How to Have an Effective Customer Meeting

Customer’s will make time for you when they know that the time spent will be valuable and helpful for them. 

Customer’s are busy and usually struggle to find the time to implement new technologies. In most cases, when they purchase new technologies, they expect you to help them achieve the vision with the expectation that it will make them more effective, efficient, lower costs and/or improve revenue streams.

During the onboarding or implementation process, there will be a series of meetings planned to help the customer launch the new technology into production. There will also be a series of customer meetings planned post implementation with the CSM to check in and ensure continue usage, expansion and retention.

When planning to meet with a customer whether it’s the Kick-Off meeting, consulting session or a check in meeting, it is best to plan the right meetings at the right time with the right content. Make the meetings informative and effective in helping them clearly understand where they are at in the progress of the implementation and/or make a difference in improving the operational business impact with the use of the technology.

The following are my recommendations for the Five steps to conducting an effective Customer meeting:

1. Prepare

2. Research

3. Analyze

4. Recommend

5. Establish Action Plan

1. Prepare for a Customer Meeting

It is always difficult to work through customer challenges and/or come up with a plan forward if you don’t know anything about the customer. When you show up to every customer meeting, thinking all customers are alike, you will find yourself playing defense. However, if you review the background of a customer and learn about who they are, their industry, products and services, markets, focused mission and the department and team you are working with, it will help you to ask better and more specific questions about their business and how they operate. This information will be what you need to help design the right plan and solution to make the highest value impact.

My customer research showed one of the top 10 challenges customers had with a vendor was having the vendor’s team show up to a meeting unprepared. They would show up for a meeting without an agenda or any preparation nor a plan to help them have a clear guide to operationalizing the technology in production.

When preparing for a customer meeting, create an agenda with a list of activities, issues or items that will be addressed including recommendations. Agendas help the customer to understand what is expected during a meeting. I recommend adding an agenda to the meeting invite so all the customer team members who are invited can view the agenda. Ask the customer’s lead team member or Project Manager to review the agenda and provide any changes. It will provide an opportunity for the customer to ask for changes or additions to make sure their issues, concerns or items will be addressed.

Based on the agenda, prepare for the meeting by making sure you have all the intel, resolution plans and recommendations required to address each item on the agenda. You may need to consider adding various internal team members with the right experience and knowledge to help resolve outstanding issues or answering specific requests.

Review the customer attendees, who you have invited and who the customer has added to the invite. Review their roles in the company in order to understand how these roles are working together on this project and who may be the decision makers and influencers.

2. Research - Know your Customer

Customers love to work with vendors that make them feel special and known. When you attend a meeting and can talk about the customer’s business, products, services and markets, it creates a more personalized experience. Customers do not like to have to tell you all about their company and what they do.

To get the best understanding of your Customer, research the following areas:

• Company website:

  • Read the “About” page and know who they are and how they present themselves to the market and what they may be known for.

  • Review their product and services pages to learn what they offer to the market.

  • Review the target markets they are focused on serving.

  • Review the last 2-3 market announcements to learn about the latest events and activities. These can be good openers.

• Public or Private:

  • Google search the company name asking what their current year revenues are; it will give you some estimates if they are private.

  • Confirm if they are private or public.

• Research Customer’s competitors and current market trends

• Review internal CRM system company profile

  • Review your in house CRM system and all the data the Sales and Services teams have documented about the customer.

  • Contract Value and terms of contract.

  • Renewal date.

  • Expansions from original contract.

  • Contacts and key stakeholders, decision makers.

  • Is Customer in production or implementation stage?

• Review the Customer Roles and what their responsibilities are

• Review Customer Success Story

  • Review internal Customer Success story documented by CS team regarding the customer’s perspective on their success with the use of the product. This would include the customer goals, objectives, expected outcomes and business operations and processes that have had the highest impact from operationalizing the solution after 30-60 days.

  • If Customer is not in Production use of the solution yet, then review the current status of the implementation including what Phase they are in, the goals and outcomes expected for the current phase and the expected Go-Live date in the plan.

• Review Open Customer Issues

  • Review the current support open issues to understand top issues and any issues considered critical or blockers to the customer’s use of the product.

  • Review the open issues trend over the last 2 quarters to understand how many issues they have experienced to date and in what areas they are having the biggest challenges.

• Review Education Program achievements

  • Review the percent complete of the education plan recommended for each team member or user of the product. This helps to understand the depth of knowledge transfer that may or may not have taken place to date with the onboarding or implementation process.

3. Analyze the Customer Information Gathered and Reviewed

Armed with all the information above, take the time to review and analyze the current customer state. Think about building a 5 minute elevator pitch in your head about who the customer is, their current state and challenges, the plan for how your product will improve their business operations, the business impact expected by the customer and what their experience has been so far with your company.

The following are the analytics I recommend having at your fingertips and ready to utilize at anytime during your customer meeting:

1. Contract Value (Total value of the contract).

2. # of License Units on contract and % of licenses in use.

3. Contract tenure (how long they have been a customer).

4. Time to Launch (how long it took for the customer to achieve production use).

5. Current Phase of Customer Roadmap Plan (The Phased roadmap plan for Land and Expand strategy to operationalize the solution across the company).

6. Time to Value (This can be Time to First Value or total value depending on how much progress has been made on the Customer Roadmap Plan to LTV).

7. Customer Role, job responsibilities and personal goals and how this project will impact their career personally.

8. Customer Profitability and/or Payback period.

9. Average Indispensability score (The utilization by product capabilities by role).

10. Average Engagement score (The total users and average usage by team and/or role).

11. Time to Renewal (The time left to the end of the contract).

12. Average Number of Issues logged per month.

13. % Users completed Education Program.

These types of data points will help you to understand how committed, engaged and determined your customer is to either enable the use of the solution into production and/or to improve their ability to operationalize the solution to achieve the business impact expected.

The challenge is to help the customer overcome a stuck or stagnant state of use, they will need you to help them design a plan. It is critical that you use the information above to help the customer architect the right plan to achieve the expected results.

Be prepared to ask more questions about specific customer team member roles in order to help them learn how to be more effective and efficient within their own role and make their daily operations easier.

4. Recommend a way forward

Customers will generally come to you with a list of issues, challenges, questions or concerns. The above three steps are what is required to help you be prepared to overcome the challenges, answer the questions, mitigate their concerns and create a plan to move forward.

The most common approach to customer service and CSM touch points are to send an email response or schedule a meeting and then ask the customer what they want to discuss or cover. The problem with this approach is that the customer doesn’t always know what they need or should be asking in order to maximize the benefits of the technology. They need a plan that will guide them to the vision state that will actually make an impact to their business and operations.

Most customers only scratch the service of a technology’s capability when they self-implement. If they can get to value early on by themselves, then they may continue over time to explore more advanced capabilities and realize the value long term. However, this is a high risk approach to customer success unless the solution is considered shelf-ware and completely self-serve.

The majority of technologies take a bit more effort and knowledge transfer to understand how best to implement and integrate into their operations. In order to drive value for each customer, the technology vendor will need to create a guide and plan for the customer to be clear on how best to operationalize the solution into their business operations.

Once you have this plan established, use this plan as the guide to constantly update and recommend ways forward to execute the plan and achieve the results.

Design the plan and way forward with the customer doing the majority of the work, so they can learn all the capabilities of the software and understand how to diagnose issues as they arise and make changes in the future as their business operations and processes change.

The highest rate of customer growth is achieved by developing a plan that the customer agrees with the outcomes, deliverables and timeline. If it is a phased approach, present the entire plan so the customer can agree with the overall plan and the priorities accomplished with each phase. This is important for the customer to be able to realize some real values with each phase and stay committed to moving forward and investing in the long term plan.

5. Establish Action Plan

When you start a customer meeting, review the agenda and address the customers top concerns and issues first by presenting the solution and/or options that have been prepared based on your review of the issues and research completed prior to the meeting. For those agenda items, additional questions or concerns that come up during the meeting that cannot be resolved during the meeting, take the time to talk through the expected outcomes from the customer. Make sure to have clarity of what the customer’s expectations are. It may be required to reset the customer’s expectations in order to help architect the best plan forward that the technology company can deliver on.

If the customer is in an active implementation and has a project plan, it is best to review the updates and any impacts to the project plan prior to closing the meeting. This will be helpful to identify if any of the current open issues are blockers to the customer’s ability to launch into production or move forward with an expansion or continue use of the solution.

If you are not in an active implementation, it would mean the customer is in production use of the solution and the plan forward would entail a phased approach based on the unique customer roadmap created by CSM/Consultant to expand the use of the solution to a more advanced level using additional features and functions and/or across a larger user community by adding additional processes or business units.

The roadmap plan will drive the customer’s continued expansion across their organization and company making the solution the standard for the company. This should be included in your final recommendation and action plan to discuss and agree to next steps in progressing the roadmap plan execution.

Conclude the meeting by reviewing the agenda items and resolutions provided. Review any additional issues or action items and provide estimated time frames for resolving each of these issues. If you are unsure of the timelines that can be committed to, then let them know that you will review this with your internal teams and send them an updated plan with estimated dates for resolution.

Summarize the Action Plan at the end of the meeting, prioritize the action items, identify blockers, discuss next steps, assign team members and set the right expectations with the customer on how and when the action plan items will be executed.

Summary

When you approach each opportunity to meet with the customer team using the approach above, it will arm you with the right information to provide insightful information and the ability to discuss options to solving current issues as well as the plan for next steps and next phases.

This approach will make the customer feel that you are not only committed to their success, but really know and understand them and what they are trying to accomplish. They will believe you are committed to helping them with their business transformation to make a business impact in becoming more efficient and effective.

Customers will be grateful for the preparation and coming to the meeting with insights, recommendations and plan to ensure they will be successful with the solution. They will appreciate that you know their time is valuable and you did not waste it with another unproductive meeting.

One of the best quotes I heard from a customer during an interview was:

End every meeting with an agreed to plan for resolving current issues that enable the plan for next steps and/or the next phase of the roadmap plan to be executed on time.

As always, we welcome your thoughts and feedback. If we can help drive customer retention and expansion results, feel free to reach out to [email protected] for a free 30 minute session.