customer visit marketing

The Art of the Customer Visit: How to Plan One + Why You Should

When was the last time you visited a customer? Customer visits might seem extravagant and unnecessary on the surface.

Why not just get on a phone call or Zoom meeting? Or follow up with them via email? You could just send them a survey, or even dig into your product analytics to surface insights.

That said, if I’m talking to another entrepreneur and say something like, "It's super crucial you physically visit your customers", they all look at me as if I just said the most obvious thing in the universe.

And we’re not excluding ourselves here: We launched Close in January of 2013, but our first customer visit was more than a year later!

Some businesses put off visiting customers because it takes time, and it’s easy to push down on your long to-do list. Or, it may seem more urgent to focus on getting new customers to sign on, rather than visiting existing customers.

If this sounds like you, let’s discuss the benefits of visiting your customers, and how you can set up successful customer visits.

What Are the Benefits of Visiting Your Customers in Person?

It’s true: COVID has permanently altered the way B2B sales works. Studies by McKinsey show that companies have reduced their in-person efforts as a go-to-market strategy by more than 50 percent since the pandemic started.

That said, a decent number of B2B buyers still prefer in-person contact during the customer journey.

And this is exactly where the opportunity lies—fewer companies are vying for your customer’s attention in person. This opens the playing field for your company to perform more customer visits.

And trust me—it’s worth the effort. Here's a quick rundown of the value we got from our first customer visits.

Motivate Your Team to Serve Customers Better

Seeing real people use your product is incredibly inspiring. It energizes you. It recharges your batteries. It gives you a visceral sense of how your work actually impacts the life of your users, rather than just an intellectual understanding. It's like pouring gasoline on the fire that fuels your engine.

Everybody on your team—from the CEO to the intern—should visit a customer, for this reason alone.

It is different from hearing customers tell you how much they love your product or how great they think it is. You just have to experience customer satisfaction happening in real-time. You need to see real human beings depending on what you built. You need to witness how your product helps them to operate better, to be better at what they are doing.

The impact you make on other people's lives is a much stronger driver than any number on a spreadsheet can ever be. Do not underestimate how much this affects you. It's powerful.

Build Better Customer Relationships

Meeting someone in person adds another dimension to your relationship with your customer. You can do a lot of relationship-building via email, chat, phone, and Zoom, but nothing has the same effect as meeting someone in person. It creates a human bond between the two of you.

Jason Lemkin of SaaStr says he never lost a customer whom he had personally visited while he was CEO of EchoSign. Spending time with your customers transforms a transactional relationship into a partnership. It builds empathy on both sides, which ultimately leads to better business.

In-person customer visits are one of the best ways to build customer intimacy . It deepens the commitment on both sides. If one of the people we met needs help one day, we'll be more eager to support them. And I'm pretty sure they'll be more forgiving if there's ever an issue with Close and be more loyal to our product.

Get In-depth Product Feedback on the Customer Experience

Your customers are more than the sum of all their clicks on your product. Yes, you might be monitoring product usage and reading all the feedback people send you via email or even tell you on the phone, but you're missing a lot of crucial context if you can't see your customers using your product within their work environment.

• How exactly are they using your product?
• What's happening around them?
• What else is on their screen?
• What's competing for their attention?
• What's their workspace like?

When you visit your customers, you get to see the environment in which they use your software. You experience your product embedded into a user's workday and get a sense of the entire puzzle, rather than just a single piece of it.

And it's little things, like...

• What kind of headsets /chairs/desks are they using?
• What other software/apps are they using during their day?
• Which little hacks did they come up with to make them more productive and efficient?
• What makes them smile, and what makes them frown when interacting with your web or mobile app ?

It just gives you a better picture of what's working and what's not.

Here’s a real example: during one customer visit, we saw that the customer was using a TV to display our reporting in Close . But at the time, our reporting page wasn’t optimized for full-screen display—it looked crappy.

I remembered that one of our engineers had worked on a quick fix that would make this look better, but we had never released it. I sent a message to the team, and within an hour, this feature was released by our VP of Engineering, Phil Freo . It looked fantastic, and our customers loved it.

While visiting customers, you can gather more in-depth feedback about how they’re using your product and where they would like to see improvements in the customer experience. Product managers can then use this information to build out improvements.

Find Opportunities to Upsell

Years ago, during one customer visit, we found the customer was on a basic plan that didn’t include a specific feature. Instead, they were using a third-party provider to get this feature for their sales team.

Talking with the founder, we faced some resistance to upgrading their plan. But we gained an internal champion during that customer visit by chatting with the sales team manager. We gave him everything he needed to make the transition happen, and they soon upgraded their plan to start using this feature again.

This is the power of in-person visits—not only did the extra revenue help us, but by upgrading their plan, the customer’s success with our product was significantly increased.

Create New Case Studies and Customer Stories

Using case studies and real-life examples of how your customers use your product is an excellent digital marketing strategy and one that will help build trust in your brand.

When planning customer visits, think about the customers you may want to interview for video testimonials or case studies on your website. Having these real customer stories also helps build better marketing alignment with your ideal customers and their needs.

All of these are examples of the kinds of benefits you can get from visiting your customers. You can't predict which benefits precisely you'll get—but you will always get value from a customer visit!

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How to Plan a Client Visit That Boosts Customer Loyalty in 7 Steps

By now, you should be sufficiently motivated to actually visit your customers. But what do you say and do? How do you get the most value out of these visits? How do you prepare for them? How do you wrap them up? How do you get started when you visit their office?

1. Identify Which Customers to Visit

Whether you have 10 customers or 10,000, it’s probably not feasible to visit everyone. So, which customers should you visit?

To start, make a list of the customers who already have a good rapport with you—your partners, advocates, and overall best customers.

Next, include customers who are using your product or purchasing from you on a regular basis. Learning about how they use your products and services, or why they keep coming back to you, will be great for your team.

Finally, make sure to include the customers who consistently give you critical feedback. These customers are already pushing your team to do better, and they will likely have super valuable insights to share with you when you visit in person.

2. Decide Who You’re Meeting With

Once you know which companies you’ll visit, decide which individuals inside the company you’ll need to meet with.

First of all, you set up a meeting with the founders or CEO. That's the person you'll be officially meeting. But it's not necessarily the person you'll spend most of the time with.

For SaaS companies, focus on the person managing the team that's using your product, as well as the end-users. If you’re a service-based business, talk to the people who are mainly affected by using your services.

3. Spend Time Getting to Know the Business Beforehand

Just like when prospecting, spend time doing research before the meeting—whether that’s on social media sites like LinkedIn, on the company’s website, or in B2B databases like Crunchbase.

When you walk into that client visit, you should know exactly who you’re talking to, what kind of business they are, which customers they serve, and how your product or service fits into that workflow.

4. Prepare and Share an Agenda

Having a clear agenda for your customer visit is essential to get the most out of the time you spend with your customers.

Start by setting out the agenda for your main meetings with the C-suite and with the managers of the teams that use your product. Set up talking points: such as updates to your product pricing, or upcoming feature launches in your product. Also, leave room in the agenda for their team to add any questions or comments. Leave a clear space for them to give you feedback.

Once your customer visit agenda is prepared, share it with their team. Let them have editing access so they can include their ideas. Make sure that expectations between you and your customer are aligned before you start asking them a lot of questions. Create a setting that encourages them to discuss and share their concerns openly.

Also, make sure to discuss confidentiality. If you plan to report back to your team after your customer visit, explicitly ask them if they're fine with you sharing their business processes, revenue numbers, etc, with your team. (If not, that's fine too—you can still share the learnings, without actual specifics, with your team.)

That way, both teams will be ready to get started when the day comes.

5. Learn About the Customer Experience in Real Time

So, the day of your customer visit has finally arrived! Start by talking in general, broad terms about their business and your business. Then, progress to more specific topics and product use cases.

Be both a student and a mentor. Learn as much as you can about your customers, and look for opportunities to help them. Learn about their workflows, and your product fits into those workflows.

Here are some questions you might ask during a client visit:

• How often do you use our product?
• Which team members use our product the most? How often do they use it?
• Are there secondary users that only use our product occasionally? If so, for what? How often?
• What are your business goals?
• How do you implement our product in your daily workflow?
• What bugs have you encountered?
• What features are you missing within our product?
• What do you like most about our product?
• What do you hate about our product? Which limitations do you find particularly frustrating?
• Which metrics does your team track within our product? (Or which KPIs does our product impact for your team?)
• If our product ceased to exist tomorrow, what alternatives would you consider to replace us?
• Are there any trends or changes in the industry that could affect the way you use our product in the future?

These questions and others like them will give you a clearer picture of how your customers use your product, and how it impacts their business.

6. Ask for and Give Referrals

Visiting customers is a great opportunity to get referrals . And to refer them to others as well. Don't just limit referrals to potential customers—any reason to put them in touch with other people is fair game, as long as you can see potential value for both parties.

Sometimes we see companies serving the same audience with complementary services—that's potential for a co-marketing initiative. If you introduce two happy customers to each other, and they collaborate together, and both get a ton of value out of it, you generate a lot of goodwill, and oftentimes very vocal brand advocates.

If you have a partner program set up, try to see if the customer you’re visiting would be a good candidate for that program, and help them understand how it works and the benefits they could get.

7. Create a Customer Visit Report for Your Team

If you do conduct a customer visit, make sure to document your learnings and take note of memorable moments. Then, you can share these insights with your team.

It's important that all the insights you gain during a customer visit actually become organizational knowledge—otherwise, your customer visits are basically useless.

So, set up a structured customer visit report that your team can peruse and learn from, both now and in the future. Inside this document, note specific items that will be of interest to the different teams in your company—for example, product feedback that your product managers may want to look at, customer journey insights that the marketing team should keep in mind, or product knowledge gaps that the customer success team may need to address.

To make sure everyone in the company benefits from customer visits, we try to share some pictures or highlights from our customer visits in Slack, and then during our weekly team meeting, a team member might give a quick 2-minute summary of their customer visit.

How Often Should You Plan Customer Visits?

There's no one-size-fits-all formula. It depends on your startup, but in general: you should meet them more often than you're meeting them now.

Jason Lemkin recommends every co-founder, CEO, and Customer Success Manager should meet on-site with five customers a month.

Being able to see the environment in which your customers use your product, the atmosphere at their workplace, and talking with the people who use your product daily is always an insightful experience.

Customer visits have been a crucial market research method for traditional businesses for many decades—but they're even more crucial for startups and SMBs . Your most powerful asset when you're in a market with established, large companies is your ability to understand your customers better and focus on their needs better than a large corporation can.

Michael Seibel, Managing Director at Y Combinator, said : "If you look around the startup ecosystem, you can find too many founders who believe that famous investors + lots of employees = winning. I bet most of our VC-backed competitors feel this way, and you can use this to defeat them (they aren't talking to customers nearly enough).”

Want more insights on talking to your customers? Get my book and learn more about building customer intimacy.

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How to Conduct the Perfect Customer Visit

By Natsha Ness

Customers are the lifeblood of any organization. Whether you have the ability to meet with them face-to-face, or are required to so over Zoom due to our ever-changing reality, customer visits require intentionality. They also provide a golden opportunity to make your customers the North Star they should be – and improve literally everything about your organization as a result. Why a Customer Visit is Worth Its Weight … in Actual Gold

How do we know a customer visit is critical to success? In 2019, we conducted research into sales and marketing alignment, in partnership with DRIFT . In it, we found a significant correlation between the most aligned sales and marketing teams (which were also the most revenue-generating teams) and their focus, not only around customers-centric metrics, but also regular visits with customers.

Planning Customer Visits is Key

Sometimes customer visits are inexpensive (like when they happen on Zoom ). Still, just because you’re  remote doesn’t mean the interaction has to feel inexpensive. In fact, you can still invest in the same sorts of things you did on-site. Think about buying lunch with an UberEats code. Or sending your customers a box with a bunch of goodies for the meeting. In other words, think about how you can make the “visit” an experience.

If someone falls into your target account list, and is likely to have a strong lifetime value in your business, they’re worth visiting. But you have to first make sure there’s mutual agreement around the desired outcome of such a meeting. In other words, why are you getting together?

There could be plenty of possibilities, but three main reasons almost always necessitate a customer visit:

• You’re close to creating a proposal. If you’re about to put together a proposal, a customer visit will help you achieve the tight alignment you need to make sure what you’re offering is a good fit with what the customer needs. This will likely come after multiple discovery calls and deep dives. You’ve figured out which challenge you want to solve, and have had conversations with various people that lead you to believe it’s time to create an official proposal.
• You recently created a proposal. (My recommendation is to make the customer visit happen before the creation of the proposal, but it’s better to go after than not at all).
• Upsell. An often underutilized function of customer visits are to the folks who already invested with you, but of course, this can be leveraged to further the relationship and ensure it stays. It can also be used to uncover additional insights into other products or services that may fit additional, previously undiscovered, challenges. You can also work to prevent customer churn by conducting a customer visit.

Who should be involved in a client visit?

After the “why” comes the “who.” Who needs to attend your customer visit to achieve your desired outcome? There could be a wide variety of internal stakeholders that you want to include. You might have people from business development, marketing, analytics, general managers or directors and/or someone from the C-Suite. There should only be people there who have direct input into and/or influence over the subject matter at hand; no one extra. Once you figure out who should be there, think about each of their differing priorities. If you’re unsure of someone’s priorities, ask them in advance. This will help you show up prepared.

Then consider who should be there from your side. Again, don’t bring anyone who doesn’t have a clear role. There’s no dedicated team that should go to customer visits; it varies based on the goal and the customer. You should know what the customer cares about before you head there. This helps you decide whether you need your CEO present or whether the principal on the account is sufficient.

Before the Visit 

One of the best tips I can give you is to get all the skeletons out of the closet before you get in front of someone. For example, if your customer’s marketing leader beams about his 600 pieces of content, but the business development group complains they are out of date and impossible to find, do you want the first time the marketing leader hears that to be real-time, while you’re onsite? Trust me; you don’t. The whole meeting could go downhill fast. You can work through potential issues by asking if there will be multiple budget stakeholders in the room. If so, as it relates to this project, find out whether they will be contributing some of their budget to the meeting’s desired outcome. If so, what does that look like? These questions can help you spot any areas of potential friction before you’re ever in the room.

Preparation is Prince

The content of your meeting is king, but preparing properly to share that content is certainly a strong runner up. Make sure each attendee has a very specific role, and then prepare the right presentation. Consider the following question to guide your preparation:

• Are you sharing a slideshow? Audio? Video?
• What assets will you use before the meeting, during the meeting and after the meeting?
• How will you leverage small, breakout rooms to facilitate conversations vs. all-together, large group dynamics?
• Do you need slides, overheads, pens, markers, etc.? If so, it’s a good idea to send these ahead!
• Do you need a backup plan? For instance, what if your computers don’t work; do you have a hard copy of your presentation?

Then, it’s time to rehearse. Spend time with your team actually going through the presentation before heading to the customer. Talk about who will cover which slides, and how the flow will go. Make sure you’re bringing value to the customer and the tone of the meeting will be what they’re expecting. Finally, send over a message summarizing the purpose of getting together. I like to call this the DOGMA – Details Outlining Goals & Meeting Agenda. I tell them this is what we agreed to, and offer them a chance to come back and add to it or edit what I’ve sent.

During the Client Visit

Here are a few tips for the meeting itself:

• Watch for signs of misalignment. This often looks like one person repeatedly whispering to another, or in Zoom world, obviously Slacking. If someone is smiling during your presentation and you’re being serious, they’re probably talking about something else with someone on their computer. Even if you notice this, don’t mention it in front of the whole group. Instead, note it for later.
• What you can explore directly and immediately are the subtle expressions that indicate someone doesn’t buy into what’s being presented. If these things happen, try to draw it out so it can be addressed in the room. Don’t be afraid to just say, “Sally, it looks like you might have something to share.” If there are corporate politics involved and you can’t draw out the issue, try to have a conversation privately in person or via  a private Zoom chat. But stay in tune with all parties as much as you can by reading body language, tone of voice and so on.

Note: This insinuates that when on Zoom everyone has their camera on. Everyone should have their camera on.

• Record the meeting. Some people get weird about recordings, but having your meeting recorded can go a long way in helping you clarify issues later or capture something that even the best notetaker might miss. If you think someone might not like the idea, have a colleague dial into the meeting and record the call. You can say something like, “Peter couldn’t be here in person, but he wanted to call in.” It’s an easy, subtle way to get a recording to happen without making anyone feel uncomfortable. Enlist a dedicated note taker, but ask all attendees to take notes.
• Leverage a “Parking Lot.” If someone brings up an idea or thought that isn’t perfectly relevant to where you are in the agenda, jot it down in a “Parking Lot” that you can revisit at the end of the meeting – or afterward.
• Don’t leave the room without recapping what went on, with details and next steps. “This was our desired outcome and here are the five things we discussed. Numbers one through four have been hashed out, but we need to spend more time on number five so let’s set up a call ASAP to flesh that out more.” Make sure to spell out who owns what, and the agreed upon timeline so you set the expectation for accountability.

After the Visit

You had your meeting.  Now what? This is where you make or break the trust and credibility you worked so hard to create. I suggest sending a quick email to all involved parties, again reiterating what was discussed and the next steps. But take it a step further and get a handwritten thank-you note in the mail that same day. The content should be different – make it personal and send it out fast, and you’ll blow your customer’s socks off. Really.

After you’ve sent the customer a summary, create a customer visit report for your internal teams. A customer visit report should include:

• Action items
• Positive highlights
• Risks and opportunities
• Any other key observations and notes

Customer visit reports can also be given to clients, or sent in lieu of the email suggested above. After you’ve written up the most important information, it’s time to start taking action.

Take the lead by holding up your end of the bargain. Take care of any items for which you’re responsible, and set up any follow-up meetings that were discussed immediately. The power of a customer visit can quickly be deflated by distraction – and a lack of action – when it’s over.

How We Can Help Your Client Visit Planning

So, which customers or prospects deserve your time and attention onsite? Make a list, and get to scheduling. It’s the step you’ve been missing toward better alignment and better results too. Need support with any of these tactics? Shift Paradigm is a full-service partner for any organization that wants to stay agile in the current digital landscape. Our customer engagement services provide the complete package to keep your customers invested in your products and organization. Interested? Contact Shift Paradigm today!

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The importance of customer visits: Tools & tips

Table of contents, what are the benefits, who does it concern and why, what is a customer visit program, before the visit, during the visit, after the visit, final tips: how to simplify the customer visit.

Nowadays, with people being so connected, companies often or completely forget the importance of customer visits. A Digital tool can show you statistics, but can it actually read the true interests or intentions of a client?

The answer to that is most likely not. Usually, the more customers you gain or have to deal with, the more it is essential to keep a close relationship with them.

Wouldn’t you like to be considered more than a data or a click on an ad? I’m pretty sure you would.

Why are customer visits important?

Customers are constantly being solicited by your sales team or your competitor's. In fact, they will likely appreciate talking with a salesman who is not trying to sell goods, but instead someone who is invested in hearing about their problems and preferences. So, by meeting with them:

• It helps customers feel appreciated
• It creates a certain bond: Meeting clients in their environment shows you how they integrate your software in their workday. You’d be able to study their behavior and show them your support
• It detects needs or problems that would not have been obvious on the telephone or by e-mail
• Finally, company workers will feel more motivated as they will get honest and personal feedback of their product or service

You must keep in mind that you are not the only one soliciting that customer, it is a competitive market, so getting as much personal information as possible will keep you ahead of the game. And finally, seeing their smile and satisfaction in person can be the best reward ever.

You might want to bring your whole team such as the marketing and analytics members to the meeting but remember the goal here is not to sell but to listen and be understanding. Therefore, it should only concern the most profitable customers. And here is how to do it:

• Refer to your CRM tool and highlight, via the sales dashboard or cross tables, those who have ordered the most often or with the best average basket;
• Profile your customers. For instance, by using a progression metric, which assumes that the most interesting customers are those who have the best potential (good contact, several exchanges to date) but who have not yet made many purchases.

In a logic of cost reduction, a strategy to take into account is also the optimization of b2b sales funnel : you organize your customer visits by geographical area , and link them in order to lose as little time as possible between each appointment. 

This method can only boost your notoriety amongst customers and build customer loyalty. Because once it is done properly, it increases your efficiency to read and better understand the customer. And as it is generally said, time is money as well as of the essence.

Tips: Check out our lead generation in digital marketing and lead conversion to know how to best generate and convert lead into customer!

• The Best B2B Sales Lead Generation Strategies
• The 7 Fundamental Steps of a B2B Sales Cycle

A customer visit provides an opportunity for interaction between the parties involved to reach a settlement. Discussions may include pricing and terms, advertising, and 'team' approaches to visits. Strategizing is very essential and should not be omitted. It really gives you a true insight into a customer’s perspective.

Customer visits can be divided into four classes:

• It can be a Customer visit with the senior management team. Owners, presidents, general managers, and so on.
• A customer visit with the sales managers
• A customer visit with a team of two or more people.
• And finally, a customer visit with an individual. This could be a member of the sales management team or a sales person.

How to prepare for it?

Preparation is key as it helps with your confidence and organization.

• First step is to make an appointment with the person or people in charge.

Ask them when they will be available and set a time and date.

Make sure that each party is aware of what the meeting will be about beforehand.

Speak to them about confidentiality, that everything you report back to your team will be done with their consent.

• On your end, if you haven’t already, keep studying your customer.

See what has changed in the use of the product from now up until the day of the meeting. Study their company, visit their website to know more about their products, services, and their world. Build a client portfolio or a persona. 

It will help you personalize the interview with a guaranteed effect!

Make sure each attendee on your team knows their role.

Review and reread your files as well as the history of exchanges and purchases, if applicable, to have all the keys in hand.

Do not forget to have a backup plan. It shows your professionalism in case something goes wrong.

Pay attention to CAC customer acquisition cost and customer lifetime value calculation to balance your fee.  

Once every concerned individual is informed about the meeting, this is where you get into the gist of things.

Start off with light conversations, then get to the purpose of the meeting.

Make them feel comfortable. You do not want to seem too keen to get down to business.

Keep in mind that this is a mutual agreement, so the customer or client won’t run away. Nevertheless, here are a few topics you can do and speak about:

• Be at the same time the student and the mentor. Pay attention to them as well as try to find the best solution to their problem.
• Get to know what their daily work life looks like. Ask open-ended questions. Allow the customer to take the lead and talk.
• If possible, focus on who uses your products or services more. And if so, how often and what are the main reasons?
• Once you have determined the necessity they have for said products and services, ask them what they would like to be changed. Are there any bugs?
• Above all, take notes, whether the information seems useful to you in the short, medium or long term, or not, perhaps this data will be useful later or will speak to one of your colleagues.
• Finally, don’t leave the room without summarizing what was said, as well as speaking of the next step you will take to ensure their needs are met.

Many benefits can come out of this.

Have a debrief . Review what happened. What did you learn? Were some of your questions answered? Did you reach your goals? What was the most helpful?

Then, follow up with the customer and your team . Send the customer a thank-you note, so they can know you appreciate the time spent together and the feedback they have given you.

It doesn’t need to stop there, as keeping a close relationship and giving your customer or client the best experience is not a day process but a constant and ongoing contact with them. Which is why your next steps should involve:

• making a new appointment,
• drawing up a diagnosis or a commercial proposal ,
• preparing for the negotiation based on the customer's specific requests,
• identifying trends in the marketplace . If a number of your customer visits reveal the same concern, this may be an area that you need to focus on.
• communicating important elements to the relevant teams (e.g. the after-sales team).

Customer relations, like all professions, are going digital.

This is all the more appropriate as salespeople are professionals who often work on the move.

It is therefore essential to equip them with a mobile sales management application.

There are interesting tools for note-taking and customer visit reports, as it allows you to create any business document, tailored to your image.

Your documents are unified and 100% dematerialized, for consistency and centralization that benefits the whole company, especially the sales representatives in the field, who no longer lose any of their work.

Depending on the different email scenarios configured, the managers receive a summary and the customer a recap by email. And if the visit is successful, you can even have the customer sign an order in the same breath!

The tool can also communicate with your CRM, a second essential tool which thanks to technology can directly be mobile, that is to say on your phones and tablets.

Using a flexible and customizable software, your sales representatives have all the necessary tools at their disposal on their smartphone or tablet: customer files updated in real time, connection to your ERP, generation of sales documents (quotations, order forms, invoices), and access to order history, stocks and your catalogue.

And you, have you tested any digital tools for your customer relations?

What did you think of them?

If you are still here, here is one last piece of advice: Always look to the future but do not forget that customer satisfaction is crucial to a company’s success.

Nothing beats a face to face meeting as hidden gems can be said. Take the time to know who you are catering to. Customers buy when they feel loyalty and consideration. Do not overlook great relationships that can lead to great opportunities.

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How to Plan the Perfect Customer Visit [+ Docket Template]

Publish: August 02, 2021

Now that the world is opening behind up, it’s time to get out there and meet your customers face-to-face. For many newer consumers, these might will their first time getting to spend time through you — especially as conferences have moved online.

Creating that joining is invaluable. But before you book that plane ticket, it’s essential to create an schedule. Planning of perfecting customer visit will ensure that you meet thine goals and that your customer meeting will be successful. Here’s a take at how you geting where. Employee Visit Plan - Preset - Vesta EVV

Why plan a customer visit?

Jason Lemkin, the founder of SaaStr and EchoSign, has said “ I almost lost a customer I actually visited. ” That’s a bold statement — one that's worth taking note of. But why? What is it about customer visits that can such a big impact upon customer loyalty?

First of any, yourself get to make a stronger impression with your customers. No matter about you sale, you aren’t just selling a product — you’re other selling the people go it.

Your vision, my passion, your knowledge are all play into the perceived value of our product or service. All of these elements come across more strongly when you visit in person. AMPERE Zoom call just isn’t plenty time at go deep. Planning the perfecting customer visit will ensure that she meet my goals and is your customer meeting will be triumphant. Here’s one look at how you get there.

Next, you get to check how your customers represent using your outcome in person. Are they constantly printing out reports up pin up on a bulwark? Is you seeing teams walk across the sell floor to point out something on a screen? What kind of working surround and equipment how people do? What extra gender of add-on are people after?

Everything happening behind the scenes paints a much clearer picture of any your customers are. And when it comes time to renew or jump on that next customer success call, you’ll can a lot get knowledge finishing to draw on.

Finally, meeting owner clientele in person is a immense motivational turbo! When you’re behind a screen for so long, to can launching to feel like what you do doesn’t matter — or that you’re don making any real connections. But a visit to a customer’s your can change all that, and really light up your featured of “why” you do this at all.

5 Potentially Goals of Your Customer Visit

Going into a customer visit with goals includes mind will help you got the most out of your time there. Here are five objects to consider when planning a custom visit:

1. Understanding Their Business Goals

If you’re visit a client, you’re likely hopping for one long term relative. Understanding what their future goals are can help align your product for you needs. That in-depth conversations want rarely come up over a quick phone call. customer visits.pdf

2. Gathering Feedback

Customer visits provide a unique opportunity to gather honest and in-the-moment insight into what your client needed and want. Wenn you sit next to someone who types your product in their daily work, there’s a land more space on have this feedbacks arise. And documenting computer for future sales opportunities and thine product team is one of an more productive promotions you able take during a your visit.

3. Referral

In-person tours are a great time to ask for and enter referrals. Question, “Are there any other business that you my with that you could see our product being helpful for?” Alternatively, if adenine pain point is mentioned by the client and you know the perfect company to help solve it, don’t be afraid to build that termination. It’s just additional way you can bring value to your customers.

4. Uncovering Company for Cross-Selling or Upselling

While your primary target shouldn’t be pitching your offering at every opportune, you might unmask adenine trouble that your product button service can helped decipher. Noting these potential value-adds can make for more effective, thoughtfully targeted upsell and cross-sell conversations.

5. Testimonials and Case Studies

Customer visits can be ampere unique source of sales index, including pictures for situation studies, video testimonials, and strong evidence-based customer stories. If you plan on production those one the your primary goals, consider asking your client to set the stage in these kinds on materials before you visit so you already knowledge who you’ll be word to, before coming onsite.

How to Plan to Onsite Customer Meeting

For putting read attempt in before you hinfahren, you’ll have ampere much better chance of achieving your our and impressing get clients. Here am some key actions to consider when planning get customer meeting. Customer Visit Scheme Presentation | Sequent Learning

Thoroughly prepare front one visit.

Before you arrive, make sure you’re up to date on the state is the customer's view. Who what they usually talking up the your group? Thing customer service tickets may they raised lately? Are there outstanding issues ensure necessity to be addressed? These will come up during your visit.

Secondly, understand the current ecosystem your customer is how within. Is your customer in the news? What’s happening in theirs industry? What threats and opportunities are arising in their business-related? Being prepared and knowledgeable regarding their in working will make a better impression than arrival in blind. Purpose: To develop a win/win user visit strategy that will encompass hint points beyond Total! ▫ Procedure: Walk durch varieties of visits, look among.

Decide who you’re meeting with.

Start by setting up a meeting with relevant company business. That could be the CEO, one founders, or which VP of the functional team you're working with — depending on the company's scale. Bear in mind, while such contact may be the "reason" for our visit, they're probably not who you'll may spending aforementioned most time with.

Once you have a meeting scheduled with the company's leadership, plan the rest of get day about meeting with of teams top and employees using your product — as well as any teams that are get to signing up or expanding that current seat count or contract scope.

Make dinner reservations to you and your clients.

Classic, a your visit incorporate taking thine client out for an beautiful getting as one token of appreciation. I also offers ampere chance for thou to get to know each diverse outside of the limits for of labor environment and form stronger verbindungen. Customer Travel Plan - PDF Templates | Jotform

That beings said, this shall not adenine social visit. Keep your goals in heed — even outsides of work hours. If you’re everyday with who restaurants in the area, choose a site that has options for every diet and has a good atmosphere for conversations. If you’re not familiar with the available options, ask the client where they’d recommend. 16 Conferences Daily Example & Free Templates

Completes the wrap-up report.

After the visit be over, you stills have work to accomplish. Creation a wrap-up report used your domestic teams back at the branch. It should top key elements of the visit like whatsoever confidentiality agreements put includes place and who under the company you can share make information or sales pictures with. As to Plan the Perfect Patron Visit [+ Agenda Template]

Identify any action element that came up during the visited. Include any positive highlights during and meeting than well-being as any risks or opportunities that arose. Produce ampere duplicate of the report for get client as well, the prove that you were listening to their concerns and such you’re passing to continue up with them.

Patron Vist Agenda Template

Utilize such random agenda to plant yours own customer visit.

10 my: Welcome/Office Tour (30 minutes, w/ Stasi, Raul)

• Get settled, set up a desk or boardroom for the day

11 i: Executive Meeting (1 hour, w/ Merge, Thomas, Ankit, Shireen)

• Quick of status, product usage, any updates
• Add any bullet points you need to cover here
• Upcoming revisions oder problems for the business
• New Opportunities
• Areas away concern

12pm: Lunch

1pm: Consumer Meetings (4 daily, twisting driven Marketing teams)

• Overview of new features
• Add any ball points you need to cover here
• Collecting feedback from users
• Sit with teams to review workflow

5pm: Winding Up meeting (30 minutes)

• Process conversely configuration change recommendations
• General questions and answers
• Line to be addressed as parts of maintenance
• Expansion opportunities

6:30pm: Evening at Restaurant

Internal Remarks

• At the bottom of your agenda, include internal tips that what meant to be sharing with your team only.

Plan fork success

It’s time to get support out there and meet your client face-to-face. By planning autochthonous customer visit moving are time, you’re sure to achieve your goals and come out with a stronger understanding of how your clients need.

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Customer Marketing: 3 Retention Metrics, 3 Growth Metrics, and 6 Strategies to Jumpstart Your Marketing Plan

Customer marketing holds the key to sustainable and economic growth. Here’s how to build a plan of action for your business.

Melissa Rosen

10 Min read · 1949 shares

Customer marketing holds the key to sustainable and economic growth. Build a plan of action for your team by:

• Establishing metrics for retention and growth
• Choosing your ideal customer marketing strategy
• Targeting the right customers to promote your brand

What is customer marketing?

Customer marketing focuses on elevating and leveraging current customers’ experiences to improve retention and growth. Successful customer marketing relies on properly segmenting your audience, effectively engaging with customers, and maintaining a customer advocacy program.

The value of customer marketing is two-fold:

No doubt you’re familiar with the handful of statistics on customer retention. Acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.

Put in the effort to engage that customer and you’ll see 3x the annual value compared to other customers.

The real value, then, lies in turning that satisfied customer into a brand marketer in their own right. It’s no wonder our final stat reveals that a 5% increase in customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by 75%.

With an emphasis on quality over quantity, customer marketing strengthens client bonds while attracting new users. Marketing teams can actually decrease spending while increasing loyalty and customer lifetime value.

First, provide an exceptional customer experience that makes customers want to stick around. Then, establish a full-fledged program that makes it easy for current customers to invite new ones.

I won’t mince words: retention comes before growth. Focus on keeping your current customers happy and growth will follow.

Start by looking at the numbers. Determine the metrics you want to track, find your baselines, then set goals to improve them.

We’ll begin by breaking down the metrics to track retention and growth, then define the types of customer marketing strategies that will move these metrics, and finally show you how to reach out to the right customers with that strategy in mind.

Inspiring loyalty with customer retention marketing

Customer retention marketing focuses entirely on increasing retention and decreasing churn with regards to current customers.

The end goal here is not necessarily to get customers to market for you (yet!), rather it’s to make your current customers as happy as possible. Focus on improving customer experience, innovating your products or services, and implementing customer feedback in a meaningful way.

Follow these three retention metrics to understand the health of your current customer base:

1. Customer retention rate

Customer retention describes the ability of a company to maintain its current customer base after acquisition.

Calculation

First, set a time period you want to measure (i.e. past week, month, quarter, year) then gather the number of customers:

• At the end of the time period
• Added during the time period
• At the start of the time period

Subtract the number of customers added from the number at the end of the period , divide by the number at the start , and multiply by 100.

Customer churn describes the drop off in engagement with a customer, whether they no longer actively use a product or formally end a service agreement.

Set a time period you want to measure (i.e. past week, month, quarter, year) then gather the number of customers:

Subtract the number of customers at the end of the period from the number at the start , divide by the number at the start , and multiply by 100.

3. Customer lifetime value

CLTV or CLV (Customer lifetime value) measures the potential amount of money a customer could bring to your business over the entirety of their relationship.

Gather the average:

• Order value of one of your product(s) or service(s)
• Number of repeat purchases
• Time your customers stay with you

Multiply average order value by average amount of repeat purchases , then multiply again by average amount of time customers stick around .

Promoting advocacy with customer centric marketing

Customer centric marketing leverages your relationship with current customers to successfully execute a strategy to reach new customers.

The bottom line with this strategy is to increase the number of new customers. Focus on establishing a transparent program for advocacy, rewarding those who participate, and continually optimizing the system to inspire growth at scale.

These three growth metrics will help you track the success of your customer centric marketing:

1. Customer acquisition costs

CAC (customer acquisition cost) reveals the amount of money needed to bring a new customer into your business.

Set the time period you want to measure (i.e. past week, month, quarter, year) then gather the amount of:

• New customers added
• Money spent on marketing and/or sales

Divide money spent by new customers .

2. Net Promoter Score

NPS (Net Promoter Score) measures a customer’s desire to recommend a product or service to a friend or colleague using an NPS survey.

Set a time period you want to measure (i.e. past week, month, quarter, year) then gather the percent of:

• Promoters from your NPS survey
• Detractors from your NPS survey

Subtract the percent of detractors from the percent of promoters .

3. Average order value

AOV (average order value) measures the average amount of money your customers spend on any one transaction with your business.

Set a time period you want to measure (i.e. past week, month, quarter, year) then gather the total amount of:

Divide revenue by the number of orders during the desired time period.

Customer driven marketing strategies

Once you clarify your metrics, you’re ready to invest in customer driven marketing strategies. Get inspired by these customer marketing examples to help grow your user base.

We’ll break down each type of strategy to help you decide which one is best for your organization.

Case studies

Case studies provide a somewhat scientific approach to drawing in more customers by detailing the exact problem and solution that your service can provide. By diving deeper into a particular client’s experience, you show potential customers exactly how it could apply to them.

Choose a few different types of customers to target your ideal client base. Get the most out of these personas by really differentiating them. Think about which customers are most valuable to you, and which customers can get the most value from your business.

Keep case studies on your website, making it easy to find for newcomers eager to learn more. Stick to numbers and concrete examples to really make the case study pop.

Here at Groove, we devote an entire page to “Customer Stories.” Each study is broken down by important characteristics like industry, location, and number of employees. Readers can choose a similar company to see how our product works for them.

Reviews and ratings

Reviews and ratings offer a candid opinion of your organization, as told by customers themselves. Your strategy should aim at two types: (1) onsite and (2) offsite.

Onsite reviews sit clearly on your website, enticing browsers to become purchasers. Especially for e-commerce , customers weigh these reviews heavily when deciding which product to buy.

Most e-commerce sites embed reviews directly onto the purchasing page. Keep a close eye on these reviews and respond immediately to any less-than-stellar comments. This is often the last thing a customer views before actually purchasing.

Califia provides onsite reviews for each of their dairy-free drinks. Product descriptions highlight the number of stars and reviews for each item. Customers can scroll down to see the complete list of written comments to help make a final purchasing decision

Offsite refers to third-party aggregators (like Yelp, Google Business, Apple’s App Store, or Google’s Play Store) that host a database of numerical ratings and reviews.

You have less control over customer sentiments on these platforms, but it’s often the first place potential customers will look. Create a protocol for checking in on these reviews and responding to customers, just as you would do for your support inbox.

Maintain a constant and professional presence on these sites to let viewers know that you prioritize feedback and will engage with customers on whatever platform they prefer.

Califia manages their offsite reviews with the same care as their onsite ones. Knowing how much a review can affect purchasing decisions, they respond to negative comments immediately.

Testimonials

Testimonials encourage prospective clients to trust your business by hearing directly from current customers. Testimonials are typically shorter than case studies, some may be a simple quote. Unlike reviews, a business solicits these positive snippets directly from happy customers.

Get concrete examples when asking for customer testimonials. More often than not, you’ll want this request to come about naturally.

For instance, say a customer offhandedly mentions in a support email how your helpdesk software has helped them retain or acquire more users. Your support team should be on the lookout for these statements, ready to pounce. You want these customers providing testimonials.

Post testimonials throughout your site on relevant pages. Add a visual element, and as much detail as possible, so these quotes stand out to newcomers.

ChowNow , a food ordering system, has some of the sleekest testimonials I’ve seen. They include the customer’s name, title, company, and video alongside a hard-hitting pull-quote to capture a viewer’s attention.

User-generated content (UGC)

UGC (user-generated content) relies on customers sharing their own stories about your business offerings without (seemingly) any prompting. This type of marketing is especially prominent on social media and within online communities.

The goal is to inspire customers to post pictures, videos, tweets, and blogs featuring your product without necessarily soliciting them.

UGC doesn’t need to come from an explicit ask, instead present a unique experience that subtly nudges them to share it with the world.

Billie , a women-centric shaving and body care brand, has essentially mastered the UGC strategy. Customers post photos of their Billie razor on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Each post includes a hashtag so followers can find out more about the company. Billie’s bold colors and unique packaging encourage customers to post on social media without the company even needing to ask.

Influencers and micro-influencers

Influencers and micro-influencers are individuals who hold the attention of a devoted group of followers in a particular field. Like UGC, this strategy is often used in social media.

However, influencer marketing typically requires actual back-and-forth between your company and the influencer, usually involving payment of some kind.

On a large scale, well-known influencers can reach hundreds of thousands of people with a single post. Micro-influencers target a smaller, more niche group, offering authentic advertising opportunities and a precise injection into a desired community.

If you’re in e-commerce, apps like UserGems or Gatsby make it easy to find out who among your existing customers are influencers and propose a collaboration.

Hip Mommies , a curated shop for baby and toddler goods, boasts an impressive amount of micro-influencer content on Instagram. The company reposts photos of customers using their products, most of whom have over 1000 followers themselves.

Collaborations like these are often a win for both parties, offering targeted exposure for both your business and the influencer’s account.

Since influencer marketing is a relatively new growth strategy, be deliberate with your expectations. Set numerical goals for new customer acquisition, ask potential influencers to provide data for expected outcomes, and use tools to track exactly how many customers are coming in from this channel.

Referral programs

Referral programs set up a definitive system where current customers can invite new customers to your business in exchange for something of value. The key with this marketing strategy is to be explicit and persistent so every customer knows how to easily refer people.

Referral programs are one of the most tangible ways to encourage customers to market on your behalf. Follow customer marketing best practices by tracking all the metrics associated with the program and constantly tweaking it for ease of use.

Native personal care products put their referral program front and center. Immediately after purchasing, a pop-up window simplifies the entire program. They break it down into simple steps, provide buttons for social sharing, and even generate a pre-populated email.

Customer lifecycle marketing

Customer lifecycle marketing focuses on charting out the entire journey of a customer then implementing specific tactics at strategically chosen points of the life cycle. A good plan for customer lifestyle marketing will pinpoint when to reach out to certain customers and how .

Compile data to segment customers

The first step in implementing customer lifecycle marketing is to segment your customer base. Make your customers feel special by catering to their unique demographic.

Data points could include basic information like location, gender, or age. Or, segmentation can get as granular as date of first purchase, date of last purchase, or even number of customer support emails sent.

Figure out what information is the most crucial to understanding your customers, then compile data like crazy until you have the complete picture.

Influence customer behaviors

Using the data from above, you can start to draw conclusions and influence customer behaviors.

The retention and growth metrics we explored earlier will help you establish baselines. Once you know the average numbers for your entire customer base, use segments to see which demographics are below or ahead of the curve.

For instance, customers over forty years old may have a churn rate of 40%, whereas customers aged under forty churn at 60%.

Use a strategy from above to target the under-forty crowd. Encourage these customers to participate in your referral program by offering a special incentive. Track churn rate during this campaign to see if metrics improve.

Trigger customer marketing emails based on touch points

Emails are the simplest and most effective way of engaging with customers once you’re ready. Add even more efficiency by automating customer marketing emails to send at the right time.

Here’s our quick guide on when to approach customers, broken down by strategy:

Customer marketing action plan

Combining customer experience and marketing techniques can seamlessly grow your business and customer base. Use this abbreviated action plan to simplify your customer marketing strategy:

Put this plan into action then re-visit your metrics. When applied accurately, customer marketing can increase both retention and growth. It’s the two-for-one special that you can’t afford to not take advantage of.

Note : 2,000+ companies use Groove to delight customers with fast, personal support at scale. All without breaking the bank.  Start your free 7-day trial today!  (No credit card required)

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Customer marketing hinges upon happy customers. So, how do you get happy customers?

By using a support platform that keeps things personal, intuitive, and accessible to the entire company.

See how Groove can help you leverage support insights to improve growth and retention.

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How To Use Customer Visits To Increase Engagement And Advocacy

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by Influitive | Oct 16, 2017 | Advocate Marketing 101 | 1 comment

eBook The Advocate Marketing Playbook The Advocate Marketing Playbook provides marketers with a blueprint from which to build and manage a successful advocate marketing program. It’s a… Download eBook

There are so many ways to identify and nurture advocates that sometimes you might miss the easy wins right under your nose.

When your customers are in town for a vacation, conference, or business meeting, why not invite them to visit your office?

Customer visits are a great way to deepen relationships with your advocates, as well as promote your advocate marketing program internally.

They can range in time commitment from simply taking a customer out for lunch to developing an agenda for a full-day visit.

Crafting the perfect customer visit

One way to maximize the benefit of the visit is to ask the customer to do a 30-minute session with your employees.

Think about it: not everybody in your organization gets to meet customers and learn about what they are doing with your product. Hearing it right from the customer can be invaluable, especially for product or marketing teams who aren’t in customer-facing roles.

Customers are usually eager and happy to give something in return for you providing some training, or setting up meetings with the product team, executives, and/or their CSM. Plus, having them do a presentation is a great way to see how well a customer presents with an eye towards upcoming User Groups or conference presentations.

We keep these meeting very short and informal to keep the pressure low, with about 20 minutes of presentation followed by Q&A. Slides are not necessary and we assure them that there’s no pressure to record or use their content for marketing. At Crimson Hexagon , we have found that the larger the license, the lower the likelihood that a company will approve public acts of advocacy. However, we do find that many customers are thrilled to share their stories publicly, and there have been many presentations that have led to published case studies.

How to get customers to sign up for a visit

The opportunity for customer visits is promoted formally in our customer newsletter, and plugged informally in conversations with Customer Success Managers. The customer may just happen to mention they are coming to Boston, and our advocate marketing team takes the weight off of the CSM by managing the details. Another way to make your advocates aware of this opportunity would be to simply make it a challenge in your Hub .

Once we’ve identified an interested customer, we do the following:

• Get on a call with the customer and their CSM to develop an agenda and lock down the details
• Have our advocate marketing team book the room, invite the right people to the meeting, and order lunch
• Plan ways to make the advocate feel special the day of, like updating the Welcome Screen in our lobby to greet them

If there is also going to be a presentation, we also:

• Determine who the best person is to introduce our guest
• Make sure an Executive says hello and is in the audience
• Send an invite to all employees (including remote), along with a day-of reminder

                              A recent customer presentation at the Crimson Hexagon HQ

Why customer visits benefit your advocates and your company

We have had great success with customer visits from Fortune 100 companies, agencies, government, and non-profits. A customer visit program is a great way to raise advocacy’s profile within your organization . It also creates an opportunity to talk about other advocacy opportunities with the customer, such as having them speaking at events , creating content , being involved in a case study , etc.

The benefits from the advocate’s perspective are that it makes them feel special, provides them with an audience for their thought leadership, and strengthens their bond with your company.

Recently, Michael Cornfield , a professor of political science at George Washington University visited our office and told us about his meeting with his CSMs.

What our advocate marketing team finds rewarding is that colleagues across all departments attendm and we get lots of positive comments from employees, especially from finance, HR, and engineering. Our goal is to host two to three of these customer visits per quarter.

If I had a wish, it would be that a few times a year we were able to invite and cover the costs of having a strategic customer come to Boston for a customer visit. It’s getting close to budget time, and I will definitely add it to my 2018 plan.

Related Resources

• Customer Success and Marketing Alignment ebook
• Why Marketing And Customer Success Are Your Brand’s New Super-Duo
• Together, Customer Success Teams And Customer Marketing Can Create A Better Customer Experience

Resource Download

Click Here to download the How To Use Customer Visits To Increase Engagement And Advocacy

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How 7 brands use customer marketing content strategies to deepen audience connection

Written by by Carly Hill

Published on  September 14, 2023

Reading time  12 minutes

In marketing, brand awareness is a significant focus—in fact, it’s likely one of your main goals. But it’s all too easy to get so wrapped up in reaching and acquiring new customers that your current customer base gets left in the dust. This is where customer marketing comes in.

Customer marketing is one of the most powerful ways you can forge and feed connections with your current audience base. Investing in your current audience leads to building trust with them, as well as prospective customers.

In this article, learn how to build your own customer marketing strategy, how it creates customer trust and see some stellar customer marketing examples from brands who are getting it right.

Social Customer Care by Sprout Social

What is customer marketing?

Customer marketing refers to marketing methods, campaigns and activities designed to build connection and loyalty with existing customers by elevating their experience with your brand or products. This can be done through re-sharing customer content, responding to reviews and going above and beyond with your social responses.

Investing in a customer marketing strategy doesn’t mean you’re taking away from building brand awareness. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Investing in your current customer pool builds loyalty and connection. And that can turn them into advocates who can help you gain trust with new customers.

Customer marketing examples from 7 brands getting it right

Your social channels are a direct line to your customers. And that makes social the perfect outlet to grow your customer marketing strategy through three of the big social media “C’s”: content, conversation and creators.

Here are a few customer marketing examples from brands who are celebrated for creating connected audiences and loyal customers.

Utilizing user-generated content: Aerie, Glossier

The only thing better than happy customers is happy customers who post about how much they love a brand. Reposting user-generated content (UGC) rewards customers who post it while also boosting authenticity on your channels by putting your audience at the forefront of your brand.

Clothing brand Aerie has made authenticity a core part of its brand—and naturally, this includes featuring posts from their real customers. They regularly post UGC, and use their branded hashtag #AerieReal to find creators to reach out to. This effectively makes their audience feel seen and connected to the brand. And, according to Marketing Brew , this strategy has truly “turned people onto the brand.”

https://www.tiktok.com/@aerie/video/7277986139250625822?lang=en

Makeup brand Glossier also turned to UGC to build their “Dew it Yourself” series based on content their community was already organically posting about. “What makes this series so special is that it was spurred organically from our community—it was something they were already posting about,” Glossier’s Senior Manager of Social Media and Digital at Glossier Jamie Dinar explained in a Sprout webinar . “We tried to reframe the conversation around beauty, offering our platform to the people using our products to tell their stories, rather than having it come from the brand. Ultimately, we didn’t want to tell them how to use their products—it was their story to tell.”

Learn from these methods

Learn from Aerie and Glossier’s strategies by bringing user-generated content and community ideas into your social channels for more authentic content. Just ensure you ask for approval before you post.

Creating customer-inspired content: McDonald’s

McDonald’s shines in their ability to post extremely relatable, customer-inspired content.

The content they share—from text posts to videos—and responses they leave in the comments demonstrate a deep understanding of their audience, down to how customers order in a drive-thru. Which was the basis for viral Posts that tap into everyone’s relatable drive-thru ordering experience…

And Posts that feature products and how people use them—like this Post when McDonald’s asks their audience, “remind me to take my mcflurry out of the freezer in 13 mins” so it doesn’t get too frozen.

McDonald’s also brings the customer experience to life through the user-generated TikTok content they repost on their own channel. As well as relatable videos, and even TikTok text videos like this:

@mcdonalds ♬ original sound – McDonald’s

They pair these videos with funny, personal responses in the comments section.

Learn from this method

You can’t successfully carry out customer marketing without a deep understanding of your customers. Get to know who they are, what they’re interested in and what they respond to by looking at your post data, comments section and by tapping into the conversation.

Authentic customer demos and routines: Zara

There’s a reason why 81% of social marketers describe influencer marketing as an essential part of their strategy. Creator marketing and using real people to bring a brand to life is only going to become more important. And Zara’s robust creator strategy is a great example of how diverse creators can provide actionable and personal “how-tos” using a company’s products.

Zara diverse creators to show off their makeup routine, using Zara makeup products. This format empowers creators to express themselves creatively and authentically.

@zara Choose your lipstick! zarabeauty Thank you @coralkwayie ♬ original sound – ZARA – ZARA

Each makeup routine is different and highlights products while inspiring viewers to bring Zara makeup products into their routine too, bringing awareness to Zara’s makeup line.

Grow your creator strategy for an authenticity boost. But, like Zara has, give creators you partner with room to be creative.

Using a dedicated influencer marketing platform, like Tagger by Sprout Social , to manage and foster your creator partnerships can streamline your strategy.

Getting more life out of customer reviews: National Parks Service

Positive reviews build trust with customers by showcasing a real person’s experience with your brand or product. But you can take your reviews a step further and use them in your content to build trust and reward customers who left positive reviews.

The National Parks Service does this in a unique way on their social channels by featuring some of their funniest positive reviews. Their brand voice is light and humorous, while also providing educational captions. The posts highlight different Parks, while also entertaining their audience.

Repurpose and use positive reviews in your visual content, captions or Stories to build trust and social proof.

Showcasing customer success with case studies: Drift

Sometimes, the best way to showcase your business is by highlighting the customers who have found success with your product or service. Case studies are a tried-and-true way of creating a story out of customer success stories—whether those stories are in the form of blog posts or videos.

Drift has a robust collection of customer stories on their website . The AI-based conversational platform features success stories of customers who use and love their product.

This form of customer marketing not only rewards existing customers by putting them in the spotlight—it also provides social proof to prospective customers who may be interested in more complex products, services or softwares.

Reach out to happy customers who would be willing to be featured in a case study about how they use your product, service or technology.

Taking customer connection to the next level: Chewy

Chewy’s customer care and engagement is a stand-out example of stellar customer marketing.

You may have heard about Chewy’s surprise-and-delight strategy to send bereavement packages to customers who have recently lost a pet. Or their recent habit of sending surprise pet portraits to customers. They bring this level of personalization and care into their social channels and content, too. The majority of their posts come from UGC, making the pets they serve the stars of their social channels.

Their team is also extremely engaged on social. They often go beyond providing an answer or “thank you” to customer comments. They make an active effort to start conversations with their audience, asking them questions and posting fun prompts—while of course responding to as many comments as they can.

Chewy’s social channels are a sign to go above and beyond when you engage with customers. Post prompts that encourage your audience to engage, but only if you can be responsive. And bring customer marketing outside of the digital world too by creating tangible surprise and delight moments to keep current customers happy.

Benefits of customer marketing

Here are a few major benefits of creating a customer marketing strategy, and why it’s integral to growing your brand.

Increase brand loyalty

Brand loyalty is precious. And it’s only become more important to foster it—according to PwC, 26% of consumers stopped using or buying from a business in just the past year.

Investing in a customer marketing strategy on social enables you to foster and grow a connection with your existing customers—not just reach new ones. Connection is key to loyalty and trust. In fact, PwC found that younger generations are more likely to express loyalty to a brand by recommending it to friends and family.

And businesses are catching on. According to The 2023 State of Social Media report , 66% of business leaders say increasing brand reputation and loyalty is a top priority. A customer marketing strategy through social content and connection is your ticket to success.

Turning your customers into advocates and garnering social mentions

Word-of-mouth recommendations and social mentions are some of the most authentic promotions your brand can get—but you have to earn it. In fact, we’ve often had Sprout customers ask how they can get more social mentions from their social audience.

Your customers have the power to make or break your business—and not just through their wallets—a customer marketing strategy can turn your customers into brand advocates. The methods we highlighted with brand examples above—engaging customers, going above and beyond for them, encouraging and posting user-generated content, tapping creators—all encourage your happy customers to talk about you, and reward them for doing so.

Increased social proof

When it comes to where to shop, people trust the experience of real people. They need social proof , like reviews or posts about the brand, to trust a business or product—you’ve likely sought out this type of proof yourself.

A stellar customer marketing strategy encourages the type of brand connection that inspires customers to post, talk about and write positive reviews about your brand. And reposting customer posts or reviews puts the social proof directly on your channels.

And reposting social proof isn’t a faux pas—on the contrary. According to The 2023 Sprout Social Index™ , UGC and customer testimonials are one of the top content types consumers want to see more of on social.

Creators serve a similar purpose—to pair a trusted voice and perspective with your brand. This is one of the reasons why unboxing content is what 42% of marketers say they hire content creators to produce. There’s an inherent authenticity to the “first impression” expressed in these posts.

How to create a holistic customer marketing strategy

Here are a few easy ways you can bring customer marketing into your daily social media strategy and presence.

Regularly tap into the conversation

Part of connecting with your customers is by being social and joining the conversation. And this means finding and responding to conversations you’re mentioned in—even when you’re not tagged.

Brooklinen does a stellar job of this. They uncover customers discussing them, their products or simply related topics, even when their brand isn’t directly tagged. This empowers them to engage and connect with existing customers who advocate for the brand…

…to encourage and upsell fans who have yet to purchase…

…or just to join the conversation and give their audience a laugh.

This is where using a social listening platform , like Sprout Social’s, is crucial. Social listening enables you to widen your net across the social space, empowering you to find relevant conversations about your keywords, product mentions and brand misspellings—even when you’re not tagged.

Double down on customer and audience engagement

Good customer engagement involves simply checking social for questions and providing answers. But stellar customer engagement means going above and beyond.

Using Chewy as an example again, they show customers they care by asking them questions and conversing in the comments.

Double down on your customer care and audience engagement to foster stronger relationships, and to show your audience you care. This starts with evaluating your customer care effectiveness. Use customer service metrics like reply time, reply or response rate and sentiment analysis to understand where your customer care excels, and where it needs work.

Staying on top of your inbox to ensure you respond to comments and questions quickly is also crucial. So much so that 36% of consumers say they’ll share a negative experience with friends and family if a brand takes too long to respond, according to The 2022 Sprout Social Index™.

Finally, make it easier for your team to never miss a message. A social media management tool that funnels all of your social comments, mentions and DMs into one hub—like Sprout’s Smart Inbox —streamlines your process, by organizing your social messages, storing canned responses and looping in customer care team members in one place.

Stay on top of your reviews—the good, and the bad

Your reviews are not a “set-it-and-forget-it” tool. Reviews need to be, well, reviewed by your team regularly. Leaving these unchecked might mean you miss customer feedback at best. Or, at worst, could mean you miss a flurry of negative reviews that spin up a brand crisis.

Beyond checking your reviews, ensure you respond to them—the good and the bad. Responding to positive reviews rewards the customer who took the time to sing your brand’s praises. And responding to negative reviews can provide you with helpful feedback and, when done empathetically, may even win you back a customer.

Make checking your reviews part of your monitoring and social analysis process. And create canned responses you can adjust and customize for different reviews to speed up your response process.

Regularly check on posts you’re tagged in to source UGC

People are likely already tagging your brand—in a mention or through a hashtag. Regularly check posts you’re tagged in and your mentions. This is one of the best ways to find UGC to repost and posts to engage with.

Make sourcing this content even easier by creating a branded hashtag. Think: Aerie’s #AerieReal. Figo’s #yesfigopets. Savers’ #thriftproud. Branded hashtags are a unique and fun way to make sourcing customer marketing content easier. They may even help you identify creators to partner with.

Just remember to make your branded hashtag known by including it in the bios of your social channels. And remember to check these hashtags accordingly, as well as your tagged posts. Not every piece of user-generated content will use your branded hashtag. But you want to ensure you’re not leaving people out who do use it.

Streamline your approval process—with internal and external stakeholders

UGC and creator content is stellar, but it will likely require extra approvals from creators you work with, or from another team.

Streamlining your approval process is a key piece of a good customer marketing strategy. Sprout’s external Approval Workflows simplify your approval process so stakeholders can review content before it gets published—even if they don’t use Sprout.

With external Approval Workflows, directly share a link to a post that needs approvals from outside of your team or org. People can leave comments, and you can review feedback and approvals all from one hub within Sprout, keeping feedback consolidated—no messy spreadsheets or confusing threads required.

If you’re curious about how Sprout can empower your customer marketing strategy, and your entire social strategy, reach out to us for a demo.

Request a demo

Create a community space to source content and conversation

Social media builds a connection between your brand and audience. But creating your own space to foster a true community enables you to spark audience involvement, provide exclusive events and promos, start conversations with mega-fans and source content ideas.

You can easily create a community space where you have an existing audience—like creating a Facebook Group. Groups are a great way to create unique spaces for audience members with different niche interests and to create a place for audience members to connect with you and each other. For example, if educators are part of, but not all of your audience, creating an educator community enables you to speak directly to this niche.

You can also create an entirely new, custom community space, like Sprout’s community hub— The Arboretum . The Arb creates a space for social media and marketing pros to connect with each other, grow their own careers by joining exclusive events and sharing job postings and to talk to and ask questions to us.

Build trust and forge connections with your audience by building your customer marketing strategy

Building trust with your customers doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time, dedication and persistence. But all of this effort pays off and wins you loyal customers and a connected audience.

Doubling down on customer marketing is your first step toward creating a better connection with your existing audience. For more inspiration, check out a piece of our own customer marketing—dive into how Plaid grew their audience by 60% in one year and what you can learn from their strategy.

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Getting the Most Out of Customer Visits

How to observe and capture how key business personas make decisions.

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Description

There are valuable insights to gain when visiting customers and observing how people do their jobs. Often, the result of observing customers is the creation of personas for whom offerings can be designed. But there is much more value to looking at personas in context: there is the specific context of the persona: the decisions that person has to make, the criteria upon which he makes the decisions, and the types of information that must be taken into consideration—but there is also the Common Context for that role and related roles to round out the picture. Here are some tips and techniques on how best to approach and maximize the value of visiting and studying customers and creating personas in context.

NETTING IT OUT

There are valuable insights to gain when visiting customers and observing how people do their jobs. If you study the behavior of the people in the roles for whom you are targeting solutions, and the contexts in which they do their jobs, you’ll be more successful in developing useful solutions. A seasoned observer (even one who is not a subject matter expert in the field or the industry) can gain a full understanding of what the people in that role need to accomplish, the decisions they have to make, and the information upon which they rely to make good decisions. A perceptive User Experience practitioner will also observe the interactions among different roles as people work together to achieve the best results for their customers and their company.

Here are some tips and techniques on how best to approach and maximize the value of visiting and studying customers. What’s in it for the customers being studied? You’ll provide them with valuable feedback that will help them reinforce their core competencies and improve their practices. As a result, they will value their relationship with your company even more.

A Persona in Context

(Click on image to enlarge.)

© 2012 Patricia Seybold Group Inc.

1. This illustration highlights the dispatcher as he makes one of the many decisions that he faces every day: what vehicle and driver team to assign to a job. The cloud bubbles indicate factors that impact his decision. The Common Context is all the information that is used by the various roles represented. Those pieces of information upon which the dispatcher will base his decision are highlighted in bold.

ENGAGING WITH CUSTOMERS IN THEIR CONTEXT

User experience best practices.

We have discussed the importance of including user experience (UX) methods and practices throughout product development projects 1 as well as customer co-design initiatives. And we have provided details on how to optimize telephone and in-person individual and group interviews. 2

Now let’s look at the additional insights that you can obtain by visiting B2B customers as they are doing their jobs.

Understanding the Organization and its Goals

Even if you provide offerings for a single role within an organization, you still need to understand how the entire organization runs. For example, if you are offering a reservation system targeted for a restaurant host/hostess, you need to understand whether the number of reservations impact how many servers and line cooks need to be available; if reservations are required; if parties of a specific size can only reserve at certain hours; and how, ideally, the restaurant would want to tie the reservation system into any point of sale system or back-office database.

Things that you should try to find out before approaching an organization about a customer visit include:

• The overarching goals that your proposed offering can help achieve. (E.g., improved performance, reduced paperwork, fewer human errors, increased revenue potential, etc.).
• The critical roles of the people who would be using the proposed solution, and how they fit in the organization.

Arranging the Customer Visit. Arranging a customer visit isn’t as simple as making a phone call. To gain access to the people and information that you want, you need someone reasonably high up in the organization to grant the right permissions and make sure everyone will be available. Typically, the best way to find the right person is to go through your sales organization. The account rep will know who is in charge and have the authority. It can sometimes be difficult to get the sales person on board; sales reps are very protective of their accounts and don’t want to rock the boat. You therefore need someone with clout at your end to make it clear that these customer visits are a priority, and members of the sales team are expected to provide access to the customer.

Once you are in contact with the right person at the organization, you should spell out what you hope to accomplish during the visit, what access and information you would ideally like to have, and what value you can offer the company in return.

What You Want to Accomplish. Explain the purpose of the visit: “We are working on a next-generation solution for emergency room registration personnel that will more easily allow them to capture a patient’s information and communicate that information to the ER medical staff as well as flow the information into any back-end systems. We would like to spend time with some registrars, duty nurses, and accounts payable clerks to understand exactly what they need and how we can help.” Be specific about what you are asking for. For example ...

***ENDNOTES***

1) See " How to Think About Your Customer Experience and User Experience Design Strategy ," by Ronni Marshak and Patricia Seybold, June 23, 2011, http://dx.doi.org/10.1571/psgp06-23-11cc

2) See " Tips for Interviewing Customers, Partners, and Stakeholders ," by Ronni Marshak, January 22, 2009, http://dx.doi.org/10.1571/htt01-22-09cc

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How to Host the Perfect Customer Meeting

Updated: June 24, 2022

Published: December 11, 2019

For most organizations, meeting with customers is one of the most valuable ways you can spend your time. Nothing helps you build strong relationships and ensure customer success like a little face time.

Now, you may schedule most customer meetings for a specific purpose, such as product training, discussing services, or a quarterly business review. But, each session is also an opportunity to build trust, earn evangelists, and identify ways to grow your customer base .

Your goal should be to move your customer meetings from being merely tactical (e.g., ‘check-in with the customer on this project') to being strategic (e.g., ‘check-in on this project and ensure the customer's long term success').

To accomplish all goals at the same time, you're going to need to expand how you think about your customer meetings overall.

Let's explore ways you can improve your approach in the sections below.

Customer Meetings

The most common pitfall made in customer meetings is making the meeting all about your business when it should be all about the customer.

Put another way, if your meeting is a story, your customer is the hero.

Yet, so often you hear things like, "We'd like to show you this new feature we built." By positioning any update this way, you're making your company the hero — not your customer. Try instead, "We've released a new feature that streamlines your workflow. I'd like to show it to you and get your feedback. Does that sound good?"

This reframe does a few things. One, it talks about a benefit in terms of how it will impact your customer, which is in this case, streamlining your workflow . Secondly, it solicits a conversation by asking for feedback. This is engaging for the customer because you're making sure their voice is heard and appreciated. It's also useful for you, the vendor, as customer feedback is precious and you constantly collect it.

Lastly, by asking permission to present a topic, you're reinforcing the notion that this is your customer's time, and they're in control of it. So, for every topic you talk about, first make sure you've framed it in the context of what's in it for them.

Before you can host a meeting, however, you'll need to create an agenda. This document will guide your meeting and keep the conversation on track.

Let's discuss some ways to create this resource in the section below.

Customer Meeting Agenda

Every good meeting starts with a thoughtful agenda. That's because your agenda is your plan and your roadmap. When creating your agenda, start by asking this question: "Why did the customer agree to this meeting in the first place?"

Yes, you have your objectives. You want to help your customers succeed, nourish your relationships, identify churn risks, and suss out growth opportunities. But, more importantly, what are they expecting to accomplish by sharing time with you?

Here's a few best practices to keep in mind when planning your customer meeting.

1. Focus on the customer's goal.

Whatever their goal is, make it central to the agenda. Then, keep your agenda concise when possible. When arranging the list, start with general topics and move to more specific ones.

2. Don't overload your meeting.

Budget your time so you're likely to finish early, even if it means accomplishing less. If you must cover more topics than you have time for, make sure to send along instructions before the meeting to speed things up. Such instructions might read, "Please take a look at the attached report and be ready with questions as we only have about 15 minutes for this discussion."

3. Use action-oriented agenda items.

Especially questions, whenever possible. Another pitfall is using dull or vague agenda topics. For example, instead of "Training" try, "Where are the current training gaps?" And, instead of, "Updates" even a short, "What's new?" is much more engaging.

4. Share your meeting agenda at least a day in advance.

Or better yet, share at least a sketch of the agenda when you ask for the meeting. When appropriate, you can ask your customers to contribute to the meeting plan as well. Ask them what they would like to cover, and make sure to include it in the agenda.

Now that you have prepared for your customer meeting, it's time to run a great session.

Customer Meeting Best Practices

You need to think of your customer meetings like a mini-event. Face time with customers is incredibly valuable, but that's easy to forget because a meeting is something we get for free. But, when you think about the impact these meetings have on your business, you may realize you'd happily pay money to conduct them.

So, pretend you did pay for the time and approach your customer meetings with the same attention that a television producer might have. Put your effort, energy, and budget towards having a high-quality session and optimizing every minute that you have.

Aside from that, here are a few best practices you should keep in mind when running a customer meeting.

1. Prevent avoidable delays.

Test your conference call platform beforehand. If video tools require an installation, make that clear in the meeting invite. Plug your laptop into the projector and make sure it works. Do whatever it takes to ensure the full duration of the meeting is spent working and not resolving avoidable issues.

2. Pace the conversation.

If you're driving your customer meeting, you may have to speak a lot. To keep your customers active, interact with them constantly by asking a lot of questions. If more than a minute goes by where you haven't stopped talking, your customer may become bored and tune out.

3. Engage every participant.

Present to everyone, not just the most senior manager. For example, make eye contact with one person when you make a point. Then, address a different person when you make the next point. If you're meeting remotely, consider addressing specific people by name in the same manner.

4. Punt agenda items if you need to.

When you have an agenda and not much time, you may feel like you need to keep the conversation moving. But, when the customer talks, really stop and listen. Listening is one of the best ways to build customer rapport , and it can provide critical details that will make them more successful (and make your business more successful).

Chances are if they're talking, it's about something more important than what you've got planned. If listening means you can't adequately address something on the agenda, that's okay. Agree to follow up by email or schedule another meeting.

5. Close by confirming the next steps.

A good structure for closing a meeting is to recap what was discussed, assign responsibility for upcoming tasks, and set timelines if you have them. Doing so shows that you value the decisions from the meeting and that you're ready to control the outcome going forward.

6. End on a high note.

Be enthusiastic about your progress and showcase your excitement for your bright future with the customer. This will make them eager to meet with you again.

But, before they do meet with you the next time, you should reach out beforehand to follow-up on the first meeting you had. Not sure how? Take a look at the tips below to learn how to best follow up after a customer meeting.

Customer Meeting Follow-Up Actions

On the same day as the meeting, share your notes with your customer via email. Base your notes on the agenda, filling them in with slightly more background information, and include any decisions and next steps.

Also, link or attach any documents or pages that you chatted about during the meeting. For next steps, list out who's responsible and give a deadline if possible. You can do this formally in the notes themselves, or include it as part of a personal message, e.g., "Great meeting today. Justin will reach out by Friday to schedule the on-site with your team."

If appropriate, you can also use these notes to build enthusiasm for your next meeting. You may want to check in on the status of various challenges and most likely, you'll want to revisit all action items that came about from the last meeting —unless they're long since resolved and no longer relevant.

By bringing up the success of the last meeting and showing the impact the session had on your overall relationship, you're demonstrating an essential pattern to your customer: When you meet with us, things get done.

Now that you're familiar with the art of the customer meeting , you're ready to plan, host, and follow-up with your next customer. But, before you get started, save some time when creating your agenda by using this nifty template.

Customer Meeting Agenda Template

There are many different types of customer meetings, so no one template is going to work for everyone. Still, take a look at the framework below and you'll see that many of the best practices we listed above are built-in.

Template: Customer Meeting Agenda

Welcome the customer, thank them for their time.

Project Status

• Summarize 1-5 updates here in the agenda with 1-3 bullet points each
• Include in the agenda high-level deadlines/milestones

Training or Product Updates

Add any notes about training or product updates here.

Action Items

Summarize & Commit

End by reiterating the above action items. Call back to the original goal of the meeting to show how together you have achieved the goal.

Internal Notes

At the bottom of your agenda, include internal notes that are meant to be shared with your team only.

Positive Highlights

Risks & Opportunities

• Concerns and risks
• Upsell opportunities

For more tips on interacting with customers, read these customer service phrases you should avoid .

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How to Make the Most of Every Customer Visit to Your Website

Here’s a statistic that might make marketers gulp: on average only 2.35% of people who visit a company’s website will convert.

Why? Well, sometimes customers don’t convert because you’re just not what they’re looking for. They misunderstood your product, you’re outside of their price range, or they were never seriously thinking of buying anyway.

But some of those customer visits could turn into something more, whether it’s a one-off purchase or a long-term customer relationship.

All it takes is the right push.

So, how do you start turning more of those visits into real value for your company?

What counts as a customer visit to your website?

If your website were a physical store, a ‘visit’ would be someone walking through the doorway. A website visit is when someone lands on your website and stays there long enough for one page to load.

A customer doesn’t have to stay on your site for long to be counted as a visitor. They might arrive, have a quick scan through your page, decide it’s not for them, and then leave again.

Website visits are a valuable metric because they show you more about your company. For instance, you can use your website visits to understand whether your digital ads are reaching the right audience and garnering their attention.

But, let’s face it, the real purpose of your website is to make customers perform an action — whether that’s buying a product, booking a consultation, or signing up for a newsletter. We call these actions ‘conversions’. 

Your website visits become interesting when you compare the number of people visiting your website with the number of people converting. 

So, a customer has come to visit. How do you get them to take the next step?

Get customers to stay — and convert — with personalization

It’s essential to make sure your website itself is primed and ready to welcome customers, so you don’t drive up your bounce rates with lackluster copy or design. 

But you can still go one step further.

When it comes to getting customers to convert, few strategies are more potent than personalization. In 2020, McKinsey found that personalization at scale (i.e., personalized interactions with all or most customers) can lift sales by one to two percent for grocery companies, and even more for other retailers. 

Still not convinced? How about this: one study found that 72% of consumers say they’ll only engage with marketing messages that are tailored to them. 

With the right software, data, and understanding of your customers, you can create personalized support for every customer to get them over the finish line. 

Among other things, that personalization can involve:

• Dynamic homepages that show customers product offerings tailored to their needs and buying history
• Personalized email campaigns direct customers alerts them of a new product launch or prompts them to click ‘purchase’ on an abandoned cart.
• Social media campaigns that retarget customers with products they’ve viewed
• Proactive messaging through your messaging app

There’s plenty of advice out there on building personalized web pages, social ads, and email campaigns — so we’re going to focus on proactive messaging. 

What is proactive messaging?

While reactive messaging relies on the customer reaching out first, proactive messaging allows you to make the first move.

With the right messaging software , you can set up ‘triggers’ on your website so that when a website visitor fulfills specific criteria, your chatbox can open up and send them a templated message. 

‘Triggers’ can be based on: 

• Which page a customer visits 
• How long they remain on a page 
• Where a customer is based 
• How many times your customer has visited your website  

The first proactive message a customer sees is automated, so don’t worry — your customer success team doesn’t have to send messages to each customer manually. Once the customer responds, it’s your call whether you want to connect them with a human agent or continue to use a chatbot.

How does personalized proactive messaging convert customers? 

The principle behind almost all conversion marketing is to predict what customers will want and make it easy to find what they’re looking for. 

Now, you can do this at the aggregate level with your website design. You might choose a layout that makes it easy to find key product information or write copy that targets a customer’s needs or pain points. 

But by integrating proactive messaging into your website, you can target the needs of individual customers at very specific points in time.

Well, every time a customer clicks on one of your web pages, they’re giving you a clue about what they need from you — and what you need to do to nudge them towards conversion.

Maybe you need to provide more information. Or address a concern. Or give them a bit of incentive to take the next step. 

Let’s say a new customer lands on your FAQs page. That’s probably a sign that they need more specific information about your products or services before they make a purchase. 

Why not drop in to ask if you can answer any questions? That way, you can make sure the customer gets the answer they need fast — before you lose them. 

How to write your proactive message 

Comb through each page of your website and think about three questions: 

• Why would a customer visit this page?
• What do you want them to do once they’ve seen this page?
• What could be stopping a customer from performing the action you want to see?

Let’s take a look at some examples of how you can tailor your proactive messages to fit your customer’s activity. 

When should you not use proactive messaging?

As we’ve already seen, proactive messages are designed to smooth the path to conversions for customers. 

But there are two critical rules to remember when setting up proactive messaging. 

First of all, use it sparingly. You don’t want to annoy your customers by popping up with a different message every time they click on a new page. Try to restrict yourself to two or three proactive texts at crucial moments. 

Second, don’t let proactive messaging distract customers who are already likely to convert. You don’t want a proactive message to appear as soon as your customer opens their shopping basket — they’re already about to make a purchase, so why redirect their attention away from the ‘purchase’ button? If it looks like they’re about to abandon their basket, then give them a nudge, but make sure you’ve given them a bit of space to convert on their own first.  

Future-proof your customer service with Freshchat

The best proactive messaging doesn’t just push customers to convert — it helps you form more profound, more human relationships with them.  

That’s why we designed Freshchat campaigns feature to make it easy for you to give customers what they want when they want it.  

Complex workflows that let you build particular triggers. Detailed reporting that helps you track and improve your proactive messaging campaigns. And integrations — like support for GIFs, videos, and images — that let you turn all that technology into messages that engage your customers and nudge them through to conversion.  

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WiFi Marketing

When Do Customers Visit Your Business? Customer Visit Times

When you’re busy running a business, it may appear at first glance that you’re always experiencing the same customer visitation rates on a daily basis. In reality, it probably varies more than you think, and it’s impossible to measure your peak visitor times without quality technology.

If you’re still using video technology to discover how many people visit your restaurant or retail store, don’t rely on it completely. It’s become an unreliable method to give you a big picture. Besides, you’ll want to stick to using video primarily for security purposes.

An alternative solution to determine popular visitor times is through Wi-Fi sensor technology. This captures specific metrics that indicate when people visit you and can calculate when they might return.

Determining Visitors Through Mobile Devices

When you have Wi-Fi already available in your restaurant or retail store, you’re partially set up to detect visitors. Using Bloom Intelligence Wi-Fi sensor technology, you’ll detect a visitor when they visit the broadcast radius of your network for at least five minutes.

This is just the starting point for calculating popular visitor times. It’s helps you put together a graphical representation of the peak hours your most loyal customers visit.

Even more importantly, you’ll gain detailed metrics in daily visitation averages, including overall footfall trafficking . You can eventually whittle this down to averages on specific days.

Finding a Daily Average

Keeping your Wi-Fi running all day (and maybe at night), you’ll begin to notice a daily average of when you receive the most visits. Once you start gathering detailed metrics, you’ll likely find some surprises. Analytics frequently bring out insights in things you thought you understood.

Even if you find some surprises in the peak hours of  business during certain times of day, consider it a positive step towards improving things. If you find out your daily average is lower than you expected, you’re armed with data to amend the situation.

Bloom Intelligence lets you see these metrics in an easy-to-read format through the Bloom Intelligence dashboard.

Finding Specific Averages on Certain Days

What if you want to find out how many people visit your business on a specific day? Perhaps some of these days are ones you want to improve on based on specific events or specials you offer.

Thanks to more granular data available in your Bloom Intelligence dashboard, you can find out exactly what your specific averages are on these days. You can measure this over a shorter period of time (like a week), or make observations with an all-time average. Or, you can set it up to measure monthly, or any number of combinations.

At this point, you can take this information and apply it to how you’ll set up future marketing campaigns, all while targeting consumer behaviors.

Mapping Out More Efficiency With Events and Staff

Another great aspect to collecting data through Wi-Fi is how you can use it to map out more staff efficiency . For instance, you can know exactly how to manage staffing schedules based on when you have the highest foot traffic during any given day.

Now you can save money by avoiding paying for extra help you don’t really need.

The same goes with events you hold in your restaurant or retail store. Why bother to invest in major setups when you’re not really sure of your highest visitation rates?

The Ease of Setting Up Wi-Fi Sensor Technology

Those of you still new to Wi-Fi technology may think the setup is too complicated to invest in. In truth, it’s one of the easiest technologies to implement, while being very inexpensive to operate. Bloom Intelligence’s managed Wi-Fi services – included for every client at no additional cost – allows you to avoid the hassle and headache of managing a commercial grade Wi-Fi system.

Of course, with Wi-Fi being wireless, you’re already saving money on equipment. This includes being able to access your data 24/7 on any mobile device.

Visit us at Bloom Intelligence to learn more about how we can offer you a comprehensive dashboard system to accompany the Wi-Fi in your business.

Related Topics

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• Restaurant Email Marketing

Case Studies

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• Jefferson's

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Restaurant Marketing FAQs

What is Restaurant Marketing?

Restaurant marketing is the process of getting people to visit your restaurants. Restaurant marketing creates loyalty, provides data to research, analytics, and allows restaurants to gain a better understanding of their ideal customer profile. It utilizes all customer channels: guest WiFi, website, social, rating sites, mobile apps, email, text, and advertising.

What is WiFi Marketing?

WiFi marketing is a marketing technique that uses guest WiFi to collect & clean customer data such as names, emails, phone numbers, customer behavior, and demographics. This data is used to personalize marketing campaigns to increase customer loyalty, build online reviews, and save at-risk customers. The performance of every campaign can be tracked down to the tangible ROI of a customer walking back in your door.

Restaurant reputation management is the process for restaurants to manage customer feedback and creating systems to improve customer experiences, passively build positive online reviews, and save at-risk customers. It is a very important aspect of running a successful restaurant business.

How Does Bloom Identify and Bring Back Lost Customers?

Bloom Intelligence uses machine learning to identify at-risk customers. When one is recognized, the system will send them a message with an incentive to get them to return and re-establish their visit pattern. Bloom users are seeing up to 37% of churning customers return.

SAVE TIME, INCREASE CUSTOMER LIFETIME VALUES, CREATE NEW CUSTOMERS

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“Working with Bloom Intelligence has been amazing. They assist you every step of the way and work with you hand in hand to make sure you are optimizing your advertising potential. We are excited to use this tool to help learn more about our customers so that we can personally engage with them and understand our strengths/weaknesses.”

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“In these challenging times, it has been a pleasure working with Bloom Intelligence to help facilitate our service offering to our clients. They were extremely responsive and provided support to mitigate risk and minimize revenue loss. Great partner!”

“We’re extremely pleased with the wealth of customer data that we’re able to gather, at a very attractive price.  In addition, we’re able to communicate our new product promotions by using  the landing page as a digital billboard.  A “no-brainer” for anyone working with limited Marketing $$.”

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How to handle visitors without appointment: customer visit plan for IT companies

A customer visit plan helps prepare for intensive meetings. For unexpected visits to your office from clients, read on how to handle visitors without an appointment.

As a story, I remember: “I have been working with the law company for 20 years. No one has been out to see my shop”. They have been a business partner for two decades; however, the law firm has not visited its business client once. It proves that nothing can compare to personal interaction between companies and their clients.

With scheduled client meetings, companies will know what to do during the client visit. So regardless of unexpected client visits, what should firms do? Read about how to handle visitors without an appointment in a software development company. 

Client visits build long-lasting business relationships. Firms learn more about clients: business opportunities, legal needs, understanding protocols, and feedback from existing projects. Moreover, companies will have a chance to meet other people and foster relationships. 

Why do firms need to make a customer visit plan?

Customer visit plan: fostering business relationships .

How do firm client visits are critical to their success? A survey into sales and marketing alignment stated that there was a significant correlation between sales and marketing and their concentration. It not only focuses on customer-centric metrics but also on regular client visits. Client visits provide valuable insights and information about a business opportunity and its operations. As a software development company, it is critical to think that client visits create and help build long-term relationships with clients. 

A customer visit plan is a key 

Some customer visits are inexpensive since it happens on zoom or any online meeting platform. Firms have online discussions with clients, which does not mean the interaction is inexpensive. Companies still invest in the same sorts of things as in-person meetings with clients. Sales teams and competitors are trying to solicit clients for business deals. Thus, clients will appreciate talking or discussing with someone who is not trying to sell or upsell. However, firms must organize intensive meetings with clients rather than invest in hearing their problems. 

• Client visits make our customers feel appreciated and cared for. 
• The client visit creates a bond through imitating meetings. When visiting the office, clients can see how our development teams integrate software into the workflow. Besides, firms will study the client’s behavior and show them how you will support them. 
• Client visits help detect solutions or problems not be discussed through telephone and emails. 
• Company workers feel more motivated since they get honest and personal feedback on your software development products or services. 

How to handle visitors in the office: create a detailed customer visit plan 

There is a story of an important client visiting the company headquarters who had been working. As usual, the client meets a receptionist at the office, tending to be easier for that company. The company occupies two floors: staff on the second floor and the reception on the third floor. When the client arrives on the second floor and no one is there to welcome them. Needless to say, that client was not happy. Therefore, preparing an intensive customer visit plan is critical for most firms during the client visit. So a software development company, what should they do to handle visitors in the office? 

How to handle visitors without appointments: Tips & Helps 

Regardless of unexpected clients, here are some tips for ensuring to welcome clients when they visit your office.

• Training employees
• Remind receptionists and sales
• Personalized greetings
• Create welcoming working environment

Training employees even for unexpected occurrences in entrepreneurship

Employees should perceive that all visitors are personal customers. It means all have to make eye contact, smile, say hello, and ask any unattended questions. It will make a difference between having an unwilling experience and a potential customer. 

Remind receptionists and sales to be attentive 

The receptionists in the office can be the most important ones since they greet customers at the beginning. If the receptionist is busy with phone calls, they can make friendly eye contact and hand gestures. Besides, a salesman will be another person who communicates and interacts with the clients during their business trip. 

Personalized greetings: customer visit plan

Is there a lobby board that says “Welcome, Mr. Veon from Adamo Software” for example? This is a single gesture that puts together and shows your clients that you care about them. It builds long-term business relationships and opens more opportunities and references. For instance, a software development company like Adamo prepares welcome posts on social media and banners on TV screens to greet clients. 

Create a clean and welcoming working environment 

Companies maintain a clean workspace, particularly near the entrance and meeting rooms. Is there any paint chipping? Creating a clean environment ensures your working space shines which will reflect professionalism. 

What is the ideal way of greeting a visitor: make the most of client visits 

Set up meeting

Here are some considerations that firms should do during their client visits: 

• Showcases the visit as a service protocol: Advise the client to set the time for meeting regularly. 
• If clients want to go somewhere, combine the visit into another trip. Tying the meeting into another trip makes it more efficient for firms and alleviates concerns regarding time and expense. Most customers welcome effort from clients to visit. 
• When making client visit agenda, firms should consider activities outside of the working time: 
• Including social time with clients: lunch, dinner, or coffee talks. 
• Introducing other representatives whom clients have not met or who might be involved in the projects in the company. 
• Participating in a tour: food tours, sightseeing tours, etc. 
• Define who will attend the meeting with clients: The company can introduce other team members who have worked on the project. 

Conducting a meeting: How firms make the most of the time with clients 

• Firms should be involved 80% of the time with clients. Besides, it is essential to ask open-ended questions. 
• Try to understand the business and legal needs of clients. 
• Should advance the relationship with clients. Is there anything that firms can do to help? 
• Ask for a copy of materials: business plans, policies, and handbooks. 

Follow-up activities after the client visit 

• Thank the clients for their visit: Send a customized thank-you note. Firms can put a sign of gratitude, for example, some firm swag. 
• Produce a report: Share information, feedback you have received or staff who will work with you. 
• Follow-up with any future project: In many cases, there are assignments that are out of the meeting. It includes updated information, introductions, a training program, a review of a document, and preparing a proposal for work. 

How to get clients for IT company: Open more future business opportunities 

Some valuable tips to open more business opportunities:

• Provide value and education
• Draft unique business persona
• Go anywhere your clients are

Provide value and education 

A report shows that offering potential clients something valuable and educational instead of selling something will be engaged with clients. It is a great way to begin a rapport which will ultimately result in new business opportunities. 

Draft a unique business persona

Branding is much more than how products and services differ from other competitors. Building a business reputation through developing quality content and interacting on social media help firms attract new prospects and relationships. 

Go anywhere your clients are 

When customers do not get your firm, you will reach them. If your branding strategies do not work, start asking around if anyone is interested in your business. 

Clients have various choices today. If you are trying to get the attention of new clients, which makes you feel like selling sand in a desert. For example, a software development company showcases software application products to clients on social media: videos, images, and demos. 

Organize virtual events 

An effective way of acquiring new customers in the covid-19 pandemic is to hold a virtual event. You should invite current customers and potential clients. Current customers play as a live testimonial to your firm. Organizing a virtual event gives the chance to learn more about branding on a personalized level. 

The Bottom Line 

Planning a client visit to your office is a must for all businesses: scope and industry. With a business-to-business model like a software development company, we perceive that client visit is critical for a company since it helps build long-lasting business relationships with clients. Moreover, it also helps open more business opportunities with current clients and past clients. Make sure your firm will find a feasible way of welcoming guests even if they are scheduled clients or unexpected guests to your office. 

Tags: client visit, client visit preparation, customer visit plan, dedicated software development company, how to get clients for it company, how to handle visitors in the office, how to handle visitors without appointment, Software development company, unexpected occurrences in entrepreneurship, what is the ideal way of greeting a visitor

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Next-gen B2B sales: How three game changers grabbed the opportunity

Driven by digitalized operating models, B2B sales have seen sweeping changes over the recent period amid rising customer demand for more seamless and transparent services. 1 “ The multiplier effect: How B2B winners grow ,” McKinsey, April 13, 2023. However, many industrial companies are failing to keep pace with their more commercially focused peers and, as a result, are becoming less competitive in terms of performance and customer services.

The most successful B2B players employ five key tactics to sharpen their sales capabilities: omnichannel sales teams; advanced sales technology and automation; data analytics and hyperpersonalization; tailored strategies on third-party marketplaces; and e-commerce excellence across the full marketing and sales funnel. 2 “ The multiplier effect: How B2B winners grow ,” McKinsey, April 13, 2023.

Companies using all of these tactics are twice as likely to see more than 10 percent market share growth than companies focusing on just one. 3 “ The multiplier effect: How B2B winners grow ,” McKinsey, April 13, 2023. However, implementation is not as simple, requiring a strategic vision, a full commitment, and the right capabilities to drive change throughout the organization. Various leading European industrial companies—part of McKinsey’s Industrial Gamechangers on Go-to-Market disruption in Europe—have achieved success by implementing the first three of these five sales tactics.

Omnichannel sales teams

The clearest rationale for accelerating the transition to omnichannel go-to-market is that industry players demand it. In 2017, only about 20 percent of industrial companies said they preferred digital interactions and purchases. 4 Global B2B Pulse Survey, McKinsey, April 30, 2023. Currently, that proportion is around 67 percent. In 2016, B2B companies had an average of five distinct channels; by 2021, that figure had risen to ten (Exhibit 1).

Excelling in omnichannel means enabling customers to move easily between channels without losing context or needing to repeat information. Companies that achieve these service levels report increased customer satisfaction and loyalty, faster growth rates, lower costs, and easier tracking and analysis of customer data. Across most of these metrics, the contrast with analogue approaches is striking. For example, B2B companies that successfully embed omnichannel show EBIT growth of 13.5 percent, compared to the 1.8 percent achieved by less digitally enabled peers. Next to purely digital channels, inside sales and hybrid sales are the most important channels to deliver an omnichannel experience.

Differentiating inside versus hybrid sales

Best-in-class B2B sellers have achieved up to 20 percent revenue gains by redefining go-to-market through inside and hybrid sales. The inside sales model cannot be defined as customer service, nor is it a call center or a sales support role—rather, it is a customer facing, quota bearing, remote sales function. It relies on qualified account managers and leverages data analytics and digital solutions to optimize sales strategy and outreach through a range of channels (Exhibit 2).

The adoption of inside sales is often an advantageous move, especially in terms of productivity. In fact, inside sales reps can typically cover four times the prospects at 50 percent of the cost of a traditional field rep, allowing the team to serve many customers without sacrificing quality of service. 5 McKinsey analysis. Top performing B2B companies are 50 percent more likely to leverage inside sales.

Up to 80 percent of a company’s accounts—often smaller and medium-sized customers, accounting for about half of revenues—can be covered by inside sales teams. 6 Industry expert interviews; McKinsey analysis. The remaining 20 percent often require in-person interactions, triggering the need for hybrid sales. This pertains to highly attractive leads as well.

Hybrid sales is an innovative model combining inside sales with traditional in-person interactions. Some 85 percent of companies expect hybrid sales will be the most common job role within three years. 7 Global B2B Pulse Survey, McKinsey, December 2022. Hybrid is often optimal for bigger accounts, as it is flexible in utilizing a combination of channels, serving customers where they prefer to buy. It is scalable, thanks to the use of remote and online sales, and it is effective because of the multiplier effect of numerous potential interactions. Of companies that grew more than 10 percent in 2022, 57 percent had adopted a hybrid sales model. 8 Global B2B Pulse, April 2023.

How an industrial automation solution player implemented game-changing inside sales

In 2019, amid soaring digital demand, a global leader in industrial digital and automation solutions saw an opportunity to deliver a cutting-edge approach to sales engagement.

As a starting point, the company took time to clearly define the focus and role of the inside sales team, based on product range, customer needs, and touchpoints. For simple products, where limited customer interaction was required, inside sales was the preferred go-to-market model. For more complex products that still did not require many physical touchpoints, the company paired inside sales teams with technical sales people, and the inside sales group supported fields reps. Where product complexity was high and customers preferred many touch points, the inside sales team adopted an orchestration role, bringing technical functions and field sales together (Exhibit 3).

The company laid the foundations in four key areas. First, it took time to sketch out the model, as well as to set targets and ensure the team was on board. As in any change program, there was some early resistance. The antidote was to hire external talent to help shape the program and highlight the benefits. To foster buy-in, the company also spent time creating visualizations. Once the team was up and running, early signs of success created a snowball effect, fostering enthusiasm among both inside sales teams and field reps.

Second, the company adopted a mantra: inside sales should not—and could not—be cost saving from day one. Instead, a significant part of the budget was allocated to build a tech stack and implement the tools to manage client relationships. One of the company’s leaders said, “As inside sales is all about using tech to obtain better outcomes, this was a vital step.”

The third foundational element was talent. The company realized that inside sales is not easy and is not for everyone—so finding the right people was imperative. As a result, it put in place a career development plan and recognized that many inside sales reps would see the job as a stepping stone in their careers. Demonstrating this understanding provided a great source of motivation for employees.

Finally, finding the right mix of incentives was key. The company chose a system based on compensation and KPI leading and lagging indicators. Individual incentives were a function of whether individuals were more involved with closing deals or supporting others, so a mix of KPIs was employed. The result was a more motivated salesforce and productive cooperation across the organization.

Advanced sales technology and automation

Automation is a key area of advanced sales technology, as it is critical to optimizing non-value adding activities that currently account for about two-thirds of sales teams’ time. More than 30 percent of sales tasks and processes are estimated to be partially automatable, from sales planning through lead management, quotation, order management, and post-sales activities. Indeed, automation leaders not only boost revenues and reduce cost to serve—both by as much as 20 percent—but also foster customer and employee satisfaction. (Exhibit 4). Not surprisingly, nine out of ten industrial companies have embarked on go-to-market automation journeys. Still, only a third say the effort has achieved the anticipated impact. 9 McKinsey analysis.

Leading companies have shown that effective automation focuses on four areas:

• Lead management: Advanced analytics helps teams prioritize leads, while AI-powered chatbots contact prospective customers via text or email and schedule follow-up calls at promising times—for example, at the beginning or end of the working day.
• Contract drafting: AI tools automate responses to request for proposal (RFP) inquiries, based on a predefined content set.
• Invoice generation: Companies use robotic process automation to process and generate invoices, as well as update databases.
• Sales commission planning: Machine learning algorithms provide structural support, for example, to optimize sales commission forecasting, leading up to a 50 percent decline in time spent on compensation planning.

How GEA seized the automation opportunity

GEA is one of the world’s most advanced suppliers of processing machinery for food, beverages, and pharmaceuticals. To provide customers with tailored quotes and services, the company launched a dedicated configure, price, quote (CPQ) system. The aim of the system was to enable automated quote creation that would free up frontline sales teams to operate independently from their back office colleagues. This, in turn, would boost customer interaction and take customer care to the next level.

The work began with a bottom-up review of the company’s configuration protocols, ensuring there was sufficient standardization for the new system to operate effectively. GEA also needed to ensure price consistency—especially important during the recent supply chain volatility. For quotations, the right template with the correct conditions and legal terms needed to be created, a change that eventually allowed the company to cut its quotation times by about 50 percent, as well as boost cross-selling activities.

The company combined the tools with a guided selling approach, in which sales teams focused on the customers’ goals. The teams then leveraged the tools to find the most appropriate product and pricing, leading to a quote that could be enhanced with add-ons, such as service agreements or digital offerings. Once the quote was sent and agreed upon, the data automatically would be transferred from customer relationship management to enterprise resource planning to create the order. In this way, duplication was completely eliminated. The company found that the sales teams welcomed the new approach, as it reduced the time to quote (Exhibit 5).

Data analytics and hyperpersonalization

Data are vital enablers of any go-to-market transformation, informing KPIs and decision making across operations and the customer journey. Key application areas include:

• lead acquisition, including identification and prioritization
• share of wallet development, including upselling and cross-selling, assortment optimization, and microsegmentation
• pricing optimization, including market driven and tailored pricing, deal scoring, and contract optimization
• churn prediction and prevention
• sales effectiveness, so that sales rep time allocations (both in-person and virtual) are optimized, while training time is reduced

How Hilti uses machine data to drive sales

Hilti is a globally leading provider of power tools, services, and software to the construction industry. The company wanted to understand its customers better and forge closer relationships with them. Its Nuron battery platform, which harvests usage data from tools to transform the customer experience and create customer-specific insights, provided the solution.

One in three of Hilti’s frontline staff is in daily contact with the company’s customers, offering advice and support to ensure the best and most efficient use of equipment. The company broke new ground with its intelligent battery charging platform. As tool batteries are recharged, they transfer data to the platform and then to the Hilti cloud, where the data are analyzed to produce actionable insights on usage, pricing, add-ons, consumables, and maintenance. The system will be able to analyze at least 58 million data points every day.

Armed with this type of data, Hilti provides customers with advanced services, offering unique insights so that companies can optimize their tool parks, ensuring that the best tools are available and redundant tools are returned. In the meantime, sales teams use the same information to create deep insights—for example, suggesting that companies rent rather than buy tools, change the composition of tool parks, or upgrade.

To achieve its analytics-based approach, Hilti went on a multiyear journey, moving from unstructured analysis to a fully digitized approach. Still, one of the biggest learnings from its experience was that analytics tools are most effective when backed by human interactions on job sites. The last mile, comprising customer behavior, cannot be second guessed (Exhibit 6).

In the background, the company worked hard to put the right foundations in place. That meant cleaning its data (for example, at the start there were 370 different ways of measuring “run time”) and ensuring that measures were standardized. It developed the ability to understand which use cases were most important to customers, realizing that it was better to focus on a few impactful ones and thus create a convincing offering that was simple to use and effective.

A key element of the rollout was to ensure that employees received sufficient training— which often meant weeks of engagement, rather than just a few hours. The work paid off, with account managers now routinely supported by insights that enrich their interactions with customers. Again, optimization was key, ensuring the information they had at their fingertips was truly useful.

Levers for a successful transformation

The three company examples highlighted here illustrate how embracing omnichannel, sales technology, and data analytics create market leading B2B sales operations. However, the success of any initiative will be contingent on managing change. Our experience in working with leading industrial companies shows that the most successful digital sales and analytics transformations are built on three elements:

• Strategy: As a first step, companies develop strategies starting from deep customer insights. With these, they can better understand their customers’ problems and identify what customers truly value. Advanced analytics can support the process, informing insights around factors such as propensity to buy and churn. These can enrich the company’s understanding of how it wants its go-to-market model to evolve.
• Tailored solutions: Customers appreciate offerings tailored to their needs. 10 “ The multiplier effect: How B2B winners grow ,” McKinsey, April 13, 2023. This starts with offerings and services, extends to pricing structures and schemes, and ways of serving and servicing. For example, dynamic pricing engines that model willingness to pay (by segment, type of deal, and route to market) may better meet the exact customer demand, while serving a customer completely remotely might better suit their interaction needs, and not contacting them too frequently might prevent churn more than frequent outreaches. Analytics on data gained across all channels serves to uncover these needs and become hyperpersonalized.
• Single source of truth: Best-in-class data and analytics capabilities leverage a variety of internal and external data types and sources (transaction data, customer data, product data, and external data) and technical approaches. To ensure a consistent output, companies can establish a central data repository as a “single source of truth.” This can facilitate easy access to multiple users and systems, thereby boosting efficiency and collaboration. A central repository also supports easier backup, as well as data management and maintenance. The chances of data errors are reduced and security is tightened.

Many companies think they need perfect data to get started. However, to make productive progress, a use case based approach is needed. That means selecting the most promising use cases and then scaling data across those cases through speedy testing.

And with talent, leading companies start with small but highly skilled analytics teams, rather than amassing talent too early—this can allow them to create an agile culture of continual improvement and cost efficiency.

As shown by the three companies discussed in this article, most successful B2B players employ various strategies to sharpen their sales capabilities, including omnichannel sales teams; advanced sales technology and automation; and data analytics and hyperpersonalization. A strategic vision, a full commitment, and the right capabilities can help B2B companies deploy these strategies successfully.

Paolo Cencioni is a consultant in McKinsey’s Brussels office, where Jacopo Gibertini is also a consultant; David Sprengel is a partner in the Munich office; and Martina Yanni is an associate partner in the Frankfurt office.

The authors wish to thank Christopher Beisecker, Kate Piwonski, Alexander Schult, Lucas Willcke, and the B2B Pulse team for their contributions to this article.

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The multiplier effect: How B2B winners grow

Ads for a popular online 'side hustle' course are misleading, customers say

Chelsea Ouimet has more than a million followers between her two Instagram accounts, “Chelsea the Affiliate” and “Hustle with Chelsea.” The self-described stay-at-home mom of three smiles broadly and shows off her beautiful home in video posts touting ways to make money — quickly — through a business model called affiliate marketing.

“All you need is a phone, a laptop, wi-fi and one to three hours a day,” she says in one of dozens of videos posted on her pages. In one post, she says the average annual salary of an affiliate marketer, with no experience, is $177,566. “I made that salary in my first 11 weeks,” she says.

Affiliate marketing is not new, but social media triggered an explosion of interest — and an array of concerns. The market for online learning courses has  boomed in recent years , spanning professional development platforms to online influencers  selling lessons on everything from gig work to the timeless art of seduction.

Dozens of companies online offer courses to teach you how to get into affiliate marketing. Typically, affiliates earn a commission on sales of products they recommend. The internet is full of videos with people saying they became millionaires through affiliate marketing. Part of the appeal is that these jobs can be pitched as a “side hustle” that don’t require as much time and effort as a full-time position.

I really thought I was just doing a $7 course. I was very, very shocked about it being a lot more than that.

Dana Gunning, Legendary Marketer customer

Side hustles have continued to become more common during this period of persistent inflation, particularly for younger people. A survey from the financial services company LendingTree  published in February  found that more than half of millennials and Gen Z supplement their main source of income with other moneymaking activities.

Ouimet and many others tout a $7 course offered by a company called Legendary Marketer. For that small investment, she says, you can learn how to earn thousands of dollars working from home for just a few hours a day. The company says its $7 “15-day business builder challenge” has “over 800 success stories.”

But not everyone has a success story. Dana Gunning, Loretta Lynne and Stacha Woessner, who took the course separately, told NBC News they signed up after seeing videos like Ouimet’s on social media.

“When I joined, I really thought I was just doing a $7 course. I was very, very shocked about it being a lot more than that,” Gunning said.

The women said that several days into their online course, they were surprised when a “business adviser” met with them over Zoom, telling them that to really earn money, they needed to buy the “Uplevel Blueprint” course for $2,500.

Woessner said the adviser told her: “Sell your car if you have to, put it on a credit card, borrow money from your friends or family. Spend this $2,500 and your life’s gonna change tremendously.”

All three women spent the $2,500 each and said the experience was informative. Their biggest takeaway, though? The fast way to make real money was to resell the same course to others, they said. For every $2,500 course they sold, they would earn a $1,000 commission, they added.

This was not the kind of affiliate marketing that Legendary Marketer promoted on social media, Lynne said. The videos, she said, told her that she could be an affiliate for brands such as Nike and Lululemon.

“But that’s not what they’re doing,” she said. “They just want you to resell their course.”

In online videos, Legendary Marketer CEO Dave Sharpe tells potential customers: “I’ve gone from completely broke to living the life of my dreams.” On its website, the company says it has “$250 million in career sales” and “well over half of that has been paid out to affiliate partners.”

But the fine print on Legendary’s website reads, “This is not a get rich quick program” and “the average person” should expect “little to no results.”

“The overhyped marketing is one of the biggest downsides of Legendary Marketer,” said Niall Doherty, who ranks affiliate marketing courses on his website, eBiz Facts, and often earns commissions on those he recommends. He has researched and reviewed Legendary Marketer's 15-day platform.

Realistically, Doherty said, affiliate marketers should expect to put in a lot of work and temper their expectations about how much they will actually earn.

“If you work hard at building up an affiliate marketing business for a year, not just a side hustle, the best-case scenario is that you’d be earning $1,000 a month after 12 months.”

Lynne said she earned several thousand dollars in commissions after taking the Legendary Marketer courses, but stopped after a few weeks, uneasy about upselling people.

Gunning had a similar experience. “I made one sale and I felt very bad about it,” she said, “promoting a $7 course when that’s not the goal.”

Woessner said she didn’t make any money at all and quit after a few months. 

After NBC News contacted the Better Business Bureau to ask about customer complaints, the organization took away Legendary Marketer’s A rating and started an investigation. The agency also posted an alert on Legendary Marketer’s page, citing “a pattern of customer complaints” about the company’s advertising and upsells. 

Sharpe declined to be interviewed for this story but said in a statement in part that he takes “all feedback seriously” and is working with the BBB to address its concerns.” The $7 course gives people value and knowledge about digital marketing, “like all Legendary Marketer courses,” he added.

Sharpe also said he’s working with affiliates like Ouimet to “ensure proper compliance” in marketing and disclosure to customers that there are more products for sale beyond the $7 course.

Ouimet did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Gunning, Lynne and Woessner, meanwhile, now earn commissions working with Legendary competitors. They said they have sold other courses, but their primary earnings come from selling digital products, building websites and recommending products from a variety of companies.

They advise anyone interested in becoming an affiliate marketer to read reviews and research multiple courses. Lynne said she now makes a good living doing affiliate and digital marketing, but it’s definitely not a side hustle. She said it took a long time to build her businesses and she still works long hours. 

“There is money in affiliate marketing,” Lynne said. “But you’ve gotta learn the right way to do it.”

Vicky Nguyen is the senior consumer investigative correspondent for NBC News. See her reports on "TODAY," "Nightly News with Lester Holt," MSNBC and NBC News Now.

Copilot in Windows and Windows 365: Helping customers advance in the new era of work

• Melissa Grant, Senior Director, Product Marketing, Windows Enterprise

Are you ready for a new era of productivity with AI technology that is changing the way people work? The modern workplace is constantly evolving, and AI is helping employees to work more efficiently, have more time for creativity and to really adopt this new way of working as the key to delivering business innovation. Every organization is going to need an AI strategy – one that enables them to enjoy all the benefits it unlocks for individual productivity and creativity. And we know as IT leaders, you have a critical role to play.

Today at our digital event “Advancing the New Era of Work,” Jared Spataro, corporate vice president of AI at Work, shared how we are continuing to advance Copilot capabilities across our software, services and devices that businesses rely on with updates from Windows 11, Windows 365 and new Surface devices for business.

3 strategies to advance AI across your business with Windows

At today’s event, I highlighted three strategies for how Microsoft and Windows are helping customers securely and efficiently scale AI across their business.

Advancing your goals with Copilot – your task slayer

The first strategy is to get Copilot in the hands of employees advancing their goals and freeing up their time, so they can accomplish more of what matters. Copilot in Windows is an AI orchestrator, taking on tasks across apps, files, settings, data and the web, so people can get better answers faster, grow their skills, and let Copilot do more of the busy work. This enables employees to focus on strategic work and get things done faster.

At today’s digital event, we shared how we are making Copilot super easy to access by clicking on the Copilot icon from the Windows taskbar or the Copilot key on new Windows PCs 1 and the new Surface devices for business.

In addition, Copilot in Microsoft 365 capabilities are now available in Windows. With Copilot in Windows, people can now select “Work” to enable Copilot in M365 which works across their entire universe of data at work, including emails, meetings, chats, documents and more, plus the web.

Screenshot of a Windows 11 desktop with Copilot in Microsoft 365 in Windows on the right side of the desktop. The work or web tab is set to “Work” which enables Copilot in M365 to work across a person’s entire universe of data at work, including emails, meetings, chats, documents and more, plus the web.

There are a host of new skills Copilot in Windows can do, becoming an adjunct IT assistant and a personal assistant.

Microsoft Copilot improvements for Windows 11

Work without limits – more flexibly and securely

The second strategy focuses on empowering employees to work without limits more securely on their approved device of choice, whether it’s on the new Surface devices for business or streamed from the cloud with a Windows 365 Cloud PC.

The new Surface devices for business announced today are the first AI-powered Surface PCs built exclusively for business. The Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 were designed with features that business customers have been asking for – from Copilot 2 to ports to NFC readers, security and performance with the latest Intel Core Ultra processors and integrated Neural Processing Units to increase battery life and reduce tax on the CPU and GPU. These new devices are built for Copilot and Windows 11, with the new Copilot key that makes accessing AI experiences just a click away.

When you need to deliver Windows across any device for any type of worker, Windows 365 Cloud PCs provide a great option for flexible secure work and ensure that you can control costs and manage more efficiently.

The following are three exciting advancements we’ve made with Windows 365 in how we empower a flexible and secure work experience.

Windows 365 Security Updates

Windows 365 supports single sign-on, Cloud PC encryption, and screen capture and watermarking protection to deter data leaks and data loss.

Single sign-on (SSO) and passwordless authentication support for both Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop are now generally available, along with third-party IDP support. We are actively enabling the same capabilities for Azure Virtual Desktop approved providers.

Watermarking, screen capture protection, and tamper protection support for both Windows 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop are also now generally available. Together, these capabilities help protect against unauthorized access and manipulation of data, help ensure the safety of sensitive information, and help maintain organizational data integrity.

Windows App – over 3 million active hours of usage across platform

At Ignite, we launched a preview of the Windows App — a single, unified app that provides access to Windows 365, Azure Virtual Desktop, Remote Desktop, Remote Desktop Services, Microsoft Dev Box and more, across platforms, securely connecting your employees to a Windows Cloud PC from the device of their choice. Since the preview launch, Windows App usage has reached over 3 million active hours across platforms!  Customers like Vodafone and Zurich Insurance Group are using Windows App today to enable their employees to securely connect to their cloud resources.

Windows App is available via the Microsoft Store for Windows devices, the web, or TestFlight for Apple devices in public preview.

Windows 365 GPU

Windows 365 has new offerings with Windows 365 GPU support, in preview, which makes it ideal for workloads such as graphic design, image and video rendering, 3D modeling, data processing and visualization applications. When you’re working on one of these powerful GPU-enabled Cloud PCs, you can run apps that use the local GPU resource. Windows 365 GPU support addresses one of the most frequently requested service capabilities for customers looking for simplified management and access to a GPU in a Software as a Service solution.

Innovation with you at the center, so you can become an AI powerhouse

The third strategy involves innovation that puts you and your organization at the center, helping you take advantage of AI by shifting to the cloud with your end-user computing solution that is integrated and secure, so you are future ready to become an AI powerhouse.

Windows is integral to a secure and flexible end-user computing solution set, tightly integrated with core services and applications. Working together, this means that:

• Windows works with AI in Intune to automate and analyze your device estate, ensuring management efficiency and cost savings.
• Devices are always up to date with Windows Autopatch, with the latest security protections.
• Windows empowers an ecosystem of partners to deliver the latest devices, optimized for AI like the new Surface for business devices.
• App developers can create AI-powered apps with Windows AI Studio

We are also advancing sustainability and accessibility as technology advances.

Customers like Kantar moved from on-premises management to cloud management with Microsoft Intune to deploy Windows 11 Enterprise, Windows 365 Cloud PCs, and Surface devices, improving employee productivity and satisfaction while streamlining costly, time-consuming IT processes.

Kantar adopts Windows 11 Enterprise to build the foundation for Copilot and AI

The following are two highlights of the Microsoft end-user computing solution with AI integration and innovation.

Windows 365 AI Cloud PC resizing

Windows 365 leverages AI to offer Cloud PC resizing recommendations to help you reduce costs, increase efficiency, and further simplify security and management of Windows 365 Cloud PCs. Windows 365 applies AI to assess Cloud PC deployment and utilization to provide recommendations to help you better forecast and “right-size” your Cloud PC investment. This is now in public preview.

Advancing accessibility features with Copilot in Windows

In the next release of Windows 11 preview coming end of the month, people will benefit from a host of new Copilot skills for accessibility which enable you to quickly turn on narrator, launch screen magnifier, change text size, or start live captions.  Additionally, voice shortcuts help complete tasks faster with custom commands to quickly accomplish tasks like pasting text and media, pressing keyboard keys or mouse clicks, to opening folders, files, apps, or URLs.  And multi-display, making navigating a multiple monitor setup even easier with voice commands to navigate between displays or move files and apps.

Inclusive and productive Windows 11 experiences for everyone

Become future-ready in the age of Copilots with Windows and Windows 365

IT Leaders play a critical role in this new era with AI, from deploying Copilot across the applications and services you build your business on – from Windows, Microsoft 365 to Teams, Edge and more – to ensuring an end-user computing solution that is secure with the Microsoft Cloud. We’ve supported over 90% of Fortune 500 companies to modernize their endpoints, helping them to be future-ready for the age of Copilots. With Windows 10 end of support coming in October 2025, now is the time to move to Windows 11 with a new Surface for business device and with Windows 365, and the best way to get there is using cloud management in Intune.

There are two key steps you can take TODAY to deliver on your AI strategy:

• Upgrade to Windows 11 and get Windows 365 to deliver Microsoft Copilot across every device, to every employee, more securely.
• Check out the new Surface for business AI PCs, available to order today. They deliver a holistic experience across software, hardware, security and AI for your business – in a sleek and streamlined design your employees will love. Learn more about Surface Pro 10 for Business and Surface Laptop 6 for Business .
• When Copilot for Windows is not enabled on the device, pressing the Copilot key will launch Windows Search.
• Copilot in Windows (in preview) is available in select global markets and will be rolled out to additional markets over time. Learn more . Copilot with commercial data protection is available at no additional cost for users with an Entra ID with an enabled, eligible Microsoft 365 license .

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Vietnam veteran's DMV visit leaves him in tears. But they're tears of joy.

Ed Campbell of Tiverton is a 79-year-old Vietnam veteran who had an experience with the Department of Motor Vehicles recently that drove him to tears.

“What’s so unusual about that?” you may ask. Many of us have been ready to cry after dealing with that agency.

But Ed’s story is somewhat different. His tears were tears of joy, a reaction to how well he was treated by the staff at the Middletown DMV office.

Ed graduated from Northeastern University in 1967 and was commissioned through the Army ROTC. By 1969 he was in Vietnam serving as the executive officer of an ordnance company, ensuring that other units had the weapons, ammunition and equipment they needed to fight the war.

He also earned a master's degree in an education-related field from Indiana University, but he decided that path was not for him. He joined the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, launching a lifetime career as a federal crime investigator. By the time he retired, he was performing inspector general duties for agencies such as the Small Business Administration.

It's not a variety plate ... it's simply 'unfit' for a veteran

When Rhode Island authorized special veterans plates for those service members who had earned a Bronze Star medal, Ed decided to order one. When he went to the Middleton DMV office to pick up his plates, the first thing he noticed was that the first two letters on the plate were “4F.” 

As any old soldier knows, 4F is the Selective Service abbreviation for “unfit for military service.” Taken somewhat aback, Ed tried to explain to the young woman who had just given him the plates that giving a 4F plate to a combat veteran was just not the right thing to do.

“Perhaps she was too young to understand the significance of what I was telling her,” Ed told me, “But she was very kind and very polite, and promised to bring it to the attention of her supervisor.”

So Ed went home with his plates and thought little more of it. The following day he received a call from a DMV supervisor named Jessica, who fully understood Ed’s point and apologized. She asked Ed to return to the DMV office so he could be given new plates.

He did so, and was stunned by the reception he received. Once he signed in, he was whisked to the front of the line. “Everyone knew who I was,” Ed said.

Recognizing extraordinary service at the DMV

In addition to the new plates, Ed received an apology card signed by the office staff and a $25 Dunkin' gift card.

“All anyone ever hears about the DMV is horror stories,” he added. “I cannot tell you how moved I was by this experience. Everyone was great to me, and I started to cry.”

Since it was close to Valentine’s Day, Ed went out and bought a box of chocolates for the people who had treated him so well.

Ed especially singled out Supervisory Customer Service Agents Jessica and Erin, whom I was able to identify as Erin Neville and Jessica Ramsay.

Spokesman Chuck Hollis said the DMV has created a dedicated tab on their website to make it easier for veterans to navigate through their transactions.

“We appreciate the service they have provided to protect our freedoms, and if we can make their transaction or time at the DMV better, we will do what we can to assist them,” he concluded.

Journal staff writer Antonia Noori Fazan first learned about this story and introduced me to Ed via email.

USS Yosemite AD-19 to hold reunion in RI from April 24-27

This World War II-built destroyer tender spent much of its naval career based in Melville and Newport, so for the many veterans who served on it a return to Rhode Island is appropriate. The USS Yosemite Association invites all local vets or families to attend.

Reunion HQ is the Crowne Plaza hotel in Warwick .

The job of a destroyer tender was to service destroyers in, or near, battle areas and keep them fit for duty. Launched in 1942, Yosemite saw action in the Pacific during World War II.

In 1946 the ship was assigned to Newport, where it served as the flagship for the Commander, Destroyers, Atlantic Fleet until 1962. During the Cuban missile crisis, Yosemite deployed to Kingston, Jamaica, where it tended the ships engaged in that operation. For six more years Yosemite was assigned to Newport, until its homeport was changed to Mayport, Florida.

Yosemite was decommissioned in 1994, and nine years later was sunk as a target in a naval exercise.

For further information, call Tina Briones Smith, USS Yosemite Association secretary, in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, at (734) 308-0402 or by email,  [email protected] .

Alana Cerrone O’Hare of the Providence Warwick Convention & Visitors Bureau is the local contact for the reunion. She can be reached at (401) 486-3582.

Wednesday, March 27; Noon and 1 p.m. serving times. Free “Welcome Home” Lunch for Vietnam veterans  at Texas Roadhouse, 1200 Quaker Lane, East Greenwich. Join us to commemorate Vietnam Veterans Day. The Mobile Vet Center will be onsite that day to explain services. Staff from the Veterans Benefit Administration will be on hand to assist with claims and to answer questions about VA benefits. Personnel from the Providence VA Medical Center will be available to enroll eligible veterans in medical assistance programs. The R.I. Chapter of Vietnam Veterans of America will have its memorial wall on display; Operation Stand Down will be present as well. Resources will be located in the Texas Roadhouse parking lot along Route 2. While everyone is welcome to visit the resources outside, there are limited spots available for lunch, and reservations are required. Email Missy Beaudoin at [email protected]  or call/text (860) 465-6364. Questions? Reach out to Veteran Outreach Program Specialist Ed Smith at (401) 739-0167, or email   [email protected]

Thursday, March 28; 10:30 a.m. National Vietnam Veterans Day Observance at the State House (House Chamber). Hosted by Rhode Island State Council , Vietnam Veterans of America. Join veterans, lawmakers and guests for light refreshments in the House of Representatives lounge immediately following the ceremony. Parking is tight, so please consider carpooling.

Tuesday, April 23; 6-7 p.m. Veterans Coffee Social at Warwick Public Library , 600 Sandy Lane, Warwick (large meeting room). Helen Smith from the Rhode Island Genealogical Society will present a genealogy workshop centered on family and relationships. Discussion will encourage the sharing of personal stories. All veterans and their families and friends are invited to join.

To report the outcome of a previous activity, or to add a future event to our calendar, please be aware that the deadline for this Monday column is 5 p.m. the previous Wednesday. Email your details (including a contact name and phone number/email address) to [email protected] .