reference customer visit

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

Published: August 02, 2021

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

Creating that connection is invaluable. But before you book that plane ticket, it’s essential to create a plan. Planning the perfect customer visit will ensure that you meet your goals and that your customer meeting will be successful. Here’s a look at how you get there.

Why plan a customer visit?

Jason Lemkin, the founder of SaaStr and EchoSign, has said “ I never lost a customer I actually visited. ” That’s a bold statement — one that's worth taking note of. But why? What is it about customer visits that has such a big impact on customer loyalty?

First of all, you get to make a stronger impression with your customers. No matter what you sell, you aren’t just selling a product — you’re also selling the people behind it.

Your vision, your passion, your knowledge are all play into the perceived value of your product or service. All of these elements come across more strongly when you visit in person. A Zoom call just isn’t enough time to go deep.

Secondly, you get to see how your customers are using your product in person. Are they constantly printing out reports to pin up on a wall? Are you seeing teams walk across the sales floor to point out something on a screen? What kind of working environment and equipment do they have? What other types of software are they using?

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

Finally, meeting your customers in person is a huge motivational boost! When you’re behind a screen for so long, it can start to feel like what you do doesn’t matter — or that you’re not making any real connections. But a visit to a customer’s office can change all that, and really light up your idea of “why” you do this at all.

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5 Potential Goals of Your Customer Visit

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

1. Understanding Their Business Goals

If you’re visiting a client, you’re likely hoping for a long term relationship. Understanding what their future goals are can help align your product with their needs. These in-depth conversations would rarely come up over a quick phone call.

2. Gathering Feedback

Customer visits provide a unique opportunity to gather honest and in-the-moment insight into what your customers need and want. When you sit next to someone who uses your product in their daily work, there’s a lot more space to have this feedback arise. And documenting it for future sales opportunities and your product team is one of the more productive actions you can take during a customer visit.

3. Referrals

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

4. Uncovering Opportunities for Cross-Selling or Upselling

While your primary objective shouldn’t be pitching your offering at every opportunity, you might uncover a problem that your product or service can help solve. Noting these potential value-adds can make for more effective, thoughtfully targeted upsell and cross-sell conversations.

5. Testimonials and Case Studies

Customer visits can be a unique source of sales content, including pictures for case studies, video testimonials, and strong evidence-based customer stories. If you plan on making this one of your primary goals, consider asking your client to set the stage for these kinds of materials before you visit so you already know who you’ll be speaking to, before coming onsite.

How to Plan an Onsite Customer Meeting

By putting more effort in before you go, you’ll have a much better chance of achieving your goals and impressing your clients. Here are some key actions to consider when planning your customer meeting.

Thoroughly prepare before the visit.

Before you arrive, make sure you’re up to date on the state of the customer's account. Who are they usually talking to at your company? What customer service tickets have they raised lately? Are there outstanding issues that need to be addressed? These will come up during your visit.

Secondly, understand the current ecosystem your customer is working within. Is your customer in the news? What’s happening in their industry? What threats and opportunities are arising in their business? Being prepared and knowledgeable about their inner workings will make a better impression than coming in blind.

Decide who you’re meeting with.

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

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

Make dinner reservations for you and your clients.

Traditionally, a customer visit includes taking your client out for a nice dinner as a token of appreciation. It also offers a chance for you to get to know each other outside of the limits of the work environment and form stronger relationships.

That being said, this is not a social visit. Keep your goals in mind — even outside of work hours. If you’re familiar with the restaurants in the area, choose a place that has options for every diet and has a good atmosphere for conversations. If you’re not familiar with the available options, ask the client where they’d recommend.

Complete the wrap-up report.

After the visit is over, you still have work to do. Create a wrap-up report for your internal teams back at the office. It should cover key elements of the visit like any confidentiality agreements put in place and who at your company you can share contact information or sales figures with.

Identify any action items that came up during the visit. Include any positive highlights during the meeting as well as any risks or opportunities that arose. Create a copy of the report for your client as well, to show that you were listening to their concerns and that you’re going to follow up with them.

Customer Visit Agenda Template

Use this sample agenda to plan your own customer visit.

10 am: Welcome/Office Tour (30 minutes, w/ Stacy, Raul)

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

11 am: Executive Meeting (1 hour, w/ Stacy, Thomas, Ankit, Shireen)

• Overview of status, product usage, any updates
• Add any bullet points you need to cover here
• Upcoming changes or challenges for the business
• New Opportunities
• Areas of concern

12pm: Lunch

1pm: User Meetings (4 hours, rotating through Marketing teams)

• Overview of new features
• Gather feedback from users
• Sit with teams to review workflow

5pm: Wrap Up meeting (30 minutes)

• Process or configuration change recommendations
• General questions and answers
• Items to be addressed as part of maintenance
• Enhancement opportunities

6:30pm: Dinner at Restaurant

Internal Notes

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

Plan for success

It’s time to get back out there and meet your clients face-to-face. By planning your customer visit ahead of time, you’re sure to achieve your goals and come out with a stronger understanding of what your clients need.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Are the Benefits of Visiting Your Customers in Person?

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

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

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

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

Motivate Your Team to Serve Customers Better

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

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

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

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

Build Better Customer Relationships

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

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

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

Get In-depth Product Feedback on the Customer Experience

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

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

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

And it's little things, like...

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

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

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

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

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

Find Opportunities to Upsell

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

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

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

Create New Case Studies and Customer Stories

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

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

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

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

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

1. Identify Which Customers to Visit

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

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

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

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

2. Decide Who You’re Meeting With

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

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

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

3. Spend Time Getting to Know the Business Beforehand

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

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

4. Prepare and Share an Agenda

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

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

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

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

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

5. Learn About the Customer Experience in Real Time

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

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

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

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

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

6. Ask for and Give Referrals

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

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

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

7. Create a Customer Visit Report for Your Team

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

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

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

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

How Often Should You Plan Customer Visits?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The importance of customer visits: Tools & tips

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

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

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

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

Why are customer visits important?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Customer visits can be divided into four classes:

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

How to prepare for it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Make sure each attendee on your team knows their role.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Many benefits can come out of this.

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

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

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

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

Customer relations, like all professions, are going digital.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What did you think of them?

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

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

Articles on the same topic

• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)- One of Marketing's Most Important Indicators
• The importance of B2B sales funnel: what, why and how?

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How to Conduct the Perfect Customer Visit

By Natsha Ness

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

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

Planning Customer Visits is Key

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

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

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

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

Who should be involved in a client visit?

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

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

Before the Visit 

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

Preparation is Prince

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

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

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

During the Client Visit

Here are a few tips for the meeting itself:

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

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

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

After the Visit

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

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

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

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

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

How We Can Help Your Client Visit Planning

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

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

Publish: August 02, 2021

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

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

Why plan a customer visit?

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

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

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

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

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

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

5 Potentially Goals of Your Customer Visit

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

1. Understanding Their Business Goals

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

2. Gathering Feedback

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

3. Referral

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

4. Uncovering Company for Cross-Selling or Upselling

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

5. Testimonials and Case Studies

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

How to Plan to Onsite Customer Meeting

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

Thoroughly prepare front one visit.

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

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

Decide who you’re meeting with.

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

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

Make dinner reservations to you and your clients.

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

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

Completes the wrap-up report.

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

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

Patron Vist Agenda Template

Utilize such random agenda to plant yours own customer visit.

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

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

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

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

12pm: Lunch

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

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

5pm: Winding Up meeting (30 minutes)

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

6:30pm: Evening at Restaurant

Internal Remarks

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

Plan fork success

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

Don't forget to share this post!

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The importance of customer visits: Tools & tips

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

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

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

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

Why are customer visits important?

Customers are constantly being solicited by your sales team. 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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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).

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.

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The Customer Experience Center: Successful Customer Visits

How to Have Successful Customer Visits to Your Customer Experience Center

In my first blog on Customer Experience Centers (CECs), I  shared best practices and key strategic elements  in the various customer experience centers we visited last summer. My second blog focused on some of the more tactical elements that we saw involved in the  design of these centers and preparations for customer visits , e.g., layout, physical props, and the all-important effort that goes into communicating your story. Now we’ll bring it all together with an overview of the best practices for executing the actual customer visit itself, starting with the intake process and ending with critical follow-up steps.

Intake Process: Registration, Research, and Planning

One of the first themes that emerged as we learned about best practices at customer engagement centers was the need for a well-thought-out registration or intake process for  every visit  (whether a new customer or a return visit). These processes vary from center to center, but typically involved several common elements:

• Coordinate information sharing: Executing a successful customer visit requires close collaboration between sales reps and technical folks to clarify the objective of the initial meeting and any follow-up interactions (e.g., whether a second visit should involve a broader range of participants, or narrow and focus on specific technical challenges). Large firms in particular may want to consider implementing a CRM system to track who has interacted with whom and record any relevant market research or account plants that have been developed.
• Do your homework:  If a sales rep generates a first visit, they will be an essential, but not sole, source of information about the underlying customer problem or situation. Additional research is advisable to help provide context, whether it’s about competitive pressures, regulatory hurdles, or internal politics. For relatively local customers, it may be helpful to start with a shorter meeting between a limited number of participants so that the host company can “right-size” the itinerary for the formal visit. There are no rote or “one-size-fits-all” customer visits – each should be tailored to the client and situation at hand.
• Give yourself plenty of time:  The time allotted to accommodate a customer visit (from conception to execution) varied widely among the centers we visited – anywhere from an hour to 3 months – but a lead time of four to six weeks to prepare for a visit was considered optimal.

Who’s in the Room? (Or Sales vs. Tech)

The goal of a customer experience center is to generate revenue. But who “owns” the visit? The business-facing sales rep who identifies the clients’ problem and brings them to the center? Or the technical staff who will be the ones likely to solve the clients’ problem?

Letting sales staff run the show risks leaving the customer unsatisfied – as one company said,

“Sales reps want customer tech shows in which they can participate;  customers  want to hear new tech ideas from engineers.”

But leaving the entire visit to technical staff has its drawbacks as well, and at least one firm we visited has a “no drop-off” rule to prevent sales staff from doing just that. In general, CEC personnel must actively work together to strike the delicate balance between the business drivers associated with the relationship and the technical orientation that is often the foundation for the visit.

In my previous blog , I talked about the importance of thoughtfully developing the story you want to tell your customers about your company.  How  you tell the story is likewise important and worthy of thoughtful development. This requires not only planning and preparation, but also the ability to pivot in the moment and adapt as the conversation develops. Being able to pivot means being skilled at listening. While active listening is hard work, it’s essential to one of the goals of a customer visit – to elicit. Not ask, not survey, but elicit. From the Latin  ēlicitus , or “drawn out.”

CEC guides frequently mentioned that customers don’t come in with a clearly articulated problem. Part of the challenge inherent in elicitation is helping to identify and define the problem. How can the customer be helped to discover the problem that needs to be solved? When (or where) is the moment that the problem takes form? And while the problem is taking shape, how can the “wild” or “out there” ideas – that might just turn into something with a little more coaxing – be maintained for future consideration? Skilled guides excel at leading the customer through this thought process to arrive at an outcome that everyone understands and is excited about.

So – What’s A Successful Customer Visit?

One of the measures of success for a customer visit was described to us as creating a shared experience, a moment that may later be referred to as, “Do you remember when we…?” between you and your customer. That’s a great accolade, but undoubtedly the greatest measure of success is the opportunity to innovate – new ideas, new products, new processes – that results from improved communications, deeper understanding of customer problems and company capabilities, and the trust needed to execute. There’s a lot of work and individual skill that goes into achieving this outcome, but if you take the time to prepare a thoughtful, personalized experience for your customer, it just might pay off.

Find out how Newry can help your organization move smarter to move faster. Get traction in your market.

Amy Fritz has been a member of the Newry team since 2006, offering her expertise and insight on varied subjects including green building, wireless communications, architectural glass, and medical diagnostics systems. In addition to her consulting work, Amy has been deeply involved in the firm’s marketing and knowledge management functions. She enjoys continuously tackling interesting and diverse tasks, and loves her work at Newry because every day is a new challenge.

Published April 28, 2021

How to ask for a customer reference: an essential guide.

What is a Customer Reference and how do you ask for one politely? Dive in to get insights on how it is done and some interesting statistical notes too.

People have stopped trusting sales folks altogether. Since they have been ‘programmed’ to convert all no’s into nods, prospects find it hard to trust their words. Let’s face it – aren’t they saying it all to get the product sold out? However, if you give those prospects a little proof of a customer who was absolutely delighted with your product or service, there are higher chances of them buying the belief or the product.

Although the game of customer reference can be a pretty risky venture, you need to know what to do and specifically what not to do. When you play your cards right, there is a golden chance that won’t just add a new customer but also augment relationships with your existing references. Before we dive into how to ask for a customer reference, let us brush up on some basics.

What is a Customer Reference?

The definition of customer reference is a person or a company that is willing to share  positive feedback  or story about one of your products, services, or overall  customer experience  at large. They are the ones who at the higher likelihood of spreading a positive word about your brand to their friends and relatives. In the customer success dictionary, they would be tagged as ‘ promoters on the NPS scale ’.

While we know what customer reference is. Let us now know what it is not. A customer reference is not a favor! Customers who loved your product, staff, or services would want you to succeed and prosper in your business. Further, it gives the customers an opportunity to promote themselves and their success stories with your brand to a peer. It’s nowhere near being persuasion or pressure to air a positive review for your company.

In fact, according to a Customer Reference Data Survey Report by Veeva, it has been stated that 69% of the customers cited the need to improve targeting, segmentation and alignment was one of the top most drivers for customer reference data improvement initiative.

How to ask for Customer Reference?

Rope in a real story wisely.

Pick a customer who has had a genuinely happy experience with you. The best way to find the ‘one’ is by learning how well they have implemented and benefitted from the product or service in their personal lives. If the answer turns towards a positive note, that means they are the ones who are willing to go the extra mile for you. Their satisfaction and happiness is all that you need to achieve a good customer reference. Once that happens, the rest will automatically fall back into their places.

Steer away from Reference Burnout

You have already worked really hard to get these customer references, so, don’t scare just yet by overdoing what they are doing. Know what makes an ‘overdo’ and check back regularly to ensure that they still want to act as a reference for you on their willingness. One of the best ways to avoid reference  burnout  is by having a backup. Having a single customer to act as a reference might call upon trouble. Instead, let the brands focus on nominating extra customers as and when required.

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Provide some incentives in return.

While getting a customer to give a reference for your brand out of good faith and their undying love for your product is great, it does not mean you should not show them some appreciation of any kind. You can do that by giving them a month or two free of subscription fees. You might also give away  a promo code  that they can use on their future transactions. It is not necessarily the worth of these incentives that matter, but it rather speaks highly of you as a brand, and how well you value your customers is what gets manifested.

Set proper expectations

Do your customers have complete knowledge of how you intend to use their references? Will the names and quotes of the customer air on the website and on collateral materials? Will the reference be asked to speak directly with future clients? And most importantly do the references know of these clauses and have agreed to them? Getting approval and meeting these  set expectations  ensure that you do not overstep those preset boundaries and establish a successful and long-term relationship with the references. Putting them in a situation where they aren’t well aligned with the expectations can lead to some serious issues.

Consider automating your Customer Reference Program

Sometimes it can become cumbersome to manually track and manage the interactions and activity of the references with spreadsheets and stuff. There are several technological solutions out there that you may want to consider that keep your program, productive, systematic, and organized. If you happen to have substantial references, it might just make sense to take to  the reference program  to better streamline your actions, solves challenges, give a backseat to the manual notes and improve your overall results in no time.

Don’t be a Pushover

While it might seem triggering to let your customers do the ‘selling’ on your behalf, you should not take a backseat and rely on them entirely. Simply put, refrain from being a pushover. If you can learn how to suppress your need for their approval and genuinely answer the customer’s need for a reference, you will soon start to earn respect.

Timing is everything

The client’s decision to provide you with a recommendation will mostly depend on the time of your request. It is advised to inquire two or three days after the sale is completed. The client can forget the work you did for them if you wait too long after you engage with them, and they will not have any specifics to add to the suggestion.

Additionally, they might not feel as motivated to provide you with a customer reference several weeks or months after the purchase. However, it might also be problematic to inquire too quickly. They might not feel comfortable giving you a review if you have not finished working for them yet.

When you ask for customer reference soon after the deal is made, the customer will still be thinking about your good or service. They may provide a candid assessment of their interaction with you because they have recently used the product or service and interacted with the staff.

Best Tips to get Customer Reference

• Turn the tables around: Ask them what questions they would like to ask your customer. This way, you can refer to the right customers only and lessen the chances of failure. Also, if they are not prepared with a list of questions, ask them if there are any top concerns about a particular product or service. For instance, you can ask them – ‘Is there any product that you used in the past and had an issue with?’ Further, be ready to give them a few specific questions to address if they cannot come up with one.
• Render Research reports and Case Studies: One of the best ways to deflect those early reference requests is by deploying published proof of your good services via case studies. Also, you may take to research reports which are a great way to address the customer’s doubts and apprehensions. If not that, you can always ask your best customers to drop a review on some of the relevant sites as well. Review sites are slowly gaining trust and interest in the customer’s hearts.
• Recorded Video Testimonials works too: For this, all you need to do is get your most trusted customers on a video conference call, say on Zoom or Google Meet and record their valuable testimonials. This way you can feature a multitude of customers from different spheres and showcase their love. Additionally, for smooth functioning, you may hire a transcriber and an editor to present the aforementioned in a refined manner.
• Form a Customer Advocate’s Community: To handle a huge volume of reference requests, it is advised to form a group of such likeminded customers who are willing to speak to the prospects. As and when you form a community of these customer’s advocates and provide them a purpose to do so, they will be happier to connect with them. It could be possible that many of them would want to make newer connections and expand their social circle with similar interests.
• Send out invitations to events where the customers are present: There is nothing better than getting your prospects to interact with your customers. Try to host a virtual or in-person event and ask your customers to publicly state how well they have been helped by your products or services. This way, you can convince the prospects better. In fact, this can work better than some of your best sales trick up your sleeve.

How to Respond to Customer Reference Requests?

Ensure all customer doubts have been cleared before entertaining the reference request.

Before providing references, ensure all other issues have been brought up and addressed. You may reply by saying something like this:

We will be pleased to provide you with as many references as you might need. Once all your other questions have been resolved and you are certain you want to proceed, our policy is to put you in touch with references.

What other queries do you have regarding this project, and what additional details would benefit you?

Choose wisely

Make sure you understand what your prospect is seeking from the references; find out if there are any unresolved issues. This will assist you in selecting the best lawyers for your consulting business.

You can respond – Of course, you are welcome to contact any of our many former customers.

Please let me know what questions you have so we can direct you to the best resources to aid in your decision-making.

Offer a number of contacts

Give more than one example and explain why each one is relevant.

Your justification gives the prospect a subliminal hint that they might not even need to contact your reference and can just proceed with your consulting engagement.

For instance:

The CEO (Chief Executive Officer) of Cameroon Candies is Mia Bestbud.

Cameroon, like you, was switching from actual candies to chocolate NFTs.

Thanks to our joint efforts, Cameroon now generates millions of dollars from selling digital truffle images.

You can get in touch with Mia at [contact details].

Provide 10–12 references if you are unsure whether a prospect will hire your consulting firm or if you are not entirely confident in what your previous clients will say.

Ironically, when you give prospects an extensive list of references, they are less likely to call.

The sheer number of options creates enough additional friction for them to forego the reference-check step.

So, now the ball is in your court. How do you respond to reference requests from potential clients?

Customer Reference Templates that Work out

1. the professional way.

Not all of your customers might like a casual tone of email communication. For the ones who fit that list, sending out a professional-toned letter email would work out just fine. Have your senior managers write these out to the customers, something like this:

2. The Casual Way

And for the ones who would want to see you talk to them like a friend, there is another way out for addressing them. Ensure that your team is all set to collect testimonials from the customers when they are already having a conversation with you. It can go something like this:

3. The Wrong Way

When a customer finds such a request where there is nothing in it for them, why would they want to do it for you anyways? Note that, it is you and your business who will eventually get benefitted by this gesture, therefore iron out all possible errors that might come your way. Specifically, something like this:

4. The Incentivized Way

Since a customer is giving you a big help, you might as well favor them back with something you can. To begin with, how about a 10% off coupon, maybe a promo code or perhaps a month free of subscription fees. This way, the customers would refrain from taking a backseat from helping you out.

Parting Thoughts

A customer reference is often seen as the ‘hot potato’ from the lenses of different teams of a company. But when infused in the right manner, it can help close sales quicker, add more credibility and trust factor to the brand’s name, entice more media coverage and pull in more prospects to do business with you. So, why is the wait? Go for the ask. And strive to do so on a personal yet professional front. What you will soon realize is that you are going to get a lot more referenceable customers rooting for you than you could ever imagine. Know that there is nothing more powerful than an army of brand advocates to boost your revenue.

You might also like:

• The Essential Guide to Customer Feedback –  Customer feedback is the insights and information put up by the customers about their experiences with your company. Read on.
• To understand how SmartKarrot can helps SaaS companies keep and grow loyal customers, Request a Demo .

An implementation engineer with six years of experience is a seasoned professional specialising in implementing and integrating complex systems and technologies for businesses. Possessing a diverse skill set that combines technical expertise, and project management capabilities.

Published April 28, 2021, Updated June 07, 2023

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7 Steps For Creating a Powerful Customer Reference Program

• October 27, 2020

Table of Contents

Customer Reference Program. If you work in business, then you might feel like there’s an endless stream of programs to get stuck into. Knowing where you put your time and energy can be daunting. Which programs deserve your attention? And should you start a customer reference program? The answer is yes, and we’re going to tell you why.

A  customer reference  is a story or set of stories told by your customers that highlight what is great about your company. When you create a customer reference program, you are essentially creating a list of customers who you can rely on to tell their stories. These stories can be important for various situations, for example, if you need to point a journalist in the direction of someone who has helped. But why exactly do you need a customer reference program? How does it help shape your business for the better? And how do you build one?

Why You Need a Customer Reference Program

The key to success lies in the details.

No business can thrive without the support of its customers. This might be intuitive, but a customer reference program aims to take this to the next level. Most of the time, we only know how customers feel about our business through faceless sales figures of brief customer surveys. This data can tell us a lot, but it’s not always comprehensive or specific. Sometimes it’s better to know why one (or a few) customers love your business and understand these customers in great detail.

If you delve heavily into the details of how one customer uses your product and exactly how it solves problems for them, you can start to unlock how your wider customer base perceives your product. The issue with general feedback is that it’s too broad. Customers might love one aspect of your product, or hate one aspect, but what about everything in between? What about that one feature in your software that never quite works as expected but isn’t used very often? How do your customers feel about that feature? Do they wish it worked better but never took the time to tell you? Maybe. This is just one example of how you can start to uncover more things about your product and start to make it work for everyone, all the time.

You Need Advocates

Advocates or brand promoters are a great asset to your business. They essentially market your product for you, and they do it for free. Your brand promoters can have an incredibly powerful effect on your revenue, so they should never be underestimated.

However, while having brand promoters is good, it’s even better if you know how to access them whenever you want. Sometimes you need to ask a customer a question about your product and get quick, honest, and thorough feedback. With a customer reference program, you always have a customer on hand to reach out to. The same is true if you need a customer to write a testimonial or a  customer success  story. You will always have a valuable resource (your loyal customers) to tap into.

You might also find yourself in a position where a journalist or someone from the press wants a comment from one of your customers. They will go one of two routes here. They might ask your customers directly by reaching out on social media and asking for a comment. Or they might ask whether you have a customer you can direct them to. By having a customer reference program, you have greater control over the situation. You can point them in the direction of a customer that you know thinks highly of your company and someone who you trust to give an honest, fair, and favorable answer. They are your advocate!

How to Create a Powerful Customer Reference Program in 7 Tips

This section isn’t a guide but rather a collection of expert tips on a robust customer reference program’s essential ingredients. Let’s take a look.

1.  Make Connections

You’ll never have a thriving customer reference program if you can’t effectively connect with your customers. The biggest hurdle you need to jump is getting willing customers. To get customers who are eager to be your advocates, you first need to create a great product. Then you need to offer a consistently great experience. And lastly, you need to make emotional connections with your customers. Customers only want to become references if they feel passionate about your product and your brand. Without this magic ingredient, your program will fall flat. So, how do you make connections?

If you’re just starting to make connections now, it’s probably too early for you to start a customer reference program. Why? Because creating emotional relationships with your customers takes time. It’s not something that happens overnight. Here are some tips on making connections with customers.

Always be available

You should make sure that you’re always available to talk to your customers and offer multiple communication channels like phone, email, live chat, and chatbots.  Chatbots  are excellent at bridging communication gaps and propelling you into a 24/7 business. Sure, chatbots might not make your customers emotionally connect with you directly, but indirectly, this is precisely what they do. They present this image of your company as a company that will always be there to answer their questions, who takes customer service seriously, and who wants to engage actively. It shows that you care about speed and convenience and solving your customer issues at a time that’s good for them.

Be Authentic and Genuine

Communicating with your customers on social media should never feel like ticking a box. It has to feel authentic and natural. You do this by asking questions that are important to your customers and actively responding and engaging with them. You want to come across as relatable and real. Like you also use your products and get value from them. If your customers perceive you as real and genuine, they are more likely to engage with you honestly and do it more often.

Practice Empathy

Companies who are empathetic always score more emotional wins with customers than those who don’t. You show empathy by demonstrating that you understand your customer’s frustrations, and you’re willing to listen to them.

2.  Make it Fun and Simple

A customer reference program is an excellent asset to your business, but you have to balance its value with the labor your participants have to put in. Many companies make the mistake of making their customer reference program hard work for their customers. They create complicated documents that are pages and pages long. They might suggest a multitude of rules or try to but an unnecessary workload onto the participants. For example, let’s say you approach a customer who is a member of your customer reference program to write a testimonial for you. It would be unwise to send them a style guide and say, “this is the style guide we use for our company, so please write in this style.” We’re not all writers, and you can’t expect your customer to go through their testimonial with a fine-toothed comb looking for style inconsistencies. This is something for you to do in-house.

3.  Thank Them

Remember, they’re doing you a favor by being your reference, so they deserve to be thanked. You shouldn’t send canned emails but rather manage them like you would an account. They add immense value to your business, so they should get  personalized communications  and be offered an open line of communication.

4.  Attract Customers From Different Segments

It’s a good idea to have customer references from different parts of your customer base. Not all customers love your product for the same reason. There might be some overlap in what customers like, but it’s also true that we all use products differently and fix different problems for us. You’ll discover this when you conduct your customer research and create your segments. If you can, you should attract at least one customer reference for each segment. That way, you always have someone to approach when you have a question specific to how that segment uses your product.

5.  Evaluate and Revise

Just because you’ve already created a customer reference program doesn’t mean it’s set in stone. It’s important to collect feedback for your program, both internally and externally. Ask the customers who are in your program what they think of it. It would help if you asked them questions like:

• How did you find the onboarding process?
• Are you comfortable with the level of communication you have with the company?
• Do you enjoy being part of the program? If so, why?
• Is there anything you’re uncomfortable with or think takes up too much of your time?
• If you could change something about the program, what would it be?

Internally, you should ask for feedback from different teams around the business. It’s critical that your marketing and communications teams are actively engaged every step of the way. They can help you craft your communications and marketing material in a way that will resonate with those in the program.

6.  Align References With Business Objectives

A key part of having a customer reference strategy is knowing what you want to gain from your strategy. You should always be thinking proactively rather than reactively. Sure, customer reference programs do help with reacting. They give you the means to react effectively when you are approached by journalists or want specific answers to questions that currently act as roadblocks.

But customer references also have a proactive function, and this is where and why you should align them with your business objectives. For example, let’s say you’re actively targeting a new  customer segment : students. To position your brand as student-friendly and one that fixes problems that students frequently face, you need a student advocate. It would help if you had a testimonial from a student so that potential customers can see how you help people like them.

7.  Find Your Evangelists and Manage Them Carefully

Customer references are often thought of as reactive. They are there for you when you need someone to take a call or write a case study, but otherwise, they might stay silent. By contrast, your evangelists are your outspoken advocates who will be proactive in promoting and defending your company. Evangelists can also be customer references, and it’s a great idea to engage them, but it’s essential to understand the difference between references and evangelists and treat them differently. Your evangelists might enjoy attending your events or answering more emotive questions than your typical references. They are great at converting your skeptics to loyal customers. However, they can also seem less impartial, so you might want to opt for a reference rather than an evangelist if you need a quote for a journalist.

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How to Write a Visit Report

Last Updated: March 30, 2024 References

This article was co-authored by Madison Boehm . Madison Boehm is a Business Advisor and the Co-Founder of Jaxson Maximus, a men’s salon and custom clothiers based in southern Florida. She specializes in business development, operations, and finance. Additionally, she has experience in the salon, clothing, and retail sectors. Madison holds a BBA in Entrepreneurship and Marketing from The University of Houston. This article has been viewed 647,786 times.

Whether you’re a student or a professional, a visit report helps you document the procedures and processes at an industrial or corporate location. These reports are fairly straightforward. Describe the site first and explain what you did while you were there. If required, reflect on what you learned during your visit. No additional research or information is needed.

Writing a Visit Report

Explain the site's purpose, operations, and what happened during the visit. Identify the site's strengths and weaknesses, along with your recommendations for improvement. Include relevant photos or diagrams to supplement your report.

Describing the Site

• Reports are usually only 2-3 pages long, but in some cases, these reports may be much longer.
• In some cases, you may be asked to give recommendations or opinions about the site. In other cases, you will be asked only to describe the site.
• Ask your boss or instructor for models of other visit reports. If you can't get a model, look up samples online.

• If you visited a factory, explain what it is producing and what equipment it uses.
• If you visited a construction site, describe what is being constructed and how far along the construction is. You should also describe the terrain of the site and the layout.
• If you’re visiting a business, describe what the business does. State which department or part of the business you visited.
• If you’re visiting a school, identify which grades they teach. Note how many students attend the school. Name the teachers whose classes you observed.

• Who did you talk to? What did they tell you?
• What did you see at the site?
• What events took place? Did you attend a seminar, Q&A session, or interview?
• Did you see any demonstrations of equipment or techniques?

• For example, at a car factory, describe whether the cars are made by robots or humans. Describe each step of the assembly line.
• If you're visiting a business, talk about different departments within the business. Describe their corporate structure and identify what programs they use to conduct their business.

Reflecting on Your Visit

• Is there something you didn’t realize before that you learned while at the site?
• Who at the site provided helpful information?
• What was your favorite part of the visit and why?

• For example, you might state that the factory uses the latest technology but point out that employees need more training to work with the new equipment.
• If there was anything important left out of the visit, state what it was. For example, maybe you were hoping to see the main factory floor or to talk to the manager.

• Tailor your recommendations to the organization or institution that owns the site. What is practical and reasonable for them to do to improve their site?
• Be specific. Don’t just say they need to improve infrastructure. State what type of equipment they need or give advice on how to improve employee morale.

Formatting Your Report

• If you are following a certain style guideline, like APA or Chicago style, make sure to format the title page according to the rules of the handbook.

• Don’t just say “the visit was interesting” or “I was bored.” Be specific when describing what you learned or saw.

Sample Visit Report

Community Q&A

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• ↑ http://services.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/471286/Site_Reports_for_Engineers_Update_051112.pdf
• ↑ https://www.examples.com/business/visit-report.html
• ↑ https://www.thepensters.com/blog/industrial-visit-report-writing/
• ↑ https://eclass.aueb.gr/modules/document/file.php/ME342/Report%20Drafting.pdf

About This Article

To write a visit report, start by including a general introduction that tells your audience where and when you visited, who your contact was, and how you got there. Once you have the introduction written out, take 1 to 2 paragraphs to describe the purpose of the site you visited, including details like the size and layout. If you visited a business, talk about what the business does and describe any specific departments you went to. Then, summarize what happened during your visit in chronological order. Make sure to include people you met and what they told you. Toward the end of your report, reflect on your visit by identifying any strengths and weaknesses in how the site operates and provide any recommendations for improvement. For more help, including how to format your report, read on! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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Leveraging happy customers to convince and convert new prospects can be one of the most powerful tools in your sales arsenal. However, many companies still rely on unstructured and manual reference processes that are inefficient for sales and can be frustrating and burdening on customers.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through implementing an automated, scalable customer reference program that drives revenue and customer loyalty.

Why Customer References Matter

Let’s start by examining why customer references should be a core part of your sales strategy. 

Reference managers know this down pat, but it’s worth raising these points to your cross-functional leaders in sales, marketing and customer success to help secure program buy-in:

• Close Deals Faster – References shorten sales cycles by validating your solution and addressing prospect concerns. Deals with references have higher conversion rates.
• Larger Deal Size – Social proof builds confidence allowing you to land bigger deals. References get prospects comfortable to invest more. 
• Accelerate Expansion – Happy reference customers are great targets for upsell and cross-sell opportunities later on.
• Increase Loyalty – Customers that help recruit new leads end up being more loyal long-term. Active references have higher retention rates.
• Competitive Differentiator – A structured reference program is a huge advantage over letting sales hunt down references manually. 

With numbers behind it, you’ll gain executive support to invest in building a scalable program.

Lay the Groundwork with Sales

Partnering with sales is crucial right from the start. Take the time to interview sales leaders and team members to gather insights that will inform your program design.

Key questions to ask:

• How are references currently handled? What works vs. doesn’t? 
• What criteria determine if an opportunity is eligible for a reference?
• What attributes make for a strong reference match? Industry, region, use case, etc. 
• What reference criteria is must-have vs. nice-to-have? 
• Are there any emerging needs to address with references?

Record the calls or document all criteria mentioned. Then, follow up with a quick survey that lets your sales team prioritize and rank the factors that matter most for references. This data will help guide your program set-up. 

Build Your Technology Foundation 

Leveraging automation and integration will optimize efficiency at scale. Here are the key elements to implement:

• CRM Integration – Connect your customer relationship management (CRM) system directly with your reference solution. This allows the triggering of workflows from systems sales already use like Salesforce. Pre-existing integrations can help automate your process easily.
• Reference Request Form – Create a customizable form to submit references that pre-populates fields from the CRM record. Build in the criteria fields sales said are must-haves.
• Member Profiles – Configure member profile fields to capture the various attributes that aid in matching. Sync these profiles with customer data from your CRM. 
• Segmentation – Set up member groups based on criteria like industry, region, use cases. This facilitates targeting relevant prospects.
• Automated Workflows – Build workflows to route incoming requests, publish to proper member segments, and collect feedback. 

Design the Ideal Member Experience

Along with ease of use for sales, you need to design an experience that incentivizes customers to participate.

Your customer-facing elements should include:

• A Portal – This allows members to view requests, accept opportunities, and provide feedback. Consider gamification elements like points and badges to drive engagement and completion.
• Onboarding Survey – Ask new members for the key attributes you identified with sales that are not already accessible from your CRM. 
• Personalized Requests – When sending a request, always include why the member is uniquely qualified to customize the ask.
• Opportunities for Recognition – Spotlight and thank engaged members both publicly and privately. Consider sending handwritten notes.  
• Rewards – Compensate members for time spent on calls with points, gift cards, or early access to new features. 
• Measurement – Gather feedback and satisfaction scores to continuously improve the reference program experience.

The more value you deliver, the more references will want to stay active members.

Train Sales on New Workflows

Once your solution is ready, introduce it to the sales organization through demos and training. Clearly explain the steps they need to take. Here is a common setup for scaled reference programs:

• Submit a Request – Demo how they now complete a form instead of emailing for references
• Provide Background and Details – Stress the importance of giving detailed requirements to find the best match
• Make Introductions – Walk through best practices for connecting the prospect and advocate
• Give and Get Feedback – Have them rate the reference call and member’s performance afterward. They can also solicit feedback from their prospect to help improve their experience moving forward.

You really need to emphasize how this streamlined process benefits sales by delivering better matches faster without having to chase down references manually. You also need sales leadership to endorse the new program to build buy-in across the teams. Provide job aids and tutorials that reps can reference on how to leverage the solution.

Recruit Reference Members 

Now it’s time to recruit customer advocates to join the program. Consider these best practices:

• Target ideal customers – Who do you want to reward? Go after your happiest, low-churn customers to be advocates. You’ll also want to identify potential targets based on criteria sales provided like industry, region, and use cases. 
• Highlight benefits – Position the program as a chance to guide their peers and gain early access to new capabilities. Offer it as a VIP experience with unlocked rewards and opportunities. 
• Promote continuously – Keep the program top of mind with ongoing calls-to-action (CTAs) in newsletters, customer communities, and events.

Make sure you’re building a diverse member base aligned to sales requirements to support a wide range of prospect needs.  

Motivate Ongoing Participation 

You need members who not only join but actively participate in taking calls. Use these strategies to drive engagement: 

• Recognize contributions – Thank members publicly when they help and provide gifts or rewards. You should also provide perks like granting member-only access to content and experiences. 
• Create guided journeys – Develop campaigns that guide members through getting started and then progressing to become power advocates. 
• Spotlight advocates – Elevate highly engaged members as champions through titles, features, and events. 
• Make it competitive – Show leaderboards, award badges and status, and host contests around participation. 

Encourage helping behaviors by recognizing, rewarding, and incentivizing members to stay involved. Monitor participation levels and gather feedback on experience.

Measure Program Success  

The last critical component is reporting metrics that demonstrate the value delivered and uncover areas for optimization. Track both activity metrics and business impact:

Operational Metrics:

• Number of successful references provided 
• Reference requests fulfilled 
• Time to complete reference requests
• Reference member sign-ups
• Member engagement/participation 

Business Metrics:

• Win rate for opportunities with a reference versus without
• Average deal size for referenced opportunities 
• Expansion/upsell revenue from participating accounts
• Sales cycle compression for referenced deals

Present metrics that tie to revenue won to secure executive support. Contrast referenced deals vs. non-referenced to reveal the sales impact.

Tips for Getting Started 

Follow these best practices as you launch your own program:

• Invest upfront in sales alignment and robust systems to scale
• Focus on delivering value to references through personalized experiences
• Start small with a pilot group and expand the member base over time 
• Continuously gather feedback from sales and members to improve
• Support reference members with training and community engagements
• Evolve the program to activate references beyond calls like events and content

With the foundations for success in place, you’ll see your advocates drive growth and boost loyalty. A customer reference program done right is a proven way to accelerate sales cycles, increase deal sizes, and expand key accounts.

Resource Download

Click Here to download the How to Build a Best-in-Class Customer Reference Program

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Please note you do not have access to teaching notes, success factors of a reference visit – a single case study.

Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing

ISSN : 0885-8624

Article publication date: 1 November 2001

Reference visits to the plants of suppliers’ present customers are an important practice in industrial marketing. Yet, studies regarding how to conduct reference visits do not seem to exist. The purpose of the article is first to describe the total process of a reference visit and then to develop success factors from that description. A single case study was conducted to describe that process. The decision systems analysis (DSA) was used as the analysis method that resulted in a flowchart description of the total process of a reference visit. Through eight key considerations seven success factors were then developed. It is concluded that managers should follow these success factors in their marketing practices, managers could use the DSA as an aid to improve their current marketing practices, and managers should take into account the value the visit creates for the parties when planning and managing a reference visit.

• Industrial marketing
• Supplier evaluation

Salminen, R.T. (2001), "Success factors of a reference visit – a single case study", Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing , Vol. 16 No. 6, pp. 487-507. https://doi.org/10.1108/08858620110403086

Copyright © 2001, MCB UP Limited

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Reference effects and customer engagement in a museum visit

Purpose By extending the expectancy-disconfirmation theory and integrating the elaboration likelihood model, this study aims to explore the reference effects (i.e. disconfirmation and self-identity) and customer engagement that affect customer experience on satisfaction with a museum visit. The study is designed to test a dual-mediator mechanism involving disconfirmation and self-identity. The moderating role of cognitive, affective or behavioral engagements is also examined with the overall purpose to advance the understanding of customer experience in cultural consumption such as museum visits. Design/methodology/approach A self-administered field survey in two stages was carried out on visitors to the Hong Kong Museum of Art. A total of 465 valid response sets were used for analysis. Hypotheses were tested using confirmatory factor analysis, three-step mediation test, structural equation modeling and moderation regressions. Findings Disconfirmation and self-identity are found to be dual mediators in the experience–satisfaction relationship. Cognitive engagement reduces the effect of knowledge experience on disconfirmation and self-identity but increases that of the entertainment experience on disconfirmation and self-identity. Affective engagement amplifies the effect of knowledge experience on self-identity but mitigates the importance of entertainment evaluations. Practical implications Findings highlight the importance of both perceived knowledge and entertainment experiences in visitors’ evaluation of a cultural experience. Managers are suggested to craft promotional messages with the psychological appeal that connects visitors with museum services. Appropriate engagement tactics for museums can be developed to avoid overloading visitors with information. Originality/value Previous studies treat disconfirmation as the dominant reference effect in the formation of customer satisfaction. This study shows both disconfirmation and self-identity as dual reference effects that link the customer experience to satisfaction in the museum context, serving as a pioneer in defining how the influence of experience on reference effects varies depending on how customers are cognitively and affectively engaged in such context.

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Identifying brand touchpoints to increase switching costs in the banking industry

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AT&T informs users of data breach and resets millions of passcodes

March 30, 2024 / 2:51 PM EDT / CBS/AP

AT&T said it has begun notifying millions of customers about the theft of personal data recently discovered online.

The telecommunications giant said Saturday that a dataset found on the "dark web" contains information such as Social Security numbers for about 7.6 million current AT&T account holders and 65.4 million former account holders.

The company said it has already reset the passcodes of current users and will be communicating with account holders whose sensitive personal information was compromised.

It is not known if the data "originated from AT&T or one of its vendors," the company said in a statement. The compromised data is from 2019 or earlier and does not appear to include financial information or call history, it said. In addition to passcodes and Social Security numbers, it may include email and mailing addresses, phone numbers and birth dates.

It is not the first crisis this year for the Dallas-based company. 

New York prosecutors said they are opening an investigation into a wireless network outage in February that left  thousands of AT&T customers  across the U.S. without cellphone service for roughly 12 hours.

The outage, which also affected some Consumer Cellular, T-Mobile, UScellular and Verizon subscribers, led to widespread frustration by phone users and briefly disrupted 911 service in some communities. 

AT&T apologized for the network disruption and offered a  $5 credit to customers .

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Computer Science > Computation and Language

Title: realm: reference resolution as language modeling.

Abstract: Reference resolution is an important problem, one that is essential to understand and successfully handle context of different kinds. This context includes both previous turns and context that pertains to non-conversational entities, such as entities on the user's screen or those running in the background. While LLMs have been shown to be extremely powerful for a variety of tasks, their use in reference resolution, particularly for non-conversational entities, remains underutilized. This paper demonstrates how LLMs can be used to create an extremely effective system to resolve references of various types, by showing how reference resolution can be converted into a language modeling problem, despite involving forms of entities like those on screen that are not traditionally conducive to being reduced to a text-only modality. We demonstrate large improvements over an existing system with similar functionality across different types of references, with our smallest model obtaining absolute gains of over 5% for on-screen references. We also benchmark against GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, with our smallest model achieving performance comparable to that of GPT-4, and our larger models substantially outperforming it.

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Immigration and 2020 false claims: Takeaways from Donald Trump's Wisconsin rally

GREEN BAY – Wisconsin first delivered the presidency to Donald Trump eight years ago and on Tuesday the former Republican president returned to the critical battleground state to pitch himself as a solution for the U.S. southern border while continuing to promote false claims about Wisconsin's elections.

Trump arrived in Green Bay during a classic upper Midwest spring snowstorm for his first Wisconsin stop of the 2024 presidential election cycle. There, he argued he would level more strength at the border to a crowd gathered in a downtown convention center that was the site of his first rally in Green Bay in 2016.

"This is the worst president in the history of our country," Trump said of rival Joe Biden. "Joe Biden is not respected. Joe Biden is not feared."

Here are takeaways from Trump's visit to Green Bay:

Trump again promotes lies about Wisconsin's 2020 election

Trump opened his speech by again falsely claiming he defeated Biden in 2020, saying he "won this state by a lot" that year.

Biden won Wisconsin by about 21,000 votes in 2020, a defeat that was key to Trump's reelection loss that year.

"Look, we won in 2016. We did much better in 2020. I hate to say it. We did a hell of a lot better. But there’s more spirit now than at any time than we’ve ever seen," Trump said. He said he would not let Democrats "rig" the 2024 presidential election.

More: Gilbert: For Donald Trump, Wisconsin in 2024 looks a lot like Wisconsin in 2016

The election rocked the nation when Trump refused to accept the results while spreading false claims about the accuracy of elections in Wisconsin and in other battleground states. The effects of Trump's falsehoods about the 2020 election have been lasting, with just 19% of Republican voters reporting feeling "very confident" in the election result, according to a January survey of registered voters by the Marquette University Law School poll.

Trump on Tuesday also mentioned ballot "dumps" during the 2020 election, a misleading reference to a Milwaukee practice of reporting the results of all absentee ballots in a single update that often takes place later at night because election workers wait until the counting is complete to report results.

Trump has falsely claimed this practice amounts to fraud.

Trump blasts Biden on immigration issues

In his swing through the upper Midwest, Trump tore into Biden over his administration's handling of immigration issues inundating the southern U.S. border with Mexico, dubbing his case against the president "Biden's bloodbath." The reference was a nod to heavy criticism Trump received last month for warning voters of a "bloodbath" for the American auto industry if Biden was reelected.

Trump leads Biden on Wisconsin voters' opinions about which candidate would do a better job handling immigration, according to the January Marquette University Law School survey.

Trump focused on immigration issues during his speech, claiming the U.S. "is becoming a third-world country."

“We’re going to end up with the largest deportation in America," Trump said about his plans if reelected. "I’m here to declare Biden’s border bloodbath ... ends the day I take office. I will end the carnage."

More: Bice: Wisconsin Democrats are burying Republicans in 2024 fundraising

Trump pledges to protect Social Security benefits

Trump pledged to keep Social Security intact if reelected while falsely claiming immigration crises would deplete its reserves.

"We never touched it. We let it be," Trump said of his administration. "Your Medicare and Social Security will be safe."

Trump blasts indictments

The former president is facing charges in four separate criminal cases based on allegations of election interference, handling of classified documents and paying a porn star to prevent her from disclosing a sexual encounter.

Trump accused Democrats of engaging in "election interference" through the charges.

"They want to take away my freedom because I won't let them take away your freedom," Trump said.

Trump endorses Eric Hovde in U.S. Senate race

Eric Hovde, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Wisconsin, received Trump's endorsement during Tuesday's rally — which Hovde helped open. During his introduction, Hovde received heavy applause for his pledge to donate his salary to charities if elected .

"You have tremendous potential," Trump said to Hovde. "Everybody go out. Support him. And get him to win."

More: Wisconsin U.S. Senate race updates: Eric Hovde reaches endorsement threshold with $1M raised

State GOP chairman, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson promote early voting as Trump mixes message

Republican Party of Wisconsin chairman Brian Schimming and U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson urged the crowd Tuesday to embrace early voting .

Johnson said if Republican voters did not utilize in-person absentee voting, the party may not do well in November.

"Either we have a red wave in November or America is doomed," he warned.

At the same time, Trump reiterated false claims about the accuracy of Wisconsin's 2020 election. Trump in 2020 blasted the use of absentee voting ahead of the election and following his loss, Trump sought to throw out all ballots cast in-person absentee in two counties, a practice known as early voting.

"It doesn't give me a lot of heartburn," Schimming told reporters ahead of Trump's speech.

Schimming said he spoke to Republican National Committee officials about promoting the benefits of voting in-person absentee, which Trump has previously characterized as fraudulent.

"So I think you will see a pretty consistent message there," he said.

Trump proposes death penalty in homicides of police officers, banning 'squatters rights'

If elected, Trump said he would ensure anyone convicted of killing police officers would receive the death penalty as a criminal penalty. He also proposed a task force with the goal of banning any legal protections of people who enter homes they don't own and seek to exercise "squatters rights."

"We will end the plunder, rape and destruction," Trump said.

Democrats promote Biden, blast Trump ahead of Green Bay visit

Ahead of Trump’s visit, Democrats held news conferences in Madison and Milwaukee on Monday highlighting Biden’s infrastructure efforts and his support for union workers, as well as his administration’s advocacy for abortion access.

Kent Miller, president of the Wisconsin Laborers’ District Council, called Biden “the most pro-union president and pro-worker president in our history.” Biden visited the union’s DeForest training center in February 2023, before he had officially announced his plans to seek reelection.

Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway, who serves on a national advisory board for the Biden-Harris campaign, noted that Tuesday’s rally in Green Bay will be Trump’s first visit to Wisconsin since August 2022.

“Let's just think about how many things have happened in Wisconsin since 2022. We've had a lot going on, but apparently Donald Trump doesn't care because he hasn't been here,” Rhodes-Conway said. “He's been at the country club, on a golf course and, yeah, in a few courtrooms, I think. And this belated visit doesn't really represent a break in his routine of throwing Wisconsin families under the bus.”

Trump’s visit follows a string of visits from Biden and his surrogates in recent weeks, including Vice President Kamala Harris, first lady Jill Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. The Biden campaign officially launched canvassing efforts throughout the state last month, following a visit to Milwaukee by the president. Biden is expected to be in Madison on Monday .

Jessie Opoien of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel contributed to this report.

Molly Beck can be reached at [email protected].

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Jimmy kimmel blasts us as ‘filthy and disgusting’ after trip to japan, says americans viewed as ‘garbage people’.

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Liberal talk show host Jimmy Kimmel spoke on his show about how surprisingly clean Japan is in comparison to the U.S. and even Europe, joking that Japanese people associate Americans with garbage.

While American cities struggling with rampant homelessness, crumbling infrastructure and crime is a popular point of discussion in American politics, Kimmel gave a monologue Monday on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” about how a recent trip to Japan shattered his image of what a modern society could look like.

“Here in America, we know we have our faults. We know we have areas for improvement. But, overall, I think most of us believe that, compared to the rest of the world, we’re pretty buttoned-up. I know I did,” he said. “I go to Europe where there are dirt holes where plumbing is supposed to be, and I hold my breath and I go, ‘I’m glad I’m not one of these people,’ and then I go back home, right?”

His recent trip changed his tune, however.

“But now, after traveling to Japan, I realize that this place — this USA we’re always chanting about, is a filthy and disgusting place. We were in Japan for seven days. Not only did I not encounter a single dirty bathroom, the bathrooms in Tokyo and Kyoto are cleaner than our operating rooms here,” he said. “Everywhere you go, the bathrooms are clean. They don’t smell bad, and they have those toilets that wash you from the inside out.”

The talk show host also noted that this is the case not just in hotels, but in “restaurants, bars, truck stops! We went to two truck stops — I swear to God — the bathrooms were cleaner than Jennifer Garner’s teeth.”

Even Japanese streets are astoundingly cleaner than those in American cities, he said.

“There’s no litter. People carry their own trash. There are no garbage cans in Tokyo,” he said. “30 years ago, some terrorists put a poisonous gas in some trash cans. They’re like, ‘Okay, no more trash cans. Everybody clean up after yourselves,’ And guess what? They clean up after themselves. They bring their garbage to their houses.”

He then said that Japan and America are like two famous theme parks.

“It’s like the whole country is Disneyland, and we’re living at Six Flags,” he said. “I’ve been home 36 hours. I’ve never felt dirtier. We are like hogs compared to the Japanese. I can’t imagine what they must think of us. ‘Oh, the garbage people! Yes, the Americans, garbage, yes!’”

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AT&T Notifying Customers About Massive Data Leak

AT&T this week is letting customers and former customers know about a major data leak , and it is sending out emails and resetting passcodes to prevent unauthorized account access.

Back in 2021, a hacking group said that it had stolen information on 70 million AT&T customers. AT&T at the time said that it had not suffered a breach, and the company still insists that the data did not come from its systems. Customer information leaked includes names, addresses, birth dates, AT&T account numbers, phone numbers, email addresses, and social security numbers, along with passcodes.

The data was not made public until March 2024, but now that it is out in the wild, AT&T has initiated passcode resets and says that it is working with external cybersecurity experts to further analyze the situation.

The company says leaked data does not include financial information or call history, and it will be providing complimentary identity theft and credit monitoring services for those who had their personal information compromised.

AT&T has determined that AT&T data-specific fields were contained in a data set released on the dark web. While AT&T has made this determination, it is not yet known whether the data in those fields originated from AT&T or one of its vendors. With respect to the balance of the data set, which includes personal information such as social security numbers, the source of the data is still being assessed. Based on our preliminary analysis, the data set appears to be from 2019 or earlier, impacting approximately 7.6 million current AT&T account holders and 65.4 million former account holders. Currently, AT&T does not have evidence of unauthorized access to its systems resulting in theft of the data set.

Impacted current and former customers will be receiving a letter or an email from AT&T.

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Glad I dropped AT&T a long time ago.

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Tornado threats, heavy rain and snow expected as dangerous spring storms threaten millions

A likely tornado moved or rolled mobile homes and uprooted trees in Kentucky and buildings were damaged in Tennessee as severe weather swept across those and other states Tuesday, putting millions under weather alerts, officials said.

No deaths have been reported in what the National Weather Service called a major spring storm, but officials in Kentucky reported collisions resulting in injuries.

“We have reports of substantial damage to a number of structures — and thankfully, as of right now we are not aware of any fatalities,” Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, who declared a state of emergency, said in a statement .

Tornado watches covered more than 16 million people Tuesday evening in a swath from northeastern Louisiana to central Ohio, according to the weather service . Flash flood watches covered an area from West Virginia and Pennsylvania to New York.

In Kentucky, photos submitted by the Boyd County Emergency Management office indicated "tornadic damage of at least EF1 intensity,” the weather service said on its storm reports website. Two mobile homes were either displaced or rolled.

In Sunbright, Tennessee, Billy Glen Kennedy got a call from a friend after the severe storm moved through the town of around 500.

“He just said, 'You might want to get into town; your funeral home’s gone,'” Kennedy, the owner of heavily damaged Schubert Funeral Home, told NBC affiliate WBIR of Knoxville . “And I didn’t even know what happened.”

Kennedy said he heard sirens of emergency vehicles driving past his house, which is not unusual. “But I had no idea I’d come up here and find this,” he said.

Multiple rounds of storms were forecast for the Ohio Valley, middle Tennessee and the Southeast on Tuesday. Parts of Kentucky were under a tornado watch until 10 p.m., and Beshear warned residents to remain prepared.

One weather-related injury was reported in Lexington, Kentucky, Mayor Linda Gorton said, without providing further details.

Dozens of calls have come in, with the Lexington Fire Department receiving 61 calls for emergency service and two calls for trees crashing into homes, as well as reports of two structure fires caused by downed power lines, the mayor said in a statement Tuesday.

"Three injury collisions" were also reported, as well as seven collisions that did not result in injuries.

Beshear said the weather service has confirmed an EF1 tornado in Nelson County and another EF1 tornado in Anderson County. That strength of tornado has gusts of 86 to 110 mph on the Enhanced Fujita Scale .

Tuesday's possible tornadoes come after severe weather that affected parts of the Midwest on Monday, including severe thunderstorm watches in parts of Indiana and Ohio. A section of U.S. 23 in Columbus, Ohio, was flooded by Tuesday, NBC affiliate WCHM of Columbus reported . 

In New York City, a travel advisory was in place for Wednesday, with an additional 2 to 3 inches of rain expected, the city’s  Emergency Management Department said. The advisory lasts until Thursday.

The National Weather Service's Weather Prediction Center said Tuesday on X that late-season heavy snow and gusty winds across the Great Lakes and the Northeast through midweek are expected.

Most of Wisconsin was under either winter storm warnings or winter weather advisories Tuesday. Snow was falling in Green Bay, the weather service office there said, and snowfall rates in the Fox Valley and lake shore areas could be 1 inch per hour at times.

At least four tornadoes were reported Monday in Oklahoma and Missouri.

The city clerk for Barnsdall, Oklahoma, said that several homes were damaged but that there have been no reports of deaths. Because of the weather, public schools were closed Tuesday.

Schools were also closed in parts of Ohio .

In addition to the wind and snow, around 41 million people from Indiana to New Jersey were under flood watches Tuesday.

Two to 3 additional inches of rain fell in the Pittsburgh area Tuesday, the weather service there said, on top of 2 to 4 inches of rain that had already fallen. "Flooding remains a big issue across much of the region," the weather service office said on social media.

The highest flood threat Tuesday was associated with the severe thunderstorms charging across parts of the Ohio Valley. Rainfall rates of 1 to 2 inches per hour could spark flash flooding.

Because of the heavy rain, the Weather Prediction Center issued a notice of slight risk of excessive rainfall over parts of the lower Great Lakes, the Ohio and Tennessee valleys and the central Appalachians through Wednesday morning. The wet weather is likely to create localized flash flooding, with urban areas, roads and small streams being the most vulnerable.

On Wednesday, the mid-Atlantic and Florida were under severe weather risk. That expanded to include 22 million people from Florida to Maryland.

A secondary low-pressure system along the mid-Atlantic coast could bring heavy, wet snow and some sleet to the Northeast on Wednesday afternoon through Friday, the center said.

Upstate New York and northern New England should expect significant snow accumulations that could create hazardous travel because of low visibility and snow-covered roads.

The center also issued a notice of slight risk of severe thunderstorms over the Florida Peninsula from Wednesday into Thursday morning. The storm is expected to bring frequent lightning, severe wind gusts, hail and possible tornadoes, it said.

The springtime storms follow a wet Monday when unconfirmed tornadoes, hail, strong gusts and heavy rain battered parts of the South.

Minyvonne Burke is a senior breaking news reporter for NBC News.

Kathryn Prociv is a senior meteorologist and producer for NBC News. 

Phil Helsel is a reporter for NBC News.