff, configuration, activation, optimization) and align emails, in-app guidance, training, and community invitations to each phase.
- Orchestrate cross-functional plays: Coordinate marketing nurture streams, CS touchpoints, sales check-ins, and product education so the customer experiences a single, coherent journey—not disjointed outreach.
- Measure adoption and value signals: Track product usage, engagement with enablement, meeting cadence, and leading indicators of value. Use a revenue marketing dashboard to visualize progress and risks in the first 90 days.
- Optimize with customer feedback: Host 30/60/90-day checkpoints to confirm what’s working, where friction exists, and what needs to change. Feed this back into your CLG insights and play design.
- Scale successful plays: Turn your best 90-day journeys into documented playbooks, templates, and automations—so every new customer benefits from proven CLG-led onboarding.
First 90 Days CLG Maturity Matrix
| Capability | From (Reactive Onboarding) | To (Customer-Led First 90 Days) | Owner | Primary KPI |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Customer Insight | Generic onboarding checklist | CLG insights (goals, use cases, constraints) captured and shared before kickoff | Sales & CS | Insight Completeness at Day 0 |
| 90-Day Planning | No formal 90-day plan | Standardized, co-created 30/60/90 plan for every new customer | Customer Success | % of Accounts with 90-Day Plan |
| Journey Design | Ad hoc touchpoints | Mapped journeys with CLG-informed content and plays for each phase | Revenue Marketing | Time-to-First-Value |
| Metrics & Dashboards | Basic product usage reports | Revenue marketing dashboards linking adoption in first 90 days to pipeline and revenue | Marketing Ops / RevOps | 90-Day Adoption & Health Scores |
| Cross-Functional Rhythm | Inconsistent internal coordination | Regular 90-day review cadences across Marketing, Sales, CS, and Product | CRO / CCO | 90-Day Retention & Expansion Signals |
| CLG Feedback Loop | Feedback stored in silos | Insights from first 90 days feed ICPs, messaging, and playbooks | Strategy / CX | Rate of Playbook Improvements |
Client Snapshot: Aligning Around the First 90 Days
A leading B2B organization modernized lead management and revenue marketing, then extended those disciplines into the first 90 days of the customer lifecycle. By grounding onboarding in customer-defined outcomes and connecting activity to revenue metrics, they improved adoption, shortened time-to-value, and created clearer line of sight from marketing to long-term revenue impact. Explore how this kind of alignment can look in practice in the Comcast Business Case Study.
When you apply CLG to the first 90 days, onboarding stops being a box to check and becomes a strategic revenue moment. You don’t just “get customers live”—you prove value quickly, build advocacy, and lay the foundation for expansion and long-term revenue marketing performance.
Frequently Asked Questions about CLG and the First 90 Days
Make the First 90 Days Your CLG Advantage
We help revenue marketing and customer teams design CLG-led first 90-day journeys that improve adoption, retention, and long-term revenue performance.
Get the Revenue Marketing eGuide Take the Revenue Marketing Assessment (RM6)