One long-term theme at SaaStr is Getting on Jets.  Something I never really enjoyed, the travel part of visiting customers. But over time I learned two things.  First, you learn so much more when you visit customers in person.  They tell you things about the product, about what they need, about what they are thinking, that you never get over email or a quick phone call.  And second, it built relationships.   We literally never lost a single customer at Adobe Sign / EchoSign that I visited in person.

I Never Lost a Customer I Actually Visited

It was hard-to-impossible for a while — although face-to-face is back now.

But as we all are getting back to meeting together IRL again, something has changed:  high-velocity customer 1-on-1s via Zoom are the new normal.

You can do something now your calendar didn’t permit before.  And that maybe only sort of made sense before.  You can Zoom with 6+ customers a week.

And it’s awesome.  Zoom is great but before all this change, in many ways for SaaS customer success, Zoom was just a tool.  It was really just WebEx and GoToMeeting 2.0.  Better, but the same basic paradigm.

Today though, you can do something wonderful with Zoom.  Customers, at least your customers in tech, are WFH.  And they are ready to Zoom.  To Zoom and talk about your product, the industry, hear from you.  Customers love to talk to the CEO.  And the magic of course is that you can do more of them.  Of course, this worked before, but people didn’t think of Zoom interactions the same way before everyone in tech was WFH.

So set a goal of at least 6 Zooms a week with at least your top customers, every week.  Carve out 45 minutes for each one, with a simple agenda and maybe 3 slides on the company and what you want to check in on.

If you set a goal of 6 a week, that’s 1-a-day plus an extra.  You’ll get into the habit of just firing the Zoom up straight from your calendar and just talking.  Talking 1-on-1 with your top customers.

In a way we didn’t quite do with Zoom before.

And you’ll be closer.  Maybe not in the same way as before when you visited your customers in person.  But maybe, with more of them.

(note: an updated SaaStr Classic post)

Related Posts

Pin It on Pinterest

Share This