client visit purpose

The Importance of Customer Visits: Tools & Tips

By Kishana Citadelle & Coralie Petit

Updated: May 23, 2024, first publication: August 4, 2021

Table of contents

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 read the true interests or intentions of a client?

The answer to that is most likely… No, it doesn’t.

Usually, the more customers you gain or have to deal with, the more it’s essential to keep a close relationship with them.

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

Let’s unveil the importance of customer visits and how to plan it efficiently. 👇

Why are Customer Visits Important?

What are the benefits.

Customers are constantly being solicited by your sales team or your competitors.

In fact, they are likely to appreciate talking with a salesman who is not trying to sell goods, and instead, someone who is invested in hearing about their problems and preferences.

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 into their workday. And by doing so, 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;
• Company workers will feel more motivated as they will get honest and personal feedback on their product or service.

You must keep in mind that you are not the only one soliciting customers. It’s a competitive market, so getting as much personal information as possible will keep you ahead of the game.

And eventually, seeing their smile and satisfaction in person can be quite a reward. 🏆

Who Does it Concern, and Why?

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.

Here is how to do it:

• Refer to your CRM tools to 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, there’s a strategy to take into account: the optimization of b2b sales funnel .

👉 You organize your customer visits by geographical area , and link them to lose as little time as possible between each appointment.

This method can only boost your notoriety amongst customers and build customer loyalty. Once it is done properly, your efficiency to read and better understand the customer is increased.

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

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

Why is Customer Attraction Important?

Customer attraction is vital for:

• business growth ,
• brand development ,
• and maintaining a competitive edge .

In fact, it ensures a steady revenue stream and promotes brand awareness through word-of-mouth, enhancing the company’s reputation. ☝️

Also, effective customer attraction strategies enable businesses to:

• lead in competitive markets ,
• drive innovation ,
• and secure long-term viability .

In essence, attracting customers is foundational to not only immediate financial health, but also to the sustained success and adaptability of a business in a dynamic market environment.

What is a Customer Visit Program?

Customer visits provide an opportunity for interaction between the parties involved to reach a settlement.

Discussions may include:

• advertising,
• and 'team' approaches to visits.

Strategizing is very essential and should not be omitted! It gives you a true insight into a customer’s perspective.

Customer visits can be divided into four classes:

• Customer visits with the senior management team: owners, presidents, general managers, and so forth;
• Customer visits with the sales managers;
• Customer visits with a team of two or more people;
• Customer visits with an individual: a member of the sales management team, or a salesperson, for instance.

4 Strategic Steps for Effective Customer Visits

1- planning visits.

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

Scheduling the Visit

The 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, and that everything you report back to your team will be done with their consent.

Preparing Your Approach

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! You could visit their website to learn more about their products, services, and their world.
• Build a client portfolio , or a persona.

Organizing Your Team

At the same time:

• 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.

2- Provisioning Excellent Customer Service During Visits

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

Start with light conversations before getting to the purpose of the meeting.

💡 Our tip: Make them feel comfortable , as you do not want to seem too keen to get down to business.

Keep in mind that this is a mutual agreement . That way, the customer, or client, won’t run away.

Topics to Come Up With

• pay attention to them,
• try to find the best solution to their problem;
• ask open-ended questions,
• allow the customer to take the lead and talk;
• Focus on who uses your products or services the most. And if so, how often and what are the main reasons?
• Once you have determined their necessity for said products and services, ask them what they would like to be changed . Are there any bugs?

Good Practices

• Above all, take notes! Whether the information seems useful to you, this data might be useful later or will speak to one of your colleagues.
• Don’t leave the room without summarizing what was said and mentioning the next steps you will take to ensure their needs are met.

Many benefits can come out of this! 🧐

• bulleted Guide to Business Negotiation: Clinch Deals in 6 Steps

3- Personalizing the Customer Visits

Personalizing customer visits and interviews is a powerful strategy to:

• enhance the customer experience ,
• increase engagement ,
• and ultimately drive sales and loyalty .

Data-Driven Personalization

First, you should use your collected data and analyzes to come up with customized greetings and recommended products or services.

👉 Using CRM systems or AI automates data management and allows for personalized recommendations.

Customized Offers

Secondly, you could create personalized offers and loyalty programs that offer exclusive deals based on customer history and preferences. Ultimately, you could adjust the physical or digital environment to suit individual customer preferences, enhancing their overall experience.

By personalizing the visit, you will enhance satisfaction and encourage loyalty! 🤝

4- And… Share Feedback After the Visits

In one word: debrief .

Review what happened:

• What did you learn?
• Were some of your questions answered?
• Did you reach your goals?
• What was the most helpful?

Following-up

Then follow up with the customer and your team !

💡 Our tip: 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 daily process. It’s 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.

How to Simplify the Customer Visit?

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 , which is best for consistency. Also, centralization 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;
• If the visit is successful, you can even have the customer digitally sign an order in the same breath!

By using flexible and customizable software, your sales representatives have all the necessary tools at their disposal on their smartphone or tablet:

• Customer files are updated in real-time ;
• Connection to your ERP ;
• Generation of sales documents (quotations, order forms, invoices);
• Access to order history , stocks , and your catalog .

Have you tested any digital tools for your customer relations? 🤔

• bulleted Which is the best CRM for me?

Customer Visits: In Summary

💡 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. And to take advantage of this meeting, help yourself with the appropriate tools .

Take the time to know who you are catering to, as customers buy when they feel loyalty and consideration .

Great relationships lead to great opportunities !

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

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

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

If I talk to another entrepreneur and say, "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.

Visiting customers is like working out or eating healthy: everybody knows they should do it, but very few people do.

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

Some businesses put off visiting customers because it takes time, and it’s easy to put it off their 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 work. 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, many 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, recharges your batteries, and gives you a visceral sense of how your work actually impacts the lives 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 differs from hearing customers tell you how much they love or think your product is great. You have to experience customer satisfaction happening in real-time. You need to see real human beings depending on what you build. You need to witness how your product helps them to operate better, to be better at what they are doing.

Your impact 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 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 . They deepen the commitment on both sides. If one of the people we met needs help one day, we'll be more eager to support them. I'm pretty sure they'll be more forgiving if there's ever an issue with Close and 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. Still, 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 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 the customer 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 use 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.

Visiting customers in Germany in 2015

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

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 that will help build trust in your brand.

When planning customer visits, consider 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!

GET YOUR COPY OF TALK TO YOUR CUSTOMERS→

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

By now, you should be sufficiently motivated to 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, visiting everyone is probably not feasible. 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 best customers overall.

Next, include customers using your product or purchasing from you regularly. Learning how they use your products and services or why they keep returning to you will be great for your team.

Finally, 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 you’ll need to meet with inside the company.

First, 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 using your product and the end-users. If you’re a service-based business, talk to the people mainly affected by using your services.

The Close team visiting customers in Ottawa, Canada, 2014

3. Spend Time Getting to Know the Business Beforehand

Just like when prospecting, spend time doing research before the meeting—whether 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 getting the most out of your time with them.

Start by setting out the agenda for your main meetings with the C-suite and the managers of the teams that use your product. Set up talking points, such as updates to your product pricing or upcoming feature launches. Also, leave room in the agenda for their team to add 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 customers are aligned before you start asking them many 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 start 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, in 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 how 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 from 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 industry trends or changes that could affect how 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 an excellent opportunity to get referrals . And 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, 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.

All the insights you gain during a customer visit must become organizational knowledge—otherwise, your customer visits are 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 ensure everyone in the company benefits from customer visits, we try to share some pictures or highlights from our customer visits in Slack. 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 you should generally meet them more often than you're meeting them now.

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

Seeing 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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“We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” Romans 8:28

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

By Kishana Citadelle

Published: 4 August 2021

Table of contents

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?

What are the benefits.

Customers are constantly being solicited by your sales team. In fact, they will likely appreciate talking with a vendor 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
• Company workers will feel more motivated as they will get honest and personal feedback of their product or service
• It will create a certain bond: Meeting clients or customers in their environment shows you how they integrate your software in their workday. You’d be able to study their behaviour, to assess their potential and show them your support
• It detects needs or problems that would not have been obvious on the telephone or by e-mail.

You must note 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.

Who does it concern and why?

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 optimisation of sales rounds : you organise 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.

What is a customer visit programme?

A customer visit provides an opportunity for each party to interact in order to reach a settlement . Discussions may include pricing and terms, advertising, and 'team' approaches to visits. Strategising 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 management team or a sales person.

How to prepare for it?

Before the visit.

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 until the day of the meeting. Study their company, visit their website to know more about their products, services, and their work-life.

It will help you personalise 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.

During the visit

Once every concerned individual is informed about the meeting, this is where you get into the core 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 eager to begin 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 come from this.

After the visit

It is time to debrief . Review what happened. What did you learn? Were some of your questions answered? Were your goals met? What was the most helpful?

Then, continue 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 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 unearth 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).

Final tips: how to simplify the customer visit?

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% dematerialised, for consistency and centralisation 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 form right away!

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 customisable 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 present, here is one last piece of advice: Always anticipate but do not forget that customer satisfaction is crucial to a company’s success. Nothing beats an in-person 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 disregard great relationships that can lead to great opportunities.

8 Proven Best Practices For An Effective Customer Visit

Customer visits are an excellent means of handling disputes, improving sales opportunities, and building customer relationships. Here are 8 tips to prepare for a customer visit:

• Set the date and time for the visit strategically:  Nothing's worse than going at their busiest time. Maybe they have a seasonality, or it's a quarter-end. You don't want them to be distracted. When you're on the visit, you want to spend time with them. So, plan it strategically.
• Send discussion documents or work papers in advance:  It could be that you're reconciling a high volume of invoices that they are refusing to pay. Or there are deductions that you just can't unravel. Always send all the documents in advance so that the customer has sufficient time to prepare as well.
• Determine who from your company should attend to address any concerns:  It could be your sales rep or someone from your staff who's been working on a particular issue and meeting with the customer to resolve it. Anticipate what issues or concerns the customer could have. Plan ahead and include the people who can address their issues.
• Inform the customer well in advance who you want to meet:  Get a nod on your customer's availability and whether they are prepared for the time you want to spend with them.
• Take time to understand the customer's business before the meeting:  You can ask probing questions that will help you understand the real challenge. When you're on-site, assess their business needs, understand their customer base, competitors, and industry trends. This way you can anticipate if there's going to be higher demand requiring a review of their credit line.
• Communicate the purpose of the visit to key stakeholders:  It could be your senior management or owner. It could be a sales or a product manager. It could be somebody in customer service or operations. If there are some logistics issues or any other kind of problem that they can help you with, they should be aware that you're going to this meeting and who you're going to meet with.
• What if it's a negotiation:  If so, define the roles and the talking points in advance. Sometimes it's a better strategy just to walk away than to make too much of a compromise. Always try to leave the opportunity for further discussion.

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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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Sales | How To

How to Plan & Run a Successful Client Meeting in 7 Steps

Published April 11, 2022

Published Apr 11, 2022

WRITTEN BY: Jess Pingrey

This article is part of a larger series on Sales Management .

Client meetings give you an opportunity to build or re-establish credibility and trust with leads, prospects, and current customers. Through understanding the meeting’s purpose, proper logistical planning, in-depth research, preparedness, and planning, you ensure your customer meeting is run effectively and successfully. In this article, we explore how to plan and run a client meeting with templates you can use during this process.

Client Meeting Template

Streamline your sales operations with premade, uniform templates to help guide your client meetings. As you fill out the information from the templates, store the document in your customer relationship management (CRM) system or another database. Below you will find the template we’ve constructed to help you create an agenda and take solid notes for all types of sales meetings.

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1. Understand the Purpose of Each Client Meeting

The scope of a client meeting with a prospective client depends on their needs and where they are in the sales process . It impacts the content and flow of the meeting, the attendees, and how you will prepare for the appointment. Below are some of the most common types of meeting purposes to consider:

• Introduction meeting: In-person visit or call to make the initial connection with a lead or prospect. It involves going through the lead qualification process, determining their needs, and briefly discussing your business, product, or service.
• Consultation: An advisory discussion with a lead or current client to determine their circumstances, needs, and potential solutions for their unique situation. This is not a time to sell, but instead to provide adequate knowledge and advice based on what you learn from their perspective.
• Sales presentation: The sales pitch to a lead or customer that takes a deep dive into your business and its offerings. During this time, you present your unique selling proposition and address questions about your product or service.
• Product demo: A detailed presentation of your product, its features, how it works, and if it is well-suited for the prospect.
• Proposal discussion: A call or meeting with a prospective client to discuss quotes or a formal proposal containing pricing, scope of services, terms, and so on.
• Onboarding and pass-off meeting: A call or meeting with a new customer to go over the onboarding and delivery process of a product or service. It also involves introducing them to a new point of contact, such as a sales rep passing them off to an account manager.
• Customer check-in or renewal meeting: A meeting with a current client to check their needs and satisfaction on your solution. You can also address concerns related to your products or services renewal.

Sales management and other organizational leadership teams must develop procedures and tools for each type of meeting and make them available for their reps and account managers. Once the purpose is fully understood, the rest of these steps become intuitive.

2. Manage Meeting Logistics

Once a meeting is confirmed and all attendees understand the purpose, ensure you adequately handle the logistics. This includes agreeing on the right time, place, and communication channels, such as in-person, phone call, or video conference meeting . Furthermore, make sure anyone who should be involved is invited and aware of the meeting logistical requirements.

For instance, if you’re doing a product demonstration for your software, have one of the software engineers on the call to help the client better understand the features. Additionally, if you’re doing a proposal discussion and there are multiple decision-makers in your lead’s buying process, ensure they are all invited.

To manage the meeting well, ensure you provide detailed instructions for logging onto the phone or video conference call and that any web links for access work properly. If it’s in-person, write out navigation directions for the location and any security or parking information they need to know.

Lastly, ask the lead or customer to bring any items or information needed for the meeting. For example, with renewal-based insurance, many agents request a lead’s current policy information for their proposal discussion. This way, they can do a direct, apples-to-apples comparison with the current or updated policy.

Pro tip: Use scheduling automation tools like Calendly to streamline the process of agreeing on the meeting time and place. Calendly lets users configure their meeting parameters to meet their scheduling requirements. Meeting attendees get to receive a link for the scheduling portal and find a time and channel that works best. Once scheduled, the event is automatically synced to everyone’s calendars.

Calendly scheduling portal (Source: Wired.com )

3. Research Your Meeting Attendees

Depending on the type of client meeting, certain details should be obtained prior to the event. If you’re meeting someone for the first time, have some talking points ready to build a connection by researching information on the attendee’s experience or interests. For example, if you learn on LinkedIn that you have mutual friends or share the same alma mater with the lead, mention that in the meeting to build rapport.

For meetings directly discussing the product or service, such as a product demo , proposal call, or sales presentation, learn more about the lead’s current providers and how they feel about them. If they don’t like the current price or customer service, you can use those insights to express how you can bridge those gaps and provide a more desirable solution.

Any meetings with current clients should include a thorough review of their activity history, their customer experience, and any concern related to your firm. Be prepared to handle their complaints and understand where they are coming from based on their interactions with your product, service, or the entire business.

Some research sources you can use include LinkedIn, the lead or client’s website, or mutual connections. You can also track down information using the lead data organization and note-taking features of customer relationship management (CRM) software . Prior interactions and contact information can be stored in popular products such as HubSpot for your whole team to access.

HubSpot lead profile with activity and notes (Source: HubSpot )

4. Prepare Content & Questions

As you prepare for a customer meeting, develop preset questions to understand their needs, priorities, purchasing process, budget, and timeline. Additionally, make sure the content and materials for the meeting look professional, up to date, and ready for presentation.

For example, use a slide presentation for your product demos or a spreadsheet for price comparisons during your proposal discussions. You could also have a checklist document for reference during consultations or anytime you’re qualifying a lead. An example checklist can be found in our article on using the BANT method to qualify leads.

Last—and arguably the most important—is preparing the agenda for the meeting. This should include the sequential order of items to discuss within the allotted time slot. The agenda should also contain a goal that you should send to all participants prior to the meeting so they know what to expect.

5. Start Client Meetings With Introductions

During the first stage of your meeting, introduce yourself and the other members of your organization on the call. Also allow the lead or customer to introduce themselves, briefly talking about who they are, what they do, and why they were interested in the meeting.

Afterward, you can cite some of those talking points you created in step three. For example, if it’s a one-on-one meeting and you knew one of your lead’s friends, you could bring up that connection. Start the conversation with something that goes like “Hey, I think I saw that you are also friends with Griffin Buscavage.”

6. Stick to the Agenda

It’s essential to stick with the plan you set as it impacts the expectations of the prospects or clients attending the meeting. Furthermore, all attendees are managing their schedule around that agenda. So stay on track, focus on the meeting’s primary purpose, and respect everyone’s time by not running the meeting too long.

Part of keeping with an agenda is maintaining control of the conversation. Contrary to what many sales reps think, this doesn’t mean talking for 90% of the time. Any client meeting is a two-way conversation, with you understanding their problems and preferred fix while they discover what solutions your product or service provides.

If you run out of time and there are still remaining agenda items, find a courteous way to manage a plan to fulfill those items. For instance, if you can extend for five more minutes, ask the participants if they are available to stay. If they are not but you still need more time, agree on a follow-up call and send a calendar invite for your next meeting.

7. Create a Follow-up Plan

At the end of each meeting, include a follow-up plan for things that you, your sales rep, the lead, or the client must accomplish. Much of the post-meeting tasks depend on the purpose of the meeting and what was discussed. For example, after an introductory meeting, your next plan of action may be to send a follow-up email and a calendar invite for another meeting, such as a product demo.

During this stage, be clear on what exactly the next steps are. Perform any follow-up tasks in a timely manner to keep the lead or client in the buying or renewal mindset. If you delivered a sales presentation and the prospect wants price quotes, generate the proposal and send it within a day. This is to keep up with the information they learned and the retention of their purchasing mindset.

Pro tip: Don’t let follow-up tasks slip through the cracks. CRMs also act as task management tools where you can create and track tasks you need to complete within certain deadlines. Bitrix24 , for example, lets users manage independent tasks or ones directly associated with a lead or customer in the CRM system. Plus, the team view allows everyone to collaborate on activities that need to be completed.

Bitrix24 task and activity management (Source: YouTube )

Tips for Running an Effective Client Meeting

As you go through each of the steps of running an engaging client meeting, follow these tips to best connect with clients. These will help you become more organized, and ultimately reap better results out of your customer meetings:

• Respect their time: Show up on time, follow the agenda, and keep the length of the meeting reasonable by not exceeding the allocated time slot.
• Conduct detailed research: Any insights you can acquire before the meeting could be valuable. It also shows you take understanding and interacting with your clients on a personal level seriously. Keep the intelligence you gather on your CRM system for future reference and for others to access.
• Take diligent notes: Make sure you’re documenting everything you learn during the meetings for future use. Taking solid meeting notes also prevents you from forgetting important details a client may have mentioned during the discussion.
• Avoid inappropriate conversations: As expected in all business settings, don’t bring up unethical conversational topics or anything that would be uncomfortable for the attendees. Common things to avoid include politics, religion, and deep personal discussions.
• Focus on unique value to them: Understand your competition and how you stand out from them. Additionally, focus on robust factors within the context of how you can add value to the customer. For example, if you know the lead has a wide budget but is upset with their current provider due to poor service, you can focus on the excellent customer support you offer.
• Choose the right environment: Your relationship with the client or lead should dictate the meeting environment. If you have a client for 10 years, taking them to lunch instead of a check-in call might be a better idea since you already have a long-term, personal connection.
• Be candid: Many salespeople say that the relationships and the human side of the job are their favorite aspects of it. Keep a strong balance of professionalism and social connection during your meeting, and don’t be afraid to be yourself and make your clients laugh. In many cases, the lead or customer isn’t choosing the company, but the sales rep they have the best interactions with.

Bottom Line

Not properly handling a client meeting could be a deal-breaker for obtaining new business or retaining current customers. It’s essential to remain organized and professional throughout planning and running the client meeting. Using organized meeting agendas and taking diligent notes to reference during the other stages of the sales process help you remain systematic and close more deals.

About the Author

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Jess Pingrey

Jess Pingrey is a seasoned subject matter expert passionate about providing the best answers about sales and customer service. She has 13+ years experience in sales, customer relationship management platforms, marketing, and content creation. Her background includes launching the sales department of a successful B2B startup, training teams on using software effectively, and serving as a customer experience champion.

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Customer Visit Plan Template for Product Managers

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• First Name *
• Last Name *
• Company Name *
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This Customer Visit Plan is designed for Product Managers and will help you define:

• Objective or purpose – Why is this visit being carried out? What do you want to learn? etc.
• Customer ‘segments’ to be visited
• Guidelines and ground rules to set
• Team members who are attending
• Agenda and structure
• Debrief (and more!)

This template is discussed in depth in our Product Management Essentials Workshop.

Product Management Training

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Embracing New Adventures.

17 Terrific Tips When Visiting Clients

Meeting with your clients in their environment is a great way to strengthen existing relationships. Not only will you get a better sense of their business and culture, the visit demonstrates your professionalism and appreciation. Use these reminders as a checklist for making your client visits successful.

• Set up the appointment by phone, not e-mail. Discuss mutual objectives, agenda items, who to meet with, who will be conferenced in, meeting space, A/V equipment if needed, etc.
• Pre-call plan with your team. Identify who will lead conversation on specific issues. Prepare a list of anticipated questions and responses. Do your homework on key topics.
• Confirm the visit a day or two in advance. Ask if there are any changes from original plans.
• Take plenty of business cards.
• Wear appropriate business attire even if it’s casual jean day in their office. If you don’t know, ask if their dress standards are business or business casual.
• Bring enough materials and marketing gifts. Avoid having to ask your client to make copies.
• Conference room seating. Ask your client about seating arrangements.
• If using slides on a screen, keep room properly lighted. If detailed information is presented, have paper copies as well. Be prepared to present without visuals if equipment is not working.
• Lunch protocol. Advance planning is needed. Who to include and invite, reservations so the table is ready, and server informed you are buying.
• Ask for scheduled time to meet others you do business with in their office such as accounting, support services, and claims.
• Vehicle and parking. Be sure your vehicle is clean and ready for guests in case you are asked to drive to lunch or another meeting. Park in employee area or on the street. Do not park in their designated customer spaces.
• When visiting with colleagues, arrive together at the office. Arriving separately is an inconvenience to your host.
• Turn off your cell phone and keep it out of sight. If you need to use it to research something, ask permission, use it, then put it away. Wear a watch since you won’t have your cell phone as a timepiece.
• Using an iPad or other device to take notes is not recommended. It interferes with conversation since your attention is focused on the screen and typing. If using your iPad or tablet to run a presentation on a screen, turn off any alert sounds.
• Be a master of small talk and conversation starters. Obviously, stay away from politics and religion. Asking “how’s business?”  or “what’s new this year?” are safe conversational questions.
• At the start of the meeting, briefly review your agenda with attendees. Reconfirm timeframe. Ask your client what they want to discuss. Start with the items most important to them even if it’s not on the agenda.
• Follow up with an e-mail that is both a brief meeting summary and thank you. If there are items you are researching, let them know the timeframe of your response.

Emily Huling, CIC, CMC helps the insurance industry create top-performing sales, service, and leadership organizations. She can be contacted at [email protected] .

She is the author of Great Service Sells, Selling from the Inside, and Service Selling Supercharge. For information on learning materials and consulting services and to subscribe to her free monthly newsletter, visit www.sellingstrategies.com .

  Emily Huling  Selling Strategies, Inc.

P.O. Box 200  Terrell, NC 28682 Phone: 888-309-8802

Mobile: 704-516-5114 

www.sellingstrategies.com

11 strategies for elevating the client experience

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If you work at a law office, consulting firm, or anywhere that regularly hosts guests onsite for important meetings, then you know building strong client relationships is critical. Not only is this a good look for your brand, it’s a necessary step to secure business. After all, clients want to be sure the firm they choose will prioritize them—and giving them a VIP experience while they’re in the office is a great way to show them that you do. So, where do you start? In this post, we’ll share 11 different strategies for elevating the client experience so anyone who steps foot in your office feels like a VIP. We’ll show you how to ensure they have a smooth and welcoming arrival, and feel impressed throughout their visit.

Why does client experience matter?

While a great first impression can make them feel welcomed, impressed, and at ease, a poor first impression can do the exact opposite. Your client experience sets the tone for how guests perceive your office, employees, and organization. By taking intentional steps to improve the client experience, guests can focus on the purpose of their visit. Plus, a great client experience can influence your company’s referrals, retention rate, and overall reputation.

Intending to offer a great client experience isn’t the same as executing on a well-thought-out plan. Using the tips below, your team can establish a plan for making sure anyone who visits your office feels welcomed and important.

1. Prepare clients for their arrival

You might think that the key to making a great first impression with clients is having a beautiful lobby or grand meeting rooms. But really the first impression starts way before a client arrives onsite. Often overlooked, an invite to the office is the first and easiest way to make a great first impression. An impressive and effective invite isn’t only beautiful, it’s informational. To prepare clients for their visit, use your visitor management system to:

• Invite clients to pre-register for their visit: This enables them to provide their information and sign your NDA before they step foot in your office. It also gives them plenty of time to read and review any important documents before signing.
• Send directions, parking instructions, and pertinent arrival information: This ensures your clients don’t stress about finding a parking space near your office and allows them to have a seamless entry so they get to the purpose of their visit.

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2. Ensure an easy and sleek sign-in

Once a client arrives at the office, make it easy for them to sign in and receive an access badge for their visit. Remember to:

• Ditch pen and paper sign in: For clients who don’t pre-register for their visit in advance, signing in using a sleek iPad with your branding is the next best option. When an invited visitor types their name on the iPad, their sign-in details will automatically populate.
• Print branded visitor badges: Give each client a custom access badge to wear during their visit. As an added touch, you can print WiFi credentials on each one so they can easily access your company’s internet. This will make clients feel welcomed, while making it easy for employees to identify unfamiliar faces.

{{protip-2}}

3. Share your company’s WiFi

To have a productive visit, clients often need to connect to your company’s internet. Yet, sharing your one-and-only WiFi password means folks can stay connected even after their visit has ended. A better, more secure option is to issue each client unique WiFi credentials.

{{protip-3}}

4. Keep your lobby clutter free

A cluttered, disorganized lobby is a sure way to make a bad impression. For the same reason you’d clean your home before having guests over, it’s important to keep the entryway to your office tidy, too. Make a point to clean this area on a regular basis and be sure to store packages properly so they don’t pile up and become unsightly.

{{protip-4}}

5. Personalize your welcome

Have your team review the pre-registration list at the start of each day so they know who’s scheduled to come into the office and the reason for their visit. This way, your front desk staff can greet each client by name and be prepared to accommodate their specific needs.

“Address each visitor warmly and by name. This will help them feel welcomed, seen, and like the entire visit doesn’t have to be about business.” – Dave Park , Workplace manager at Envoy

6. Offer a beverage and snack

One quick way to make clients feel at home is to offer them a drink or snack. People are impressed by small gestures and will appreciate a white-glove service experience that makes them feel important and taken care of from the minute they walk in the door.

{{protip-5}}

7. Help clients with their coats or bags

Clients often arrive juggling items like coats, umbrellas, bags, or luggage. Offer to take these items off their hands or show them a safe place to put them during their visit. This safeguards their belongings, helps prevent potential hazards, and keeps your office free of clutter.

8. Don’t keep clients waiting

It’s never a good look to keep important clientele waiting. Let their hosts know as soon as they arrive so they don’t have to wait around unnecessarily. This will ensure guests don’t feel crunched for time or frustrated before their meeting even starts.

{{protip-6}}

9. Show them around the office

If a client arrives early for their appointment, give them a brief tour of the office. Taking the time to walk them through your office is a great way to show off your company’s facilities and make clients feel more comfortable during their visit. You can also share helpful information like the location of the bathrooms and areas in the office pertinent to their visit.For example, if your company is a consulting firm, you might make a point to walk your client down the hallway that highlights some of your major projects. You could even point out the ones that might pique their interest, based on what you know about their organization.

10. Keep conference rooms tidy and well-equipped

Tidy up your conference rooms and be sure they have the right equipment to enable a productive visit. Speak with the folks who invite clients to the office most often and find out what they need to have a seamless meeting. This might include video conferencing equipment, whiteboards, a monitor for presentations, or even a mini fridge to stock beverages and snacks. In some cases, it might also include soundproofing panels to ensure client confidentiality.

Find a workplace platform with conference room scheduling software to help hosts find the right meeting room for their needs and book it in advance.

11. Drive continuous improvement with client insights

After their visit, send your client an email thanking them for coming in. This is a nice way to conclude their visit and an opportunity to ask clients to complete a short survey about their experience. You’ll show them you care about their feedback while also collecting important insights into what folks think about your team’s hospitality.  You should also review your workplace analytics to understand which days of the week clients typically visit the office, who invites clients onsite most, and which clients visit most often. With this information, your team can proactively plan to accommodate clients and customize their experience.

A top-notch client experience is a leg up for any business—and you play a critical role in building one for your organization. Review the tips above and decide which ones make the most sense to implement. Then, it’s time to get to work. As you do, remember that this work is not only creating a great experience for every client walking through your doors, it’s making a marked impact on your business.

Pro tip: Use this guide to find the right visitor management system for your business.

Pro tip: Be sure to keep your office guest policy up to date. This will inform how your team manages your sign-in and security processes, and help ensure your clients have a great experience while they’re in the office.

Pro tip: Be sure your visitor management platform integrates with WiFi provisioning services like Cisco Meraki and Ubiquiti UniFi that enable you to automatically share login credentials with clients at sign-in.

Pro tip: Use your workplace platform to automate your mailroom and prevent package pileups. Employees will be notified automatically when their package arrives and can schedule a time to pick it up so it's not left lying around.

Pro tip: Try offering clients a custom pen or another takeaway to make a lasting brand impression.

Pro tip: A robust workplace platform will automatically notify the host upon their client’s arrival, saving your team time and reducing the amount of time guests have to wait.

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How to customize formatting for each rich text

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Tiffany is a content crafter and writer at Envoy, where she helps workplace leaders build a workplace their people love. Outside of work, her passions include spending time with her greyhound, advocating for the Oxford comma, and enjoying really great tea.

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How to Prepare for an In-Office Client Visit

Whether your first priority with your office is comfort, beauty, or functionality, it needs to work for your clients. Here are tips to impress guests.

Originally published by the American Society of Civil Engineers . Re-posted with permission.

Whether your first priority with your office is comfort, beauty, or functionality, it needs to work for your clients. A disorganized workplace can have a negative effect on your clients but also you and your business. If you want your office to be truly productive, there are pieces of furniture that play a role in welcoming clients and there are also other aspects that show that your office is professional and orderly. 

Receive clients quickly and professionally

The software guides your visitor through the sign-in process. Safety is all-important and the system also improves the security measures of your office as it offers live reports of everyone on-site. The system streamlines the entire check-in process and reduces waiting times. It eliminates the need to have a live receptionist who sometimes can’t make it to the office. Clients love the streamlined reception process that is indicative of a well-run business in all other areas. 

Ensure ergonomically designed furniture

With any business, a comfortable furniture is always a great option when thinking of clients. Whatever office you have, you should never compromise on quality and comfort. You don’t want your clients using it and then taking away their aching and stressed muscles and a headache. Ergonomics in your organization shows your company’s commitment to health and safety. 

You and your clients may require sitting a good part of the day and that means you face some health issues if your chair is ill-fitting. It is crucial to make sure that business furniture is designed to enhance your comfort. 

Incorporating ergonomics  will not only ensure your productivity but your comfort and well-being will be assured as well. Clients are such a valuable asset and you want to show your appreciation of them. It’s important to create a safe, hygienic environment for your clients that leads to better relationships and cooperation. 

Customer services just common decency

Even if employees don’t really have much to do with the client, they need to be helpful, friendly, and hospitable. This can make a huge difference between a client having a shoddy experience and a client feeling welcome and appreciated for what they bring to the business. 

Provide clear directions

How frustrating it is to be spinning and whirling around, hunting for some guidance as to where to go. If your clients use a public parking area, already from there, there ought to be signs guiding them on how to find you. Without guidance, it can cause so much confusion as to make a client late. 

Many might lose impatience and not bother to see you. You’ll get a message later explaining that they battled to find your premises. Proper signage is imperative, and if you can’t afford professional signage, then laminated A4 posters will do the trick.

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Lead on Purpose

Promoting leadership principles in product management, three reasons to visit customers.

February 28, 2008 by Michael Ray Hopkin 7 Comments

It goes without saying that professionals—in any industry—want to understand the market in which they sell, and the people who are buying their products or services. They want to know what drives business.

This idea comes up quite often, especially among product managers. In a recent post about hiding behind personas , Steve Johnson poses the following question:

Why is it so hard for product managers and marketers (not all of course, but many ) to visit customers and non-customers?

I’ve found three key reasons (or excuses) why product managers (and other customer-interacting professionals) find it difficult to visit customers and non-customers:

• Fear of Rejection: In general people do not like hearing bad things about their products or solutions. It may not actually be fear of rejection , but more a fear of not looking smart and not getting what we need.
• High Cost: It costs money and time to leave the office and spend time talking with customers. Travel costs are often frowned upon by travel managers or executives. However, the biggest cost I’ve noticed is the time … away from email and other day-to-day activities. This can seem daunting when the thought of customer visits comes to mind.
• Too _____ (many/few) Customers: You fill in the blank. If the company has hundreds or thousands of customers it can seem daunting to visit enough to really know what they want and what they are doing. If the company has too few customers it can appear like a waste of time because the company is trying to diversify and get more customers in different areas than those few operate.

No doubt other valid reasons exist, but these seem to be the ones I hear the most often.

Now I pose three reasons why customer visits are not only good, but vital to the success of a company’s products (or services):

• In person = reality: (At least a much closer approximation to reality.) Unexpected information about your product or company always comes out when talking to people in person. You learn things about people when you look them in the eyes. They gain trust in you, which increases the trust you have in your own ability to make tough decisions.
• High Cost: Ok, so this is the same as above. While it does cost money and time to travel to customers, the opportunity cost of not visiting customers is, in my opinion, much higher. If you discover only one new idea to improve a product (or create a new product), and that idea keeps existing customers happy and attracts new customers, you have more than paid for the trip.
• Discovering Gems: There is something innately valuable about getting out of the office and in front of customers. Ideas seem to flow when you interact with other people. Trade shows are good and definitely bring new ideas. Customer visits do the same, only with more pointed focus on your products and services. Time spent with customers or prospects helps filter out the dross (see definition 3) from your thinking and leads to new ideas that ultimately make your product(s) better.

It’s always easy to find excuses for not getting out and meeting with customers—Jeff has a great post on this—but the reasons to go are far more compelling. And you also get to meet a lot of great people and see some cool places!

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7 thoughts on “ Three reasons to visit customers ”

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Really good blog. I just discovered it today.

Gopal Shenoy (www.productmanagementtips.com)

I couldn’t agree more. I just posted something very similar to this on my blog and as a comment on Gopal’s blog (they are related posts, but not identical).

Personally, I fall prey to problem #2 (time). It’s pretty easy to get swallowed up by meetings, documentation reviews, and all the other daily tasks associated with being a PM.

I recently set a goal for myself to meet with a customer at least once a month and printed out a list of local customers to start with. When I go to trade shows, I’ll try to work in some customer visits/conversations there, too.

Not every customer visit garners a gold nugget, but there’s a ton of untapped info out there…you just have to go get it.

Ivan http://www.theproductologist.com

Ivan, I agree that time often becomes the inhibitor to getting out and meeting with customers. You can always find something to keep you busy and the ‘busi-ness’ can drive your life if you let it.

I love the idea of setting a goal to meet with at least one customer a month. That leads to good habits that will lead to the golden nuggets of information you need to have great products.

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I always believe that customer visit is more important than office work. If you have enough customers to keep your business running, you will enjoy hearing their opinions about your service. If you don’t have enough customers, then you will know what is happening in the market and they will give priority to you for the next opportunity.

You cant always depend on your team to give you the picture, sometimes you need to get it your self.

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Recognizing Your Customer’s Purpose is Key to Growth

by Gene Cornfield

Summary .   

Growth strategies that are purpose-led, customer-centric, experience-driven, data/AI-enabled, and technology-scaled require new mindsets far more than new toolsets or skillsets. This transformation — of culture, operations, and outcomes — begins with a broader consideration of three levels of customer purpose. First, big-P purpose describes the company’s role in the world. Second, medium-P purpose depicts its role in the lives of customers. Finally, small-p encompasses all the intents, needs, questions, or desired outcomes that might compel a customer to engage your company. The author offers four ways to define, design, and deliver purpose-led experiences.

Many organizations spent 2020 scrambling to catch up on decades-old trends, such as working from home, online commerce, and virtual events. What had long been a priority had suddenly become the priority, and too many businesses found themselves unprepared. As things open up in 2021, other pre-pandemic trends are revealing their importance to post-pandemic success, including purpose, customer experience, and their combined role in driving growth.

It now seems every month a company previously known for dispassionate dedication to profit and efficiency launches a new and emotive purpose statement. Though these meticulously crafted declarations are on-trend with stakeholder capitalism , companies that don’t go beyond inspiring oohs and aahs of solidarity among customers, employees, and shareholders may be setting themselves up for a negative backlash — and missing their most significant transformational growth opportunity.

Besides being laudable and increasingly necessary, traditional approaches to profit through purpose — such as Patagonia’s 1% for the planet and Toms Shoes’ buy-a-pair-give-a-pair — have proven to be a good place to start for many. Consider Bank of the West, a subsidiary of BNP Paribas (full disclosure: both Bank of the West and BNP Paribas are Accenture clients). In 2018, the leadership team committed to un-funding industries like fracking, coal, arctic drilling, and tobacco; prioritized funding of renewable energy; and directly connected their financial products to specific causes. In the eight months that followed, according to company CMO Ben Stuart, they saw new customer growth of 37% — the strongest in their history — and sustained growth of 25% or greater.

But to fully harness purpose-fueled growth, it’s important to consider purpose more broadly than adopting social or environmental causes, sustainability practices, or pithy purpose statements. Companies significantly outperform competitors on growth, profitability, differentiation, category leadership, and long-term loyalty of customers and employees by considering three levels of purpose — company, brand, and customer purpose — and then optimizing their products, people, processes, policies, technology, operations, and metrics to deliver experiences aligned with those purposes. Here’s how to start.

Consider Three Levels of Purpose

Big-p purpose (company).

Big-P purpose describes the company’s role in the world. Communications giant Verizon’s purpose is, “We create the networks that move the world forward.” (Verizon is also an Accenture client.) These nine words describe not just what Verizon does, but why they do it. Employees can see the higher impact of their work, and customers can see a reason to choose Verizon.

Company purposes best galvanize customers when the stated purpose reflects one the company shares with them, not just what the company does for them. For example, my firm, Accenture’s, purpose is “to deliver on the promise of technology and human ingenuity.” This describes what our people and clients do together every day. It helps guide the decisions and actions of millions of employees (ours and our clients’) around the globe.

Medium-P Purpose (Brand)

Whereas big-P purpose depicts a company’s role in the world, medium-P purpose depicts its role in the lives of customers . Companies with only one brand may opt for company and brand purpose to be one and the same. Or they may opt to have distinct company and brand purposes, especially if they have multiple divisions serving different customer needs.

For example, Kimberly-Clark (also an Accenture client) has a distinct purpose for Huggies , its baby diaper brand: “Helping to navigate the unknowns of babyhood.” This statement perfectly reflects the unmet, perhaps unarticulated, needs of Huggies’ customers, which go beyond just diapers. And with this statement, first-time parents might feel Huggies understands them, leading to their confidence in — and ultimately choosing — Huggies. But this purpose would not fit Kimberly-Clark’s other brands like Kleenex, Cottonelle, Depends, or Kotex because those brands play a different role in the lives of customers.

Importantly, purpose statements like those above that elevate a company’s motives also elevate customer expectations. Purposes stated are promises made. So if a company doesn’t change how it operates to align with its stated purpose, it leaves itself vulnerable to accusations of virtue-signaling, green-washing, or generally being full of it if their actions don’t live up to their words. And with the velocity and reach of social media, company leaders can find themselves fighting a PR firestorm before they even know what caused it.

Many have learned this the hard way, including airlines, banks, drug companies, retailers, and social media companies themselves. Not only did their share prices and revenue suffer — which could be made up in future quarters — they also lost customer trust, brand equity, credibility, and future revenue potential, which might never be fully regained. Such injuries might have been avoided if those companies better aligned their practices and policies with their purposes and promises.

Small-P Purpose (Customer)

Despite its name, small-p purpose has by far the biggest impact on business performance and market leadership. Customer purposes are all the intents, needs, questions, or desired outcomes that might compel a customer to engage your company. Think anything that starts with something like, “I need…,” “I want…,” “How can I…,” or “Can you…”

These many needs comprise your customer purpose portfolio . It’s more important that teams have a deep understanding of your customer purpose portfolio than they do of your company’s product portfolio. Why? Because every time customers achieve their purpose, they generate value for whichever company enabled them to do so. That value may be in the form of revenue, share of spend, loyalty, advocacy, lifetime value, etc.

Every purpose in your customer purpose portfolio is the endpoint of a modern customer journey . Every purpose is the thing around which an experience is designed. Every purpose reflects an outcome that, every time it’s achieved by a customer, generates value for your business. A growing number of companies measure how well they’re enabling customers to achieve purposes — and increasing performance on business KPIs as a result — using Customer Performance Indicators (CPIs).

Define, Design, and Deliver Purpose-Led Experiences

Like purpose, another poorly defined business trend of rapidly growing importance is customer experience. Ask most leaders to describe what that means, and odds are “look and feel” will be mentioned. But experience isn’t how websites or apps or stores look and feel; experience is how customers react and feel when pursuing a purpose important to them.

If the company has done a good job of understanding a customer purpose and is making it easy for them to achieve it, customers will experience something like excitement, anticipation, joy, confidence, peace of mind, or satisfaction. If the company is not making it easy for customers to achieve their purpose, they’ll experience something like confusion, frustration, exasperation, or anger.

The veneer of pixels applied across digital touchpoints or printed on physical items — no matter how pretty — has little influence on what customers experience. What counts is whether customers can easily achieve their intended purpose.

Because your organization’s growth and success ultimately rely on customers achieving their purposes, start by understanding what matters most to them — in the world, in their lives, and in the specific context of what you provide — using exploratory ethnographic research (individual open-ended discussions, observation sessions, or customer journaling). Insights from that research will inform the creation of your company purpose, brand purpose, customer purpose portfolio, and CPIs, as well as new products and experiences.

Come Up with and Prioritize New Experience Concepts

Use the customer purpose portfolio you identified through research to come up with new experience concepts that enable customers to achieve their priority purposes. Generate as many ideas as possible, deferring judgement until you have at least 20–100 concepts to consider. Evaluate each individually based on potential impact for customers (CPIs) and for your business (KPIs).

Then identify the capabilities or dependencies each concept requires (data, technical, operational, organizational, regulatory, etc.) relative to your company’s current state. Many concepts will rely on the same capabilities or dependencies. So analyze the collective customer/business impact and the cost/complexity of realizing multiple concepts with shared capabilities/dependencies in order to prioritize them. (The most innovative and valuable concepts are often the most difficult or expensive; considering them with others that share the same dependencies helps rationalize the business case for them all.)

This generates several important outputs, including:

• New customer journeys designed around customer purpose, which are differentiated by the experience concepts they include.
• A future-state experience blueprint, a master view that synthesizes your new customer journeys, top experience concepts, required capabilities, CPI/KPI impact, and other key attributes all in the context of a future customer lifecycle aligned to customer purpose and business value.
• A staged investment and realization plan that provides a roadmap of when each concept and capability will be implemented (that balances impact and costs) and optimizes how internal groups across functions will orchestrate work over time to iteratively realize the future state.

These and related artifacts help focus employees and investments on what matters most to customers and the business. They enable initial value to be generated quickly and then successively each quarter as new capabilities and concepts are launched. This continually increases company differentiation and value generation — for customers, shareholders, communities, and any causes with which you’re aligned.

Align Employee Roles and Goals

The job of every team and employee and how their day-to-day work aligns with your stated purposes should be documented, communicated, and reflected in training, ongoing operating practices, and policies. Teams and employees should also be accountable for one or more metrics that reflect how their work has contributed to the realization of those purposes (CPIs can help here).

While employees often bristle at rigidly defined job descriptions or having their performance measured, seeing their work as something more than generating company profits or their own paycheck provides a greater sense of meaning that impacts employee retention and customer perceptions, as well as metrics like satisfaction, loyalty, and lifetime value.

Assemble Teams to Deliver on Customer Purposes

Organizing work by function (marketing, sales, service, etc.) or channels (web, email, search, stores, call centers, etc.) will get in the way of success. Instead, assemble teams around specific customer purposes or expressive customer segments . Have people from product marketing (potentially from multiple products that align to the same customer purpose or segment), sales, and service join experience designers and developers; content architects and authors; experts in digital media, email, and ecommerce; and representatives from other areas like stores or third-party distribution to operate as a single team.

Each cross-functional team owns the outcome represented by the purpose/customer around which they’ve aligned and is accountable for the relevant CPIs and KPIs. They develop a deep expertise in the purpose and customer segment(s) that share it and the similarities and differences among them. Teams define customer journeys that transcend channels and organizational boundaries as needed. They collaborate using agile methods to design, build, operate, and optimize experiences and content to enable as many customers as possible to complete their journeys and achieve their purpose — generating value for the business.

Transform Operations for Delivering New Experiences

Most company operations are optimized for efficiency, which often causes friction with customers or inhibits employees from delivering better experiences — all to the detriment of growth. You’ll need to rewire operating processes and technology platforms to scale your systems’ and employees’ ability to deliver the experiences on your blueprint.

Use data and artificial intelligence to tailor and personalize journeys and experiences to each customer’s preferences at scale. Accelerate progress and reduce cost through “headless” technology architectures and cloud platforms. So rather than being optimized for efficiency at the expense of growth, you’ll be optimized for growth as efficiently as possible.

Growth strategies that are purpose-led, customer-centric, experience-driven, data/AI-enabled, and technology-scaled require new mindsets far more than new toolsets or skillsets. But this transformation — of culture, operations, and outcomes — begins with a broader consideration of purpose. One that focuses not only on why you do business, but how . When you do that, customers will be happy to be your growth engine.

Partner Center

50 Reasons to Visit 50 Clients

• October 2, 2012

Staffing is cyclical. When things get tough, it’s the ideal time to ask yourself: “Will I be among the first to recover or one of the last?”

The choice is yours. Right now, many of the people who could become your future clients are not using staffing services. As business picks up, they’re going to need people. Who do you think they’ll call? A former vendor. The first name they see in in Google search results. The sales rep who just happens to be in the right place at the right time. Or, more likely, they will call the company they believe will be best able to fill their needs.

Wouldn’t you like to be that company? It’s really not hard to put yourself at the top of the call list–if you start nurturing relationships right now. It’s time to get yourself in front of more companies, more often and in a more positive manner than your competition. Forget the “make 100 cold calls this week” routine. Instead, think about building relationships – find 100 ways to add value this week.

To get you half way there, I present you with a list of 50 reasons to visit 50 clients. I hope it helps!

Provide a little proactive service

• Schedule an annual staffing strategy planning session.
• Create a job profile for future hiring needs.
• Offer to teach hiring managers how to conduct behavioral interviews.
• Profile the needs and preferences of hiring managers at a client site.
• Conduct an audit of staffing practices and offer to provide free suggestions for improvement.
• Introduce a new service or specialty niche.

Use traditional service tasks as reasons to visit

• Pick up time sheets from the department managers.
• Drop off pay checks.
• Schedule on site reviews of your temporary employees’ performance.
• Gather new information about clients to update your orientation programs.
• Take a tour of an existing customer’s facility.
• Schedule introductory meetings with other department heads.
• Gently roll-out a rate change with an in-person visit.
• Introduce other team members to the client.
• Handle a collection call in person.
• Introduce a new testing program and its benefits.

Deliver useful information

• Provide usage reports.
• Share an article from a business publication.
• Provide an educational article or seminar to help clients use staffing to drive profits.
• Share a story of local interest.
• Follow-up on an article you’ve sent with some useful implementation ideas.
• Hold a temp focus group and share their perspective with your clients.
• Send monthly “laundry lists” of exceptional candidates.

Say “Thank You”

• Send a thank you card or e-mail.
• Drop off a small gift to the HR manager who calls.
• Bring a flower to the gatekeeper you’re trying to get past.
• Take the financial manager to lunch to discuss ways to improve profits in 2002.
• Hold a customer appreciation party.
• Have the CEO write a personal letter of thanks.
• Find out the birthday of your primary contact and send an online card.

Have some fun

• Bring some candy or donuts to share.
• Celebrate the client’s anniversary with a lunch party.
• Celebrate the success of a temporary with an on-site award presentation.
• Hold a best staffing success story contest.
• Pick a holiday to celebrate (or make up your own holiday) and create a special promotion.
• Give someone a smile. Send them a joke.
• Take a customer to a sporting event, concert, or professional meeting.
• During National Temporary Staffing week, drop off a carnation (or other small gift) with a thank you note to each temporary at his or her work site.

Collect market research

• Survey senior decision makers about hiring needs.
• Survey hiring managers about challenges of hiring.
• Survey HR about the strengths and weaknesses of staffing firms.
• Collect “best practices” stories from HR managers and share the top 10 ideas.
• Hold an HR focus group about staffing and/or hiring challenges.

Find creative ways to keep in-touch

• Send a postcard from the tropics saying “Wish we were here” (of course, tell them how your services can help them get there).
• Create a series of drop off items, giving you reasons to go back each day or week.
• Have a courier service deliver an article, gift or invitation.
• Start an e-newsletter with information that would be valuable to your customers.
• Select a “temp of the month” for recognition and present an award at the client’s site.
• Whenever a client has a PR piece published, send a congratulatory card.
• Try a “letter from camp” email to get that person who won’t return your calls to pick up the phone. If you want to see a sample, drop me an e-mail: [email protected] .

Haley Marketing

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