What is a customer visit?
One of the most important things a product manager does is visit customers. I’m sure there are many types of customer visits out there, and every product manager probably has his or her own way of doing them, but let me share some suggestions for your consideration.
Goals of a customer visit
For me, the primary goal of a product management customer visit in this context is alignment. Alignment happens on two levels during a customer visit.
- You align with the customer by listening and learning during your visit and then informing, adapting, and improving your plans to meet the needs you’ve identified.
- The customer aligns with you by learning about and potentially incorporating your plans into their own.
Together, this alignment improves your products, deepens your relationships with customers, and provides you with the insight you need to be the voice of the customer inside your organization.
Types of customer visits
I’ve done the following types of customer visits. I prefer to do them in person, but I have done all of these over the phone/webex as well.
- Roadmap reviews where you share your product plans with the customer
- Interviews where you meet 1:1 with users and pose questions to discover unmet needs and explore alternatives
- Product studies where you observe how certain problems are solved/manifested that you want to address.
- User groups (customer councils) where you meet with a group of potential users and pose questions and elicit discussion and feedback.
What a product management customer visit is not
One thing I try to remember is that a good product management customer visit should not be a number of things. That is:
- A customer visit is not a sales call. While I like to go on sales calls, a product management customer visit should be different. That is, in a product management visit, I am not there to pitch anything. Instead, I’m there to gain alignment. A customer can smell a sales call a mile away. Therefore, I need to have my intentions clear from the start.
- A customer visit is not an account review. While I sometimes attend account reviews, this is also different. I don’t want to get into every little detail of the existing customer relationship. I want to talk about the future, about unmet needs, and about how we can align to add value for both of us. I don’t want to relive every complaint, issue, or problem we’ve had over the last year in terms of support and uptime.
- A customer visit is not a user experience study. While I love doing UX studies, in product management visits we are not looking to completely understand every aspect of the user interaction. The fact is, user experience studies try not to influence or color the discussion, so the communication is primarily one-directional. In a product visit, we need find alignment so we will need some open communication.
- A customer visit is not a show-and-tell. While I will do product demos, during a customer visit I am there are to listen, share, and learn. This means if I am showing something, I’m asking more questions then I am answering. I only show enough to spark a conversation and elicit feedback.
- A customer visit is not an evangelical mission. While evangelizing might be a good thing to do to build brand loyalty and product awareness, during a customer visit I’m not there to convert anyone to believe in my company. I’m there to engage and align.
Tips for a successful product visit
Ok, so hopefully you are a little more excited about your customer visits. Here are some tips for making them a success.
- Set the right expectations with the customer up front. Explain what you want to cover, who you want in the room, and what you want feedback on.
- Plan your questions in advance. Identify gaps in your knowledge. Clarify hypotheses you want to test. Don’t waste the customer’s time. Always have too much material.
- Research your audience. Know their names, their backgrounds, and their titles. Look them up on the Web. Ask your contact about them. Show interest at a human level in who they are, why they work there, and what makes them tick as people. Making new friends can be one of the most enjoyable part of customer visits, don’t miss the opportunity.
- Be focused and adaptable during the visit. Sometimes customers will wander off the reservation and you’ll need to pull things back and stay on task so that you all get the information and alignment that you want to get. But other times customers will take you into new realms of unmet needs, underlying issues, and new opportunities. It takes a savvy product manager to know when to go off script in a way that adds value for you both.
- Appreciate your audience. Thank them over and over for their time, their ideas, their suggestions, and their feedback.
- Follow up with the customer. Summarize the feedback. Show you listened. And later when you change your plans and your product, show how their input helped shape things.
- Bring the information back to your organization. So many people inside organizations can forget who pays the bills. For others, the only time they hear from customers is when customers are upset. It is important to remind people that there are human beings out there that are being served by your products, that you are adding value in the world, and that there are more opportunities out there to capitalize on.
In the end, customer visits are one of my favorite things about product management. Unfortunately, I never get to do enough of them. Oh well.
