A 30/60/90 day plan is one of the most effective modern tools for organizations, employers, and employees to hit the ground running and make a strong first impression. It is a powerful retention strategy that is often ignored by businesses because they treat the 30/60/90 plan as a purely internal HR exercise.

In reality, the best 30-60-90 day plans are the ones that connect individual performance directly to customer outcomes. Every role in an organization, from sales to support to leadership, ultimately exists to acquire, retain, and grow customers.

In this comprehensive guide, you’ll learn exactly what a 30 60 90 day plan is, how to write one that actually drives results, and get ready-to-use templates with real-world examples. You’ll also discover how structured onboarding plans directly impact both employee and customer retention and churn, which are metrics that are far more connected than most companies realize.

Table of Contents

What is a 30/60/90 Day Plan?

A 30/60/90 day plan is a structured document that includes specific goals, priorities, and milestones for the first three months in a new role. As the name suggests, the plan divides your first 90 days into three key phases:

  • Days 1–30 (Learning Phase): This period involves collecting key information, understanding the company culture, learning the product, meeting stakeholders, and studying your customers.
  • Days 31–60 (Contributing Phase): You start applying what you’ve learned and take ownership of responsibilities to deliver results that create real impact for the customers.
  • Days 61–90 (Leading Phase): You become capable of operating independently to optimize company processes and demonstrate measurable impact on key business metrics, along with setting long-term goals.

Origin of 30/60/90 Day Plan

The concept of the 30/60/90 plan was first introduced for sales professionals as a way to structure their ramp-up period, but it eventually extended to leaders and executives. Michael Watkins’ influential book The First 90 Days gave the plan widespread recognition across different roles and types of organizations

Now the 30-60-90 day plan is considered to be a foundation of onboarding at every level of an organization. The real advantage of a 30 60 90 day plan is its flexibility.

It works whether you’re an individual contributor, a customer success manager, or a C-suite. The overall structure of the 30-60-90 day document stays the same, but specific goals and metrics are modified as per your role.

Why Every New Role Needs a 30/60/90 Day Plan?

While the 30/60/90 plan started as a way of effective onboarding for new employees, it is now important not just for a business’s internal workings, but also for the customer side of an organization.

Here’s why structured planning during your first 90 days is vital for everyone involved:

For New Employees

  • Minimizes anxiety by providing clear direction about the responsibilities and expectations.
  • Speeds up time-to-productivity to help employees contribute meaningful work faster.
  • Demonstrates initiative and understanding of how your role aligns with business goals.
  • Creates accountability by setting benchmarks and metrics.

For Managers and Leaders

  • Set up a framework to make strategic decisions without rushing into changes.
  • Builds trust with your new team.
  • Helps identify quick wins that establish credibility.
  • Sets the foundation for long-term team performance.

For Organizations

  • Structured onboarding with clear flows reduces early-stage employee turnover.
  • When new hires can start producing and adding value within 90 days, they’re more engaged, more satisfied, and less likely to leave.
  • Clear expectations to reduce miscommunication and accelerate team integration.

For Customers

A lot of companies overlook this important part. Every time a company hires someone for a customer-facing role, such as sales, support, customer success, or account management, there’s a gap between their start date and the day they can truly serve your customers well.

A well-designed 30/60/90 plan is necessary to bridge that gap, which results in:

  • Customers get fewer handoff disruptions.
  • New hires build product knowledge and client relationships faster.
  • Retention metrics stay stable even during periods of turnover.

How to Write a 30 60 90 Day Plan (Step-by-Step)?

You don’t need to use any complicated template or spend hours of work in writing an effective 30/60/90 plan. Instead, you can follow these simple steps to create a plan that’s clear and effective.

Step 1: Research the Role, Company, and Customers

Before writing anything, collect as much information as possible. This step involves reviewing the job description, company website, and any other available material.

At this stage, you should study the customer critically to make their detailed profiles by answering questions like:

  • Who are your target customers?
  • What are their pain points?
  • What does the customer journey look like?
  • What are the current retention and churn metrics?

On the employee side, you should research internal documentation, customer health dashboards, churn reports, NPS feedback, and past performance reviews.

Step 2: Define Your Goal

A critical question you must answer is: What does success look like at the end of 90 days? This is your North Star.

Some of the common goals for different roles can be:

  • Customer Success Leader: “Create a customer health scoring framework to minimize at-risk accounts by 15%.”
  • Sales Rep: “Build a qualified pipeline of $500K.”
  • Manager: “Establish trust with every direct report and identify the team’s top three bottlenecks.”

Step 3: Break Down Each 30-Day Phase

The 30-day period itself should be divided into specific phases, including:

  • Focus area: What’s the primary theme? (Learning, contributing, or leading)
  • Specific and measurable goals: Set 3–5 measurable objectives
  • Key actions: The exact steps you’ll take to achieve each goal.
  • Success metrics: How will you know you’ve succeeded?
  • Customer connection: How does a goal ultimately impact customer experience?
  • Resources needed: Tools, access, or training required.

Step 4: Align with Your Manager

The most effective 30-60-90 day plans are built via collaboration. It involves alignment between the new hire, their direct manager, and the broader organization’s team. So, you should schedule a meeting with your manager to review your draft plan. Employees can ask questions like: “What would a home run look like in my first 90 days?” and “What are the biggest customer challenges I should understand early?” to understand the company’s expectations and work accordingly to achieve optimum success.

Step 5: Build in Review Checkpoints

Set formal review meetings at the 30-day, 60-day, and 90-day marks. These meetings are vital to adjust the plan based on what you’ve learned, get feedback, and demonstrate progress. You can also use these vital checkpoints to share not just what you’ve done, but what you’ve learned about customers and the business.

Step 6: Keep It Concise

Overall, the 30-60-90 plan should be concise and simple to understand. Ideally, this plan should fit on 1–2 pages. You must avoid overloading it with too many goals. Generally, three to five objectives per phase is the sweet spot. Remember that at the end of the day, a plan you actually follow beats a detailed plan that sits in a drawer.

30/60/90 Day Plan Template

You can use this detailed and universal 30 60 90 day plan template as a starting point.

Phase 1: Days 1–30 - Learn & Absorb

ElementDetails
FocusLearn and explore the company, team, product, and customers to understand expectations
GoalsComplete onboarding by performing steps like meeting all key stakeholders, understanding team workflows, learning core tools, and studying pain points
ActionsAttend all orientation sessions and schedule 1:1s with cross-functional partners, along with reviewing customer data
Metrics100% onboarding completion with 1:1s with all direct stakeholders

Phase 2: Days 31–60 - Contribute & Execute

ElementDetails
FocusApply the gathered knowledge to take ownership and deliver actual results
GoalsLead your own specific projects and contribute to team meetings with data-backed insights
ActionsLead a small project and collaborate cross-functionally
MetricsAt least one completed deliverable

Phase 3: Days 61–90 - Lead & Optimize

ElementDetails
FocusOperate independently and create goals to maximize your impact
GoalsProvide measurable results related to customer outcomes, such as churn reduction
ActionsPresent a 90-day review to your manager and share your wins across the organization
MetricsDraft measurable KPI improvements and a documented 6-month roadmap of your vision

30-60-90 Day Plan for Marketing Managers

The 30-60-90 day template in the previous section can be used as a universal framework. However, the exact framework and goals are ultimately dependent on your role.

Let’s look at an example of how a marketing manager can implement the 30/60/90 plan to improve marketing and sales:

Days 1–30

  • Audit existing marketing channels and campaigns to analyze current performance metrics
  • Conduct meetings with teams like sales and customer success to understand brand messaging and user feedback
  • Review brand guidelines and marketing tech stack to understand what works and what does not.
  • Study customer personas and the common reasons customers churn

Days 31–60

  • Launch one new marketing campaign and A/B test on the basis of audit findings
  • Implement a content strategy improvement, e.g., SEO optimization, and produce more retention-focused content
  • Establish performance reporting related to customer metrics

Days 61–90

  • Present a complete marketing strategy for the next quarter
  • Demonstrate measurable improvement in at least one key metric, such as leads or traffic
  • Build a repeatable process for successful campaign planning and execution aligning with customer lifecycle stages

30-60-90 Day Plan for Customer Success Leaders

Anyone taking on a customer success leadership role is expected to inspire a team, learn the product inside and out, and show impact on retention metrics before the next board meeting. Hence, this is the part where the 30/60/90 framework becomes a direct customer retention strategy.

Here’s a well-crafted 30-60-90 day plan that customer success leaders, solo founders, and executives can use to reduce churn:

Days 1–30: Listen, Learn, and Build Trust

Your job during the first 30 days is to listen to your team, your customers, and your colleagues. You don’t have to jump into the solution mode just yet. Instead, focus on aspects like:

  • Understand your customers: Analyze customer health data, read churn reasons, review NPS feedback, and talk directly with customers across segments.
  • Meet with your team: Conduct 1:1s with every team member to learn about their career goals, challenges, and their feedback about the product you are selling.
  • Map the customer journey: Review lifecycle stages, onboarding processes, success plans, and renewal workflows to identify gaps and inconsistencies.
  • Get to know your peers: Meet with stakeholders in sales, product, engineering, marketing, support, and RevOps to understand how each team works.
  • Build credibility: Share your leadership philosophy. You should always be transparent in listening mode. Don’t provide detailed solutions yet, but start identifying opportunities for small wins.

Deliverables by Day 30:

  • A summary of the current state, including what’s working, what’s broken, key pain points.
  • Relationship maps of your team and cross-functional stakeholders to understand the current team organization.
  • A preliminary list of opportunities that you can divide into quick wins and longer-term goals.

Days 31–60: Plan, Prioritize, and Align

By this stage, you should know enough about the product and customers, so you can shift from discovery to planning. Using what you’ve learned in the previous 30 days, turn your knowledge into an actionable roadmap by following these steps:

  • Define your CS vision: Based on your findings, create a vision for what customer success should look like as per company goals, culture, and ideal customer outcomes.
  • Identify team structure needs: Determine whether you need to hire, restructure, or add new roles within your team to achieve your vision.
  • Refine the customer journey: Start mapping a future-state customer lifecycle that has clear stages and outcomes. Keep the customer journey map flexible, so it can evolve with your customers, products, and competitors.
  • Partner with operations: Work with CS Ops or any other relevant team to evaluate core metrics, including Net Revenue Retention (NRR), Gross Revenue Retention (GRR), NPS, onboarding duration, and other such key metrics.
  • Build your roadmap: Create a roadmap of what you want to achieve in the next 6–12 months. This can include technology improvements, marketing process changes, program launches, and any other new strategies.
  • Start small: It is better to start by identifying one or two process changes you can implement quickly instead of complete overhauls during this period. Also, you should always communicate progress and early results to the concerned higher-ups.

Deliverables by Day 60:

  • A documented customer success strategy.
  • An updated chart of the team, if you have made any changes.
  • A revised customer journey map to match your workflows.
  • A prioritized 6–12 month roadmap, including long-term goals and expectations.

Days 61–90: Execute, Scale, and Share Results

Using the detailed roadmap you created, you should put the key elements into action at this stage. It is expected that you’ll have strong knowledge about the company and customers by this stage, so you will be in a very good position to make informed decisions.

Here are the key things to do at this stage:

  • Implement new programs: Introduce your highest-priority changes that can range from a new onboarding framework and health score formula to or new retention and cancellation flow.
  • Measure key metrics: Create the relevant dashboards to track leading indicators, such as customer health, engagement trends, and churn risk in real time.
  • Train your team: Run training sessions to support the proper implementation of new workflows.
  • Formalize customer feedback loops: Build mechanisms to capture, analyze, and act on customer insights. Focus on closing the loop on NPS surveys, structured feedback sessions, and cancellation reasons to improve results.
  • Communicate success: Share wins with your team and across the organization as transparency is necessary to build credibility and also inspire others through the value of your changes.
  • Refine and adapt: Gather feedback as you execute your new strategies. Be open to iterating based on what you learn to get the best results.

Deliverables by Day 90

  • A complete list of executed strategies and program launches.
  • KPI dashboards to track retention, churn, and overall customer health.
  • A feedback summary from your team as well customers.
  • A concise document for leadership to track early progress, learnings, and next steps.

Common Mistakes to Avoid in the 30-60-90 Days Plan

Even with a great template and well-crafted document, many people can stumble during their first 90 days. Here are the most common pitfalls and how to avoid them:

  • Setting Too Many Goals: You don’t have to accomplish everything at once as it lead to accomplishing nothing well. So, stick to 3–5 goals per phase and execute them properly.
  • Skipping the Learning Phase: Temptation to make immediate changes before understanding the context can be strong, especially in executive roles. Plus, it can alienate your team. So, be transparent that you’re in listening mode first.
  • Working in Isolation: Remember that a 30/60/90 plan is not a solo project. The most effective plans are built collaboratively and with alignment between the employee, management, and customer’s expectations.
  • Being Too Vague: “Learn the product” is not a clear goal. Instead, “Complete product certification and deliver 2 practice demos to my manager by Day 25” is a goal. Focus on crafting SMART goals for every phase.
  • Not Documenting Progress: Keep a log of what you’ve accomplished, learned, and delivered is vital for your internal usage as well as during performance reviews.
  • Ignoring the Customer Angle: This is the mistake that separates good 30-60-90 day plans from great ones. Every goal in your 30/60/90 plan should connect, directly or indirectly, to customer outcomes.
  • Treating It as a Static Document: Your 30-60-day plan should evolve with your learning. Use such plans as living documents that can adapt based on what you discover during your first weeks.

Final Thoughts

The bottom line is that a 30/60/90 day plan is not just a document you write for an interview or your first week on the job. It’s a mindset that shows commitment to a structured and intentional growth in every new role you take on.

Whether you’re creating a 30-60-90 day plan for a leadership position, a 30 60 90 day sales plan, a customer success strategy, or a new employee 30-60-90 day onboarding plan template for your team, the principles are the same: learn first, then contribute, then lead. And most importantly, make sure that at every phase you are keeping the customers at the very center of your thinking.

Ultimately, with the right balance of listening, action, and iteration, you will succeed in building a high-performing team and help your company retain more customers, unlock more value, and grow stronger relationships at scale.

Key Takeaways

  • A 30/60/90 plan is a concise, but highly effective document, that divides your first 90 days into learning, contributing, and leading phases.
  • Employees should always align their plans with the manager and build formal review checkpoints at each milestone.
  • You can customize the template for your specific role, such as customer success, leadership, sales, engineering, or general onboarding.
  • It is recommended to focus on 3–5 measurable goals per phase and not 15 vague expectations.
  • The key is to connect every goal back to customer outcomes to maximize success and reduce churn
  • Structured onboarding can reduces employee churn, which in turn protects customer retention.
  • Using tools like Churnfree to complement your customer onboarding and team strategies with data-driven customer retention flows.

Ready to reduce customer churn? Just like a 30/60/90 plan can retain your best employees, Churnfree helps you retain your best customers. Start building smarter retention flows today!