The 10/10 rule for B2B product managers talking to customers

A single hour with a customer is likely more valuable than 10 hours of internally focused time. Yet many enterprise product managers are sadly content with only riding along with sales reps a couple times per year and kibitzing with clients at annual customer events.

Lots of SaaS companies have “customer-driven” or “defined by our customers” somewhere in their missions, yet don’t walk the walk when it comes to actually getting PMs out in the field to regularly talk to them.

Perhaps it’s because corporate HQ is geographically isolated from customers. Or sales and account management are overly protective regarding customer access or even prefer to be the main conduit of product intel and feedback. Maybe for harder tech plays, PMs are overwhelmingly from engineering backgrounds and are uncomfortable with customers.

Doesn’t matter why — the lack of product management-customer connections is a serious impediment to growth.

Few dispute the importance of the voice of the customer in driving product decisions, with the use of widespread tools such as user panels, customer events, surveys, analysts, and ethnographic research.

But these should augment, not replace, more quotidian PM conversations with customers.

In addition to customer/inside conversion ratio, the other part of my “10/10 rule” is that PMs should budget at least 10% of their time for customer interactions, more for earlier stage companies or those in a particularly fast-moving industries.

There’s not much research on the status quo — here’s one informal study — so click here to weigh in on my Twitter poll with your company’s ratio.

Here are some tips on helping PMs increase the quantity and quality of customer time:

How to get access

While product may have the “right” to talk to customers, the first step should be building rapport with relationship managers (RMs) — sales and account management. Help them to understand the importance for both the company and their individual goals, as well as your objectives for the conversation.

If you’re relying on senior management to help, gentle intros to relationship owners instead of papal decrees are always preferred to avoid creating resentment.

Frequent emphasis on coordinating with RMs may make me appear to be a lover of “permission slips,” but lots of sales/product antipathy is rooted in prior screw-ups that are easy to avoid. Product is a team sport in most respects, and as the players gain more comfort in each other’s abilities, autonomy comes naturally. You’ll find that by overcommunicating and overcollaborating in the early days, you’re buying yourself more freedom later on. And in larger companies, you’re also plowing the way for other PMs to come behind you.

Who should you talk to

Just don’t talk to the “friendlies,” the customers who are typical stops on any senior executive visit to town. Also talk to customers who are difficult, churned former customers, overlooked (i.e., taken for granted) customers, hard-to-land prospects (including your competitors’ best customers), and some outside your traditional addressable market.

Also, don’t only get in front of customer personnel matching product personae, but also go up and down the value chain and org chart. For instance, your company may not sell to CFOs, but they surely have perspective on your value prop. Likewise, maybe your entry point is CMOs, but CTOs and their teams are key stakeholders in a successful relationship.

What’s it in for the customer

Key to a positive, memorable experience for both sides is giving the customer something of value during the meeting. Don’t be selfish and only look out for your needs, thinking that allowing them to provide product input is enough reward.

Offer something that they can share with their bosses to make themselves look smart — much better than donuts:

• Provide information about the wider marketplace (while respecting confidentiality).
• Educate them about emerging tech.
• Spelunk through their data to tell them something about their business they didn’t know already.
• Share best practices and KPIs known only by insiders.

Also, when you radiate beyond your company’s typical point of contact (particularly up the chain of command), there’s a higher ROI threshold on the meeting time, so give them something to talk about later.

Planning the conversation

As a first step, identify your objective in the meeting — product feedback, new product exploration, pain-point identification, evangelism, etc. — and then back into the meeting structure and required materials. For now, we’ll table a (potentially lengthy) discussion of the best way to approach these very different goals.

Consider how much is information sharing (you to customer) and how much is them providing feedback to you. Err on the side of shutting up and listening — common sense, but surprisingly hard for many folks. Actively avoid “confirmation bias” in how you approach questioning.

If you’re riding along in a larger meeting, such as a quarterly business review, timebox your component to avoid subverting the meeting’s larger goal. Create a natural offramp, such as scheduling a smaller follow-up with targeted personnel.

And at each step along the way in your preparation, keep the RM in the loop, not only to get the inevitable useful feedback but to ensure you’re a unified team (whether or not she’ll actually be in the room). This also helps you be smart about the customer and her history, including the color commentary that may not be in the CRM. Understand any hot buttons or off-limits topics that could derail your agenda.

Sometimes, a PM’s presence is needed to help close a deal, to “sell the future” beyond your existing platform or to bring gravitas that sales engineering can’t offer. This can be a tricky dance that requires even closer collaboration with sales. Also, understand why product needs to be involved and identify ways that sales engineers or reps can be trained to minimize this next time around.

Mode of interaction

Face-to-face meetings are usually preferable. I live in New York City, where it’s practical to jump on the subway and have four F2F meetings in a day, but few are as lucky, particularly when your company has a global footprint. Maximize F2F interactions given budget and time constraints, but use phone or video to fill in the gaps (and be conscious of their limitations). If you’re trying to build relationships with key customers, starting with an in-person meeting (or making a point to connect with someone at a conference) will make follow-on remote conversations more productive.

When the curtain goes up

You can be fastidious about preparations, but most plans don’t survive their first encounters with reality. If you’re going to the meeting with the RM or other internal partners, be clear about who’s the ringleader and everyone’s roles and responsibilities. While improvisation is fine, disorganization is amateurish and violates the Hippocratic (Product) Oath: “first, do no harm” to the overall commercial relationship. Otherwise, good luck on your newly minted RM pal inviting you on another ridealong.

If you’re not used to customer interactions, listen passively to customer phone calls involving other PMs and take notes. Preparation is a good way to quell your nerve, but nothing beats practice. Work through a mock session or two before hitting the road, and schedule your first audience with a safe, friendly customer. Having good listening skills and projecting enthusiasm and empathy can overcome many shortcomings.

Also, watch your coworkers, both to take their cues as well as to better understand the challenges they face with customers on a daily basis. Your objective as a PM isn’t simply to maximize product/market fit, but to also find ways for your product to scale cleanly in terms of efficient sales, implementation and maintenance.

What’s next

Your job is hardly done when the meeting is over. Even if you’re a product team of one, memorialize the meeting with an eye towards informing others within your company. One good method is creating a “headline call report” in your CRM with the basic details: attendees, major points discussed, any significant findings, and action items.

For product purposes, creating a more detailed trip report is useful to tease out details not particularly interesting to non-product folks. If you’re on a listening tour for roadmap items, creating different spreadsheets (or JIRA items) for new ideas, unsolved problems, and competitive pressures helps to collate the flood of data.

Caucus with the relationship manager and determine how to handle follow up items. Subdue the urge to go over the top with customers: balance fulfilling commitments made during the meeting and deepening your relationship with the customer with the overhead of managing a growing list of customer conversations and not stepping on the sales and account management team.

In larger shops, my preference is to send a thank you note and quick recap of action items, and mention the RM will follow up in the coming days with more details. As some product items may be conflated with support and account management, this enables the RM to triage future conversations and lets you step back a bit.

But don’t disappear completely. You’re building a good network of relationships that you should continue to nurture. As you and your RM colleagues gain more mutual trust, you’ll also be able to engage more independently and more deeply. For instance, I like to bring engineers and engineering managers out into the field for customers where I have solid relationships. But in this case, I’m the coach helping to create a positive encounter.

From creator to solver

A big reason why I love B2B product management is talking to individual customers about solving their problems or unlocking new opportunities, making their daily lives better.

Being a “builder” is great, but getting outside the development bubble and witnessing your impact firsthand brings it all home, helping you and your product to get better quicker.

Consumer-focused PMs face somewhat different challenges in getting meaningful customer feedback. While this post is focused on B2B products, I’d encourage B2C PMs provide their thoughts in the comments below.