It depends on the product. I work on a highly customizable SaaS product and onboarding and setup is the real cost. The guy who says "I can do it myself."...is pretty much the worst customer ever, because he probably doesn't know what he wants and doesn't know his own business process. For a lot of our customers just the implementation is an exploration of their own current processes "Well I guess we do that...". Now…
Hey @duxup what does the onboarding process look like for your product today? Does your sales team bake onboarding into the sales process so that certain elements of onboarding are being done as a deal progresses?
Sales basically takes the initial call(s) with the customer, gets a feel for what that customer does and what their processes look like. Then they do some some rough estimates to give the customer a feel for the costs involved and ways of handling those processes.
True onboarding happens after we've gone a ways into actual implementation (contracts signed) and then they start "testing" and really using our systems.
The reason for it being so late is that the system / and our customers all involve such heavily customized processes that ... there's not much use out of the box for most customers / they wouldn't want to use it that way.
I don't know if anyone is really onboarded until the rubber hits the road ;)