PostHog Handbook Library / Growth

1,131 words. Estimated reading time: 6 min.

# In-person sessions with customers

In-person visits work best for accounts paying or likely to pay $50k+/year where you've identified specific opportunities for expansion, are navigating renewal conversations, or need to overcome significant technical or organizational hurdles. They're a high-effort, high-reward play - use them strategically.

This outline of what to consider and how to plan an in-person visit is designed to provide ideas, inspiration and avoid common pitfalls. It is not a framework nor a definitive guide - your intuition and experience should ultimately guide the who, what and how of in-person meetings.

### Account manager driven vs customer driven visits

#### Account manager driven

Sometimes you'll be the driver for the visit happening, whether by pitching a specific outcome, or offering to 'drop in' when you're around. When this is the case, it's important that you have a tight, well defined schedule and some goals (whether shared with customer or not) for the visit. Don't leave your champion(s) to do the work of planning and scheduling the sessions - you want them to be able to join the session, have a positive and productive experience, and continue evangelising us without adding to their to-do list.

#### Customer driven

Sometimes the purpose of an onsite is defined clearly by the customer, for example overcoming a specific technical challenge, or building an analytical framework for a new product. In this situation, definitely schedule significant time to address their primary goal, but do not underestimate the opportunity to create less formal contexts with smaller audiences, especially your champions.

### Formal Sessions

This section will cover the length, audience, purpose and content of sessions that you could include as part of your onsite - pick and choose like a menu. At a minimum you'll want a broader session with a big audience and a narrow session with the key stakeholder(s) and champions to progress a relationship with an account.

#### PostHog user analytics jam

Length: An hour, possibly longer with a small focused audience

Audience: Users of PostHog, the more the better, armed with laptops and logged in

Purpose: To level-up how users engage with our platform, spark new ideas and inspiration for customer teams, and expand usage and impact by enabling the audience on our tools.

Content: Set an explicit goal that you think is achievable within the session for you to work towards with the users. Invite ideas and suggestions to get the jam going, but make sure you have some solid ideas in your back pocket to get things started. Building a compound score (i.e Customer effort score, time to value, onboarding friction) can be a good one if the customer has no ideas. Do not start demoing, but do show users useful shortcuts (PostHogAI, Actions, Cohorts, Workflows, Realtime destinations etc) if relevant. Conclude by summarising progress, and suggesting some follow-up and continuation tasks to take it to the next level.

#### Check-in and planning with champions

Length: 30 minutes to an hour

Audience: The champions of PostHog at your account

Purpose: To level set about PostHog's reputation and role within the customer, and unearth any opportunities or risks, while building stronger relationships with champions. Also a chance to test the water for any cross-sell proposals, and ensure champions are aware of all of our products.

Content: Discovery and planning with the champions, potentially over a meal or in another less formal context - certainly not in front of their teams or boss, if relevant. Give the champions time to air any frustrations, and ask direct questions about renewal, their roadmap, any current or future needs in their team or beyond. This is a good time to find out where you really are with a customer and what organizational challenges you may need to navigate, as well as expand their perception of what we can do. Some good questions to ask:

-"Do you intend to renew with PostHog? If not, why not?" -"What tools are other teams using alongside PostHog data to get the full picture of user behavior?" -"What goals and focus areas are on the table for the next year? How does PostHog fit into those?"

#### New user demo on your own data

Length: 40 minutes with time for questions

Audience: Customer employees who do not yet use PostHog, or are very new.

Purpose: To increase the number of PostHog users at the customer, and expand laterally into teams that may otherwise not use us.

Content: A demo on the customer's data. Tailor this and create insights or show features that'll be a good jumping off point for the audience to go further on their own. Make sure to note who your audience is and check-in with any that don't start logging in within a week or two.

#### Executive summary

Length: 30 minutes

Audience: Senior folks - csuite or VPs

Purpose: To improve the perception of our value to senior people, while discovering our position and estimation at the decision-making layer of the customer.

Content: A punchy, direct delivery of information focused on value that connects PostHog to the key goals and objectives of our customer.

Example: Connect PostHog usage to a metric the exec cares about: "Your team shipped 12 features last quarter. Using PostHog's feature flags and analytics together, the product team can now measure impact within 24 hours instead of waiting for your monthly business review. This means faster iteration and less risk of shipping things that don't move the needle on [their key metric]."

### Manufacturing Informal Access

## Why this matters

The formal sessions are theater - everyone is in meeting mode, and the group is usually to large for real candor. Deeper information comes out over lunch, walking between buildings, or after a drink: you need to create contexts where people forget you're "the vendor" and just talk to you like a colleague.

## Making the invitation

Bad: "I'd love to take you to dinner to discuss PostHog's roadmap" Good: "I'm grabbing dinner at [specific place] after our session - you're welcome to join if you're around" Notice: You're doing it anyway, specific location, low pressure, no stated agenda.

### Common mistakes to avoid

- Don't treat this as a sales pitch - if you're showing up just to close a deal, you're not expanding your relationship and understanding of the customer.
- Don't over-schedule - leaving buffer time for organic conversations is often more valuable than cramming in another session
- Don't show up unprepared on their data - spend time before the visit building something useful in their PostHog instance that you can show them

### Follow-up

Make sure you take advantage of good will and being front of mind with the customer after the visit to followup on any outstanding goals, move any paused commercial conversations forward, or ask for access to any teams or key people you weren't able to reach while in person.

Canonical URL: https://posthog.com/handbook/growth/sales/customer-onsites

GitHub source: contents/handbook/growth/sales/customer-onsites.md

Content hash: `0af23b9be65a2a18`