I’m headed off in a few hours to Las Vegas for a trade show- flying Southwest for the last time before it all goes downhill (a situation probably worth its own newsletter someday soon)!

There is a decent amount of hassle involved in going to in person events, aside from the cost. It disrupts your week, you lose time on your regular tasks and spend a lot of down time waiting for planes, taxis, hotel check-ins, etc.

So why do it, when you can now have a Zoom call with anyone anywhere in the world with a few mouse clicks?

Simply put, there is still no substitute for meeting people in person. Even on Zoom, you can’t always get across what you want or read people as well as you’d like.

In person just gives you a whole new level of access to talk to your customers and find out how they really feel about your business, what they are struggling with, what challenges they have, what alternatives they might be considering, and so on.

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If you haven’t spoken with a customer in a while, I’d highly encourage you to make a point of doing so. It may be because you’ve gotten big enough to have other people who handle it or it may be because you sell online and so don’t normally interact with them much at all.

When I was selling my own business planning software years ago, I thought I understood my customers pretty well. The software was for writing business plans (which I had done tons of for others) specifically for restaurants (which I had worked in and managed for years). I was pretty sure I knew what the challenges would be.

Not long after starting, however, I had customer service emails coming in with questions I never anticipated. Wanting to be a good seller, I offered people emailing in a chance to call for follow-up help. Those calls completely transformed how I marketed the software, how I laid out the directions, and even some of the output.

I should have done that before I built it as much as I had but lesson learned.

Even when you’ve been in your business a long time you may be surprised to find out what customers think, what they want, and how they use the product or service vs how you think they might be doing it.

I strongly recommend having regular conversations, in person whenever possible, with your customers to find out what they value most and what they would like to see from you. You may find that you can make small adjustments that make big differences to your customers that you wouldn’t realize yourself they care about.

I find sometimes business owners are not keen to speak with customers because they are worried, they are going to hear complaints. But complaints are the best thing you can hear to help you avoid losing clients or knowing how to correct problems before they impact more customers.