• Invite people over to your virtual office!
  • How do I choose the customers I meet with?
  • I’m curious about our customers’ businesses!
  • I can have a meeting with anyone in the world!
• How to schedule meetings with customers effortlessly
  • Use a scheduling app
  • Set up a dedicated room for virtual meetings
  • Have a conversation template to make a meeting meaningful
  • Get personal if possible. It’s all about a human connection!
• How much time should one dedicate to meeting with customers?
• Pro tip: Record the conversation, but don’t share it publicly!
• How about meeting customers in bulk? There are several ways to do that, too!
• And when you travel? Meet with customers, too!
• The one thing: schedule time to meet with your customers!

Invite people over to your virtual office!

I’ve already explained how significant it is to connect with your team members, I also believe it’s critical to regularly meet with customers. I do it all the time. Every week, I have a few meetings with Nozbe users.

I know. It totally doesn’t scale.

We have more than 700,000 Nozbe users and tens of thousands of paying customers. How can I meet them all? I can’t, of course. And I’m not trying to. The goal is not to meet all of them. After all, only Chuck Norris could do that. The idea is to meet with some of them and build meaningful relationships where you can.

How do I choose the customers I meet with?

It all depends. Sometimes someone contacts me via social media or email and I feel like we should talk, so I invite them to meet. Usually, however, it’s my customer support team that does the introductions. When they’re corresponding with someone interesting, they casually ask them if they’d be interested in having a chat with the CEO. People are usually surprised that the boss himself is available for a direct one-on-one chat with one of the thousands of customers. It makes them feel special and sets us up for a great conversation.

I’m curious about our customers’ businesses!

We are lucky that our apps are being used not only by consumers but also by people leading businesses across many sectors and industries. That’s why our customer support reps tend to ask for a chat with me if someone is in an industry that we know very little about. I’m a very curious person, and I like to learn about the world outside of big tech. This way I get to talk to people who are running all sorts of businesses like insurance companies, real-estate agencies, manufacturing plants, design studios, marketing agencies, law firms or even builders of custom-made motor homes. It’s all very interesting!

Thanks to these chats, not only do I get to learn how they discovered Nozbe and how they’re using it, but most of all, I can broaden my horizons and see that there’s a world out there of businesses I’ve never heard of making some truly amazing stuff.

I can have a meeting with anyone in the world!

No, I don’t have a physical office, but I use that to my advantage. I get to have a virtual coffee with a customer from the other side of the world without having them fly over to meet. Of course, meeting in person would be even more meaningful, but trust me, just the fact that, as the CEO of a company, I schedule time to meet individually with some of my customers is meaningful enough! People really appreciate that!

How to schedule meetings with customers effortlessly

Now that I’ve explained why meeting virtually in person is a great idea, let’s get down to the logistics of scheduling this the easiest way possible.

Use a scheduling app

I use a dedicated scheduling app¹ and have decided on a few slots per week when I’m available. Usually this is around 4pm Central European Time on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This is a very convenient time for me, as it’s toward the end of my workday and it suits my European customers very well. It’s also the beginning of the workday for my American users (that’s 10am New York time). For customers in California or on the west coast, I usually make an exception and meet them when it’s evening here.

With my dedicated app, I just send them a link and they can choose a time that suits them. There’s no unnecessary back and forth and trying to agree on a time. They just choose a 30-minute slot available and that’s it. Literally a one-click-meeting agreement.

This app is further synchronized with my team’s Google Calendar so everyone on my team can see the appointments in the calendar and is aware of my commitments. Very often based on these calendar entries, someone sends me suggestions for questions or topics I can discuss at these meetings.

Set up a dedicated room for virtual meetings

In my company, we use a video conferencing software² where we can have dedicated virtual rooms for different meetings. The same applies to our customers. We have a “Nozbe Interviews” meeting room, and we send the link to each customer who wants to talk to me. Moreover, they receive the link to this room in their meeting confirmation email.

It’s the same link for everyone, as I’ve set up the room so that a customer must request to join. This way, when one half-hour meeting is finishing and I see another customer in the waiting room, I can politely steer towards finishing the current conversation, and once done, I’m able to let another customer in.

Have a conversation template to make a meeting meaningful

I still remember much from my days of running Productive! Magazine³ and interviewing thought leaders for the cover of each issue. Contrary to popular belief, it can sometimes be very difficult to strike out a great conversation with a very smart person. Usually they are great and we hit it off very quickly, but sometimes they’re not in the mood or just not talkative and you need to have a plan of what you’re going to ask them to get them to warm up and talk to you. That’s why, for each of my customer interviews, we have a template.

Don’t worry – I’m not a robot and I don’t stick to the template 100%, but it serves me as a guideline of what I’m supposed to talk about and what I should ask my customer. This template also reminds me to ask some really good questions and make the meeting more about them and their needs rather than just talk about my app and myself. Here’s a series of typical questions I have prepared:

– What’s your company about and what do you do? – I start off by asking about them. After the initial question, I ask more follow-up questions to really try to understand the basics of their business and to get to know where they’re coming from. – How did you discover Nozbe? – Only after I’ve discovered a little about them do I ask about my app and its role in their company. I want to know who started using it first, if everyone on the team is already using it and how hard or easy it was to get people on board. – What problem Nozbe is solving for you? - Now I’m asking about them again and about the problems my app is solving for them. I like to know what they’re hiring Nozbe to do. Is it task management, internal communication, flow of documents,all of the above, or something else? – Are you encountering any issues using Nozbe? – Now I’m trying to be helpful. I want to understand if they have any difficulties running our software. Are there any features they don’t like? Are they having trouble doing something? Very often here, I try to work with them to figure out how to improve the way they use our app. Most likely there’s an advanced feature in our software they’re not aware of, and I walk them through how to implement it. – Are there any other pieces of software they’re using day-to-day alongside Nozbe? – Now it’s time to see if there might be some synergies. Maybe they’re using additional tools that can work together with our app. Maybe I can help them improve a workflow. I try to use my tech expertise to help them out beyond just my app. – Is there anything else I can help you with? – At the end of the conversation, I ask for additional questions or if there are any other things they’d like to know. Maybe they’re curious about how we run our company (now I’ll finally be able to refer them to this book!) or anything else I’ve been writing about recently on our Nozbe blog or my personal blog⁴.

Get personal if possible. It’s all about a human connection!

Thanks to these questions, I can be as helpful as possible. But not only that. With such a conversation, I can quickly see if we click as people. After all, this is not only a business relationship; it’s just two people talking about things.

That’s why, depending on how the conversation goes, I get more personal if the customer lets me. We sometimes later talk about our passions, our struggles, our hobbies, our families and other things we care about. Very often I get asked about how I get all of my work done on an iPad⁵ or if I’m going to get the latest iPhone and what I think about it.

That’s the beauty of meeting with customers one-on-one. Not only do I get to learn so much about people who’re using my software, but most importantly I get to learn about different industries and build relationships with very interesting people from all over the world!

In these conversations, I can also use my additional super powers. I’m a polyglot. I speak fluently not only in my mother tongue (Polish), but also in English (duh!), Spanish and German. This way, I get extra points for surprising my customers when I start talking to them in their language.

How much time should one dedicate to meeting with customers?

Many business owners are so busy that they’ve never thought about scheduling time to meet customers. Believe me, I’m busy, too! But a little time investment goes a long way. After many meetings like this, I’ve heard from my customers that they were surprised a meeting with me was even an option. I’ve also heard that they’d try the same in their business!

It really doesn’t require that much work. As outlined above, the logistics are pretty straightforward, and currently I only have two one-hour slots available weekly, for a maximum total of four meetings a week.

Starting small is key. Making the default meeting only 30 minutes is great. It sends a clear message that not only do I value my time, but most importantly I value my customers’ time as well. However, if the meeting is going really well,I feel we have much more to discuss and my next slot is free, I very often ask the customer how much more time they have, and if possible, we talk for an hour or more!

Again, it’s all about human connections. Businesses don’t buy from businesses. People buy from people.

Pro tip: Record the conversation, but don’t share it publicly!

Yes, I record my conversations with customers! Naturally, only with their consent. When the chat starts, I politely ask them if they’re OK with me recording this conversation. They usually are. Then I hit record in our video conferencing software⁶, and we start talking.

Once the conversation is finished, I upload the recording to our video storage solution⁷ and set it up in such a way that only people from my team can watch it and nobody else.

For each meeting, we have a dedicated task in Nozbe, so once I’ve uploaded the video, I add a comment to the task and ask a person from our customer support team who organized the meeting to watch the recording on a Friday. After they’ve watched the conversation, they put notes from the meeting in a comment to this task so that we can all agree on key takeaways. They also follow up with the customer via email to thank them for their time with me and send them more information about the questions they had or things we spoke about.

Recording a meeting is a great idea. This way, nobody else but me has to be present at the meeting itself, but by watching the replay at a later time, other people from my team can feel like they’re participating and can benefit from it as well.

How about meeting customers in bulk? There are several ways to do that, too!

Apart from these individual meetings, it’s good to establish regular ways of meeting customers in bigger groups. That’s why at Nozbe we host webinars⁸ where I can meet hundreds of customers at a time. I also publish a monthly vlog, not only to my team, but also to my customers⁹. And with Rafal, our VP of product, I publish a regular NoOffice.FM podcast every two weeks¹⁰ where we share and comment on tips from this book and from our day-to-day work. All these activities give me a chance to connect with many of my customers and hopefully be a part of their lives beyond just running my product.

And when you travel? Meet with customers, too!

As I used to travel a lot for work, whether for company reunions, conferences or leisure, I would also check to see if there were any interesting customers in the area and would reach out to see if they were interested in meeting me for a coffee or for lunch.

Very often, it gets even better than that. I get to visit their offices or factories and I get a free tour of how they work. It’s really cool, and it satisfies my curiosity even more than any virtual meeting would.

Now I’m traveling less for work. Because of the pandemic, of course, but also because I’m a family man and don’t like to leave my family for too long. That’s why virtual meetings are still my preferred way of meeting customers!

The one thing: schedule time to meet with your customers!

Meet customers and talk to them. Virtual coffee is really easy to organize. People will appreciate your time, and you’ll build great relationships in the process. Thanks to current technology, you can meet anyone in the world! And if you want to talk to me, don’t be a stranger – just get in touch!¹¹