Bill Gallagher walks through Fred Reichheld's four customer-probing questions to diagnose why your sales are dropping. Ask customers directly: would they recommend you, what's changed, what could you do better, and what are they hearing from competitors.
Hey there. Is your business off overall or in some area? Have you gone a little flat in, like total sales or in some particular category product group or with a particular customer? If your numbers are down and somewhere and you don't know why, I've got something for you. Hi there, Bill. I'm Bill Gallagher, Scaling coach and host of the Scaling Up Business podcast. We've got loads of tips and tools and conversations with gurus and experts and getting real conversations with CEOs about growing their company. All that and more that you can download for free and listen to at any time@scalingcoach.com on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you get your audio, video content. So just go there and look for Scaling up and you'll find us. Or go to scalingcoach.com and you'll find us there. So here's the deal. So I'm working with this company and they're chugging right along. Things are working really great and they've been going well for a while. And then all of a sudden the orders went soft and they didn't know why that business had slowed. And so they weren't sure. And so I brought to them this thing called 4Q Conversations. Now, 4Q Conversations is a set of four questions designed for deep customer conversations that probe and. And get in a little bit deeper with our core customers and get beyond the basics of the weather and sports and that kind of thing. 4Q conversations were developed by Fred Reicheld and the team at Bain. He's also the guy behind the Net promoter system. So really great, really well thought out. And there are some questions that we don't always ask. Here are the four cues. Right. The first question is, how are you doing? I'm interested in asking the listener, my customer, my business partner, whoever is, how they're doing in their world, in their business and their job. I want to explore how you are doing. And this is a kind of common question. Sometimes it's just used as a throwaway. That's the first thing. The second question is, how are things in your world? If you are a small business operating in a business district, I might be curious about your business neighborhood or your region or that kind of thing. I might want to know about your trade industry or your group. I might want to know about some particular sector, region, that kind of thing. But I really want to know now, beyond you. The first question, your world, kind of the world that you live in as a business. I want to understand that one. The third question is, do you hear from any of our competitors. This is one we often don't ask, but is really, really useful to get to know. And we don't ask it for lots of reasons, mostly because we don't have a prompt and we're not remembering to do it, but sometimes because we're afraid what we might hear or that they might not be willing to tell us. But if you really ask openly, with curiosity, and with some room for them to even decline if they don't want to, hey, do you hear from any of our competitors? What are you hearing? They may tell you. You may find out that they're pitching them nonstop, that they've started to give away some business. They've got some special new product or service that you weren't aware about. So asking what they're hearing from your competitors, what's going on there, is a really useful, easy thing to do if you'll introduce it that way. The last question is how are we doing for you? But now with a foundation of really bringing curiosity to how they're doing, how their industry or world is doing, what they hear from our competitors. Now to finally go to how are we doing for you, you're likely to hear more and deeper things about where you're performing and and where you're not performing in the gaps that you're leaving. What are the opportunities? These 4Q questions are really designed to go deep with customers. And you could have all of your senior leadership meet with your top customers on a regular basis and even bring along the sales and service teams to go deep on four cues that really help you to get under their skin. So these are exploratory questions. I hope they're helpful for you. Remember, we've got loads of tips, ideas, tools, things like this@scalingcoach.com or look for the Scaling Up Business podcast on YouTube, iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, wherever you get your audio video content. Thanks again. Bill Gallagher, scaling coach.com we'll talk to you next time.
