Bob London’s Post

Transcript

Hey there, it's Bob London, customer discovery and listening expert, authority, thought leader, geek speaker, author, trainer. I've gotten so immersed in this idea of listen first, grow faster and this idea of, of, of making conversations about them, the customer or prospect that I wanted to share with you what I my theories. About why this works? Radically authentic discovery? My methodology? Why does it work? And in doing some research, I do think it's it rings true in light of some things that I've read that are actual scientific studies that all we're doing as account managers, customer success, sales, we are modeling the behavior that we want to see from our customers and prospects. So as you see on the list here, if you want them to be authentic with you, vulnerable, curious, transparent, candid. You have to go first. We have to go first. We have to set the tone with our behavior, our questions, our curiosity, our listening techniques in order to get them to, to build trust with us. Basically, that's what this is about. So I'm going to go through these quickly. If you want customers and prospects to be more authentic, you're basically saying I want to talk with you today, not at you. I don't want to shove 20 slides down your throat. I don't want to talk for 10 minutes without taking a breath. I want to make it into an actual. Conversation where you feel like you have time to express what's important to you. Vulnerability. Vulnerability is the idea that, hey, I might not have all the answers today, but I know I can get them. And I'm going to be straight up with you about when I think I can get those answers to the extent that they're important to getting to the next phase of our relationship. Uh, curiosity, I want to learn from you, customer or prospect. What that signals is what I've learned is when you ask customers about their companies priorities and challenges. And their job priorities and challenges, independent of whatever solution you represent. They are, they are so much more likely to open up and share with you and they become in essence, the teacher. They tell you about stuff that they didn't think you wanted to know about. You use that information to help position the value of your product, service, solution. But it all starts with being curious. You become the student because they become the teacher. You don't have to have answers to all the questions. You don't have to have a, a snappy sort of qualifying question to go next and and leave them feeling like, wait a minute, was that person actually listening to me? Transparency, we all want this. We all want transparency from other people. And you're basically saying I'm an open book. You can ask me anything. There's nothing off the table. And I'm going to signal with my the questions that I ask that are going to be bold, transparent questions that ask about your world that these are incredibly important things to customers to building transparency in both directions. And then finally, candor be straight. Being straight, that's another thing about the questions inside of the radically authentic discovery methodology is that the questions are straightforward in the sense that they go right to the customers or prospects brain. They don't sound like vendor questions. They like the question that starts many of my discovery conversations. Hey, if I could sneak into your next board meeting or senior leadership meeting or even on all hands meeting, what's the big theme? What is the big priority or challenge that the company is? Dealing with or facing or conquering right now helps you understand obviously where the budget and resources are flowing, gives you an opportunity to say, oh, that's something our solution directly helps with. Or if you ask a second level question, great, what are you guys doing about that big priority or challenge? That's a board level issue. Then you can tie the value of your solution to that. So again, the bottom line here is if you want customers to be authentic, vulnerable, curious, transparent and candor, go first, they're not going to do it unless they see that you're paving the way and. Modeling those behaviors. Thanks again. Visit boblondon.co for tons of insights about this kind of stuff.