Beyond Words: The Art of Unveiling Customer Intent Ft. Bob London and Rijuta Bhagwat | Thinkly Talks

Someone on the leadership team, my peer, said, you know, you interrupt all the time. Right. I probably argued. You know, every time we open our mouths, what we say is only as relevant as what we've already learned from the other person or learned from somewhere else. I was the guy, the marketing guy, who wasn't just saying, oh, you should spend money on this and this and do this. And it was like, let's start by understanding customers, which sounds silly because that's the most important thing in business. Human element is never going to go away. I don't care how much data there is.

Good morning. Welcome, Bob.

Hello there.

It is really, really nice to see you again. It's been a few days, it's been a minute, like I said earlier, but thank you for joining me on my community the Customer Thrives Zone. I truly appreciate it and honestly, it gives me a chance to catch up with you.

Yeah, well, thanks for having me. It's really my pleasure. And not only do I feel strongly about the topics that we're going to talk about, so I do like talking about it, but I also want to support you and whatever you're doing. And it's my pleasure and I'm excited for you.

You have always been supportive and so thank you for that as well.

It's my pleasure.

Let's dive straight into the topic today. I would like to introduce you, but our topic for today is beyond words. So going beyond words and truly using listening as the art to unveil true customer intent. And Bob London, my guest today is a customer discovery and listening expert. You teach companies how to have more strategic, more revealing customer conversations and all of those drive revenue at the bottom line is driving the engagement, driving insights, driving the revenue. But more about you, Bob. You have conducted 2700 over 2700 customer discovery conversations. You've developed a series of bold, disruptive and deep listening techniques from these conversations. And you have trademarked this methodology as the radically authentic discovery of or the RAD method. And I have firsthand experience of having used your RAD methodology with myself, my team, and the results are truly phenomenal. In addition to that, you were named twice as the top 25 customer success influencer by Success Coaching. And you are an entrepreneur in residence at the University of Maryland's Dingman center for Entrepreneurship. And my favorite is that you are a board member of Mindshare Mindshare, being one of the country's leading organizations for tech CEOs and founders, and an active member also of Gain Grow Retain, which is a leading customer success community and your writings and your work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Forbes, Miami Herald, USA Today. I mean, I could go on, Bob, what am I missing? Is there anything?

No. I'm embarrassed. I always have two reactions. First of all, to hear my name mentioned as an influencer is funny because I think of how my wife and kids would react that I'm not as influential at home and I'm not influential at all, actually. The other thing is that that award just came out again, and I was privileged to be named a top 25, I guess they're calling it Thought Leader for a third time. So those are my updates. But I'm. I'm humbled by. By all of that. And most of it is just from trying to help people get better at what they do by listening and asking better questions. So it's really a tribute to how important that is.

Absolutely. And I'm honored, honestly, to know somebody of your structure and everything you've accomplished. So anything about your journey from where you started to radically authentic discovery and developing the techniques, anything sticks out that you'd like to share with our audience?

Well, I think that there are a few things. One is there. There's some painful lessons. I remember when I. So the first big part of my career was in the corporate world, and I worked my way up to various, you know, leadership positions where I was. I was moving in a direction that I thought I was supposed to go in. Whether it was right for me, I didn't really think about. And I had some issues. And one thing, there are two things that stand out. One is when someone on the leadership team, my peer, said, you know, you interrupt all the time. Right. And this was years ago. And I. Not only did I react poorly to what he said, I probably argued, which showed that I wasn't listening. But I didn't think about it afterwards, so it didn't really resonate with me, even though he was probably correct. And so to go from being an interrupter to someone who's tried to get better at understanding other people first before I speak, which, of course, you know, every time we open our mouths is only. What we say is only as relevant as what we've already learned from the other person or learned from somewhere else, especially in. In business. So. But the other, the other quick story is, so I was. I entered the. The world of consulting as a. I had a little boutique consulting practice. I was a fractional chief marketing officer because my background was marketing. And one day I was meeting with a founder, CEO, and we were, I was asking about his business. Who's your customer? Who, who buys from you? What problem are you solving? Why don't, how come they don't buy sometimes? Why do they leave or stay after a year? And he, to his credit, realized as he was answering that he didn't really know the answers, but he was, he's making it up. And I said, why don't I do first, before we start talking about marketing, I will do a customer listening tour of your customers and I will find out in one on one conversations what's important to them in their business, what outcomes are they trying to accomplish as a business, and how does that then lead to the service or product that you're offering to my client? And that was the beginning of, that was 28, basically 2800 discovery conversations ago. And that's when I discovered that customers don't really, they aren't obsessed about your product or your service. They're obsessed with their own challenges and priorities as a business. Now, I already knew that, but what I didn't know was how much the customers would open up about their, their fears and aspirations as business owners, as, you know, users of a product, et cetera. So when I started that first listening tour, everything changed. The work that I did for my clients was better. I mean, I, it was more relevant because it was tied to what was really going on in the heads of the customers. And so it helped my clients, it helped me go, you know, I was adding more value because it was also a huge differentiator for me. I was the guy, the marketing guy who wasn't just saying, oh, you should spend money on this and this and do this and tweet this and you know, post that article on ebook. It was like, let's start by understanding customers, which sounds silly because that's the most important thing in business is understanding what's important to customers. So I became the chief listening officer is how I described it. And so that's, those were two big parts of the journey. So there was one signal about being an interrupter that I didn't really pay attention to years ago. And then there was another signal of realizing that my clients would be more successful if I could help them understand their customers more deeply. And that involved listening, of course, and asking better questions. So I hope that makes sense.

That, that absolutely makes sense. And something you said, you'd think it was silly, but it's not. There's so much talking that happens and less listening. And even though it is common sense and it should seem evident it's not really something that is second nature to most of us. So how does. What is Radically Authentic Discovery? I think you've said so often that even when you're listening, you're not truly listening. So talk to us a little bit about that. And there are some quotes that I've heard in some of your talks which if you don't bring them up, I will bring them up later.

Oh, good.

But tell us about radically authentic discovery.

Yes, Radically Authentic Discovery. So it's basically a framework with tools that includes roughly 25 tools, tips, questions that I teach and what they basically are a series of, I call them either disruptive or truth seeking questions that really are meant to get inside the customer's head and wake up a different part of the customer's brain, which is to say that these questions don't sound like normal vendor questions, like what keeps you up at night? Which everyone falls asleep when they hear that question. So I, I can. And I'm happy to share some of those questions today with your audience, with you and your audience. I know you know some of them.

Awesome. Awesome.

So there's, there are some questions that really get customers to open up because we can't listen better if the other person isn't talking more so if we're just talking, talking, talking, there's no time to listen. We didn't leave room for them to talk and there's no listening. So get them to open up. Get customers to open up by asking better questions. And then once they start talking, how do we basically keep quiet? In other words, a lot of listening starts with just don't, don't open your mouth again until they're really finished.

Yeah.

Try to stay quiet. I have some tips. Like one of them is as soon as you ask a really good question, like a question from my list, what radically authentic discovery says is hit your own mute button. And that will keep you from jumping in too soon. And it will help you. It's like a self editing tool so that you can think about, like, was I, was that really the right thing for me to say right now or should I wait because the customer seems like they're on a roll? And that's another thing is let customers, let the, let them if they, you know, go with the flow that the customer is setting? And so if so there's again about 25 of these tips, techniques and questions. You put them all together and it's called Radically Authentic Discovery. And it's a program that I teach and with Big, it's what we worked on together with your previous company. And it really works because teams find out that they're a little afraid, maybe in the beginning or intimidated to ask these different questions, but they, then they ask the question because they, they need to and they find out, wow, the customer really liked that question. So I was scared to ask it. But the customer really engaged and they opened up and I learned things about them that I never knew before about what they're trying to achieve or I found a hidden risk that I didn't know or I found a revenue opportunity that I wasn't aware of. So all kinds of good things happen when you get the customer to open up.

Can you share? You, you mentioned you had these tips and tricks, so I've heard them like you said. But please could share a couple with our audience.

Yes. So the first thing I would say is treat, don't, don't look at the other person as, as your customer. That is not how you should be defining them. They are a human being, so you have to change your view. They are a human being. They're trying to get a job done. Well, your product or service may be helping them in some way, but it is not their whole job. Then why do they even have that job? Well, their company expects certain outcomes and contributions to company level priorities and challenges. So we're basically imagine an inverted triangle or pyramid where at the top you're asking big wide questions about their company and then radically authentic discovery teaches you how to start there. Get the customer to open up and follow the path by asking then more detailed questions about their job and then ultimately ask questions about your product or service. So that's the open your aperture. It's called the size of a lens opening. The question that I start with and that I teach people to start with goes something like this. So I'm going to ask, I'm going to start with a 30,000 foot question. Mr. Ms. Customer. If I could somehow sneak into your next senior executive leadership meeting at your company or even your board meeting, what would I hear as the big priority or challenge that they're discussing for the next year so? So six to 12 months. And what's, what happens when you ask that? First of all, the customer is disarmed by the fact that you've asked a question that no one's asked them before. And it's a question that signals that you're interested in their truth, their world. So that means they're more likely to engage, but also to answer your other questions as candidly as they can. And it Also says that you're authentically curious about their company's success, not just selling more of your product. The other thing it does is it can start to give you an insight that you can then start to connect the dots with what the value is that you think you're delivering with your product or service or that you want to deliver. So if they say, well, we're just really focused on growth, okay, thanks, thanks for telling me that. Because you always want to reward their behavior and thank them and appreciate their, their candor and their, their, their engagement. So is there a big initiative around growth or is there a certain growth strategy like a part of the market that you think is going to grow? And then they start to see that, they realize that, oh the, you know, you didn't shift the conversation back to your agenda very quickly. You stayed with what they were saying. And by doing that though, the insights, you can actually connect to something that your product or service is doing really well and start to look at the value through their eyes, but also through the company's eyes. And so if, you know, we've talked about cybersecurity and cyber threats, so you know, if the board is asking about, is focused on cybersecurity, which many boards are these days, then it's about risk and cost savings and reputational protection and things like that. But how do you trace it down to like, okay, now your job is what related to that and what's the hardest. There's another question. Just simply ask what's the hardest part of your job? Whether it has to do with my product or not or service, I want to know because it could be something that we can help with in the future. But anyway, so you're basically drawing them out. You're basically drawing them out by asking about them. And it's just like everything else in life, when people are curious about you, it feels good. When they talk about themselves. It can be a little bit of.

A turn off, right? And it, it truly transcends that conversation then, right? It takes it from the tactical. Let's just get through the five motions that are, that are important for me today versus let's make this about you and tell me what can I do to make your life easier or can I even do anything to make your life easier? So understanding that is probably the first step. So you mentioned curiosity, right? Curiosity is a big word that is coming up more and more in a lot of conversations that I'm having or even listening into empathy, these words come up more and more. The challenge also today's economy. We are every, every in a. In the B2B world everybody is looking at cost savings today. And so more and more of your resources operationally are moving to probably early in career. Resources that are being coached to develop the talents or the skills of curiosity. True curiosity, true empathy. The expectation is that you have to demonstrate all these soft skills. But, but are, but the people are not truly born or they don't have those skills yet and you still are required. In the CS world we are still debating whether we should be revenue generating. Should we be focused on revgen motions, should we just be true relationship experts? What exactly should be the nature of the role and then how can we tie this to the bottom line to stay relevant as a department within our own organizations. So my question is CS is expected to demonstrate all these soft skills. CS is expected to have an impact on expansion and growth. It needs a lot of toughness along with the same soft skills. And then are we being fair then to the early in career professionals by having these diametrically opposite skill set?

Well, you know, I have a certain view on this which is that what's interesting about this is if you draw a Venn diagram of sales skills and customer success attributes of people, curiosity is something that I think customer success has a lot of. Yes, they're curious, they're empathetic, they tend to be very generous and helpful. Sales though the best salespeople, it's not because they're great talkers, it's because they're curious and they ask better questions. And so I would say, and I've talked a lot about this, that in customer success you can either try and force them, if you will to have to become salespeople and have closing skills and you know, qualification skills and you know, all the hardcore negotiation, commercial responsibilities and, and of course then you risk the turnoff that well, that's why I took this customer success job is I don't want to be in that role. The other way to look at it, which is my preference is take the skills they already have in customer success, being good listeners, being curious, being generous, being helpful and accelerate those skills, make them more curious by giving them better questions and listening techniques. If you look at Research Gong, for example, which is a software platform that helps analyze recorded customer conversations, sales conversations. Their research shows that the top performing salespeople talk less than half the time in calls and the bottom performing sales folks talk 2/3 of the time. And so if you apply that to CS and say well in CS you show up with 30 slides, a customer meeting. The implication is you're going to be talking to them or at them and going through all these slides. Where is the part where you get to listen and learn? And so I think that shift is something that top salespeople have figured out is the more I learn, the more relevant I can be when I open my mouth. And so I'm not sure I'm directly answering your question other than to say I think there's a lot of room for so the big I mentioned before sort of the intimidation factor of asking some of these questions. Everyone in business is trained only to ask questions that they know the answer to. So if you ask a customer or prospect a question, it's because you want to move them in a certain direction. Now that's accepted practice. It's fine. But we have to get more comfortable asking questions that we don't know the answer to. And that's not easy. And it came up on a coaching call I was doing yesterday with a team of company in Calgary, Canada, Alberta, Canada. And a lot of the discussion was I was sweating before I asked the customer these questions. But once I asked them I realized all it is is learning. I'm just becoming a student, which is something I talk about a lot. And so it's just really important for to focus on I I call it help customer success teams be more opportunity awareness. Whether they actually close the deal or hammer home the value proposition. It all starts with uncovering the need. And that's because customer success tends to have this trusted relationship with customers where customers will open up. Take advantage of that by asking more detailed questions and you will uncover things that lead to opportunities but also risks when you hear these new things. But you have to ask and I don't want to talk too much at one time. When you're ready, I will give you another question that is an example of asking a question you don't know the answer to. But when you're ready, I'll do that.

Maybe this is a good time for that because I do have a question from our audience. Balaji asks how do you use rad approach with existing customers, clients that you currently are working with or is it more effective with new clients?

So it's effective with both. And when I hear new clients, does that mean newly signed that they just bought? I'm not sure but we don't need to clarify that now because I'm going to answer it anyway.

Okay.

Brad works every place in the buying journey and the customer life cycle there are different because there are different Questions? It does work particularly well with existing customers because all you have to do is basically say to the existing customer, I know we talk a lot about the day to day issues and challenges and we talk about features and your product usage. But what we would love to do is have a little bit of a step back conversation. And when you do that with a customer, again, you're signaling to them that you are really curious about their success, about their world and their company. And so it works really well there. If it's a new. So if I take it literally, does it work with a new client? Absolutely. Because what's interesting is customers buy a product or service and they've basically been told everything you need we can do. And hopefully that's true. But that conversation isn't usually very in depth before the customer is onboarded, let's say, or implemented. So the onboarding and the implementation is a great opportunity to say, you know, we found that it really helps to have a little bit of a step back conversation because we want to understand your expectations going into this and also why, why is this important to your company? So one thing that I, I was. Another one of the questions is let's say your CFO was asked about our product or service. What would this, why would the CFO say our product is important to your business? Or would they say I don't know or it's not important so you have to. That's not enough. That's not a very comfortable thing to hear the answer. But what you're again telling, you're breaking down that usual wall that like we don't want to ask about, you know, what's going on in the business because we might hear something we don't like or we can't address. That's what builds relationships. So I'm hoping I, I'm not sure I answered the question completely, but I tried to take it in a direction that I thought would be, would be useful.

I think what you said is it is effective with existing customers and 100% with newer customers too, simply because they, they would love to share more of why they actually purchased your product, why you became a vend them. And then with existing customers, it gives them a chance to share what is their current pain point and how you can help either alleviate it or if you can't, you're just listening anyway and being empathetic and connected with, with the customer.

If I may, I want to give two data points from my work that might help the audience understand this. So first of all, I use an Email template to invite my clients customers to speak or my client sends it to them. So I do customer listening tours and they use this template says, hey, we're taking a step back. We're trying to get to be as great as we can at understanding our market. And we've hired this consultant, Bob London, and we would love you to spend a little time with him. It's not about us, it's about you, customer. And the conversion rate on that email is 70% or more, meaning that 70% of the customers who get that schedule time with me. And what does that say? It says that customers are interested in being asked about their business. It says that they want to help because they want the product or service to be as great as it can be. And it says that we shouldn't be afraid of talking to the customer about them and to get the truth. The other statistic is that when I, over time I started looking at, boy, these customers are talking most of the call. I'm not sure if that's good. When I do discovery or I teach teams to do it, the customer talks 75% of the time or more. They're not talking because they feel like it. It's because you asked about them. And so that's an important proof point to say, you know, once in a while you might have a customer who's not as loquacious. They don't. Maybe they give shorter answers, but. And I had a call like that recently, but ended up, you know, you'd ask a question and the customer would say, or one of the questions is, what's the one thing your team needs to get better at this year? And the answer was, you know, it was a really long pause. I didn't say anything. I'm not sure. I can't really think of anything. And I said, I just said, okay. And then I didn't say anything else. And he said, well, I guess there is one big thing. And then he went on for two minutes talking about the one thing they need to get better at. So there's a lot to be said if you combine the questions with the listening techniques, which is like the, the mute button is very helpful in that regard.

As I mentioned before, I read that when you actually posted about it on LinkedIn. And I said, what a novel idea. You know, it takes out all those filler words. It takes out any other things that might come across as interruptions, even they are unintentional. But what a brilliant idea just to hit the mute button. I have another question from the audience do you think, Chirag asks, do you think businesses are too focused on data and miss out on the human side of customer conversations?

I don't think that they're too focused on data. I think that, that the human side needs to be elevated to become equal. And I always tell this story like at, you know, one of the most successful companies of the world the last 20 years, Amazon.com that they, they came up with the idea. Someone had the idea. Amazon prime, which is for anybody who doesn't know, it's basically an annual fee of, I don't know how much it is now. It keeps going up, let's just say a hundred dollars. And for that hundred dollars you get free delivery and then you get free prime video, a subscription to video, and probably some other things. But the point is that the people who had the idea said, we have all this data and this and that. And Jeff Bezos, who was very famous for being very customer focused, in fact, he had an empty chair at every meeting he was in and said, that's the customer. So what would they say about this? That at the end of it, there were people who said, Amazon prime is a great idea and here's data. And there were other people who said it's a terrible idea and here's data about that. A human being still had to make the decision. Right. And so I would say that the human element is never going to go away. I don't care how much data there is. I think even with gong, where people are recording their conversations, a lot of it is for coaching purposes. So the sales manager can say, oh, I listened to your call and I have some feedback for how you handled this customer. That's awesome. But what needs to happen more is to look at all that data and be more curious about what happened in the last 50 customer calls and as humans, to be able to query that and understand it and be curious about it. So there's an example where human, human conversation in the. For that is data, right? And then. But how are we studying it and analyzing it to get better at what we do? So there's all kinds of opportunities. And I never thought I would be involved with AI or generative AI, but I am having a great time using tool, different generative AI tools to study what people are saying. Because there are things that we miss because we have biases, there are things that we are hearing and we, we, we only, you know, we have happy ears. We only want to hear the good things. Sometimes generative AI is completely emotionless. So it's not always right. But it is emotionless. So it hears, generally speaking, very accurately and it interprets and can even synthesize, in my experience, very accurately in the way that makes it much easier for me or someone in Customer success to say, oh, I'm reading the, the AI summary of our call and I didn't really hear that as clearly, and I'm going to go back to the transcript or the video and listen again. And it's, it's just an incredibly important thing to start incorporating in workflows now from a number of perspectives, you actually.

Have answered my next question. It was about AI and it was about using AI to scale and whether it will have an impact on our ability to demonstrate empathy and curiosity and authenticity. And I think you articulated a little bit of that in your answers.

Well, I think it's, I think it requires, I think the authenticity and curiosity and empathy is what gets people to open up. Once they open up, then you have rich data. And, and I, I would say that it's like the old garbage in, garbage out. If you, that people used to talk about. I would say that it's cliche in, useless out. If you ask boring questions, cliche questions, what you get out of it is not going to be that useful to your business. And I think that speaks to what I think is the biggest opportunity for customer success teams to become indispensable internally is, yes, generate revenue 100%. That's. Yeah, that's the churn, control, churn, avoid, surprise, churn, generate new revenue opportunities. But the other thing that I don't hear enough is becoming what I call the ear of the vendor. So in other words, everybody talks about the voice of the customer. We listen to the customer. But who in the company is really speaking to customers in an open way to get the customer to talk about what's important to them? It's customer success. And if Customer success can manage to take what they're hearing and synthesize it in a way that the other departments in the company can digest and learn from. We didn't know that. We thought our ideal customer profile was X. But what I'm hearing from this analysis that Customer Success did is I'm hearing that our value proposition is, you know, when we sell, we sell based on this. But what I'm hearing is after a year, customers say, no, that's not, that's not the value prop, it's this other thing. Or use cases and, you know, messaging for the, you know, marketing messaging. All these things can be elevated and refined based on the voice of the customer. But only customer success is in a position to extract, listen, and intentionally synthesize all of what they're hearing from the customer, which is a proxy for the marketplace in general, and bring it to the company. Bring it. I was at Churn0's event recently, their big, excellent annual event. And their guest speaker, who's a serial entrepreneur CEO, said board members love to hear customer insights, but we're not hearing enough of them, you know, and so it's too much. Here's what we did, here's what we think, here's what we're doing next quarter. Here's how we did last quarter. Not enough insight into why, what's happening out there. So I feel very strongly about this earth becoming the ear of the vendor. And maybe there's a better expression for that than that, but I think it's. There is nobody listening to the voice of the customer. That I can tell.

For the longest time, I used to use the phrases inside out versus outside in.

Yes.

I think that outside in is just lost many times. And because. And there may be a reason. There is a really nice question. Once again, thank you for all the questions that are coming in. So Zed asks, how do we deal with the tension between meeting customer expectations and driving innovation that customers might not see coming? So how do we have that balancing act?

So that's a great question. As I understand it, that customers are okay with being led and what I mean by that, in my experience, again, many customer conversations. Customers. When you. When you are constantly learning about customers and understanding the problems and challenges and priorities that they have, then you can answer for yourself the question of what can we do to add value? If you ask them, what do you need from us? It's not their job. So if you can keep learning. And I think great companies are really good at this learning at. Remember I talked about the inverted triangle or pyramid. Learning about the customer at this level, it tells you what is next, what's coming for them. And then you have this great insight that you can use to create a roadmap to become innovative. And then customers get less focused, in my experience, on the two or three smaller things that didn't happen. So you're. It's not a manipulation. It's just really. It's like anything else. They'll remember the great things you did.

Yeah.

In comparison to the details that they had questions about. And I. And I think that also speaks to your audience if you're. If you're constantly looking at your customer and listening to their users. You get bogged down. If you lift your head up and say we want to understand again, like from the CFO's perspective, why is this tool, this platform, important to the business? Then you start to hear more, richer insights because the per. The users may change, the decision makers may change. They leave, they get promoted. That's why the best companies in the world become sticky at the company level, not just the user level. So spend. I would again spend more time asking bigger picture questions of people higher up in the. In the food chain, if you will. And you will find that that that will help solve a lot of these challenges. This tension that was referenced in the.

Question and the roadmaps then do align for the vendor and for the customer.

When you take yes, but I. It's not. I want to now that you say that there's no magic solution where every customer will agree with the roadmap and every. You know, it doesn't. That's the point is if you're leading the conversation. Yeah. Customers appreciate that even if they don't get everything they want. And that is something I hear a lot is when you're constantly reactive. When you're constantly reactive, that's not good. If you lead the. It's not customer's job to know what you should build next. It's your job to know that based on what's happening in their boardroom or their senior leadership meeting. If you can understand that, then you learn what to build.

Yeah. Awesome. I want to do a quick time check. We are at eight minutes past ten, so we'll wrap this up pretty quickly. But I do have a couple of things to ask you even before. Are there any horror stories in your 2700 customer con? Anything that sticks out that you use to show the importance of listening to other. To teams that you talk to?

Yeah, I mean, I don't know about horror stories. That's a very vivid expression. I think that what I hear a lot are anecdotes about we assumed something that turned out not to be true and we're glad we learned the truth. This is from my clients that I'm training. I was in New York with a customer success team that was very engaged. Well, my job is to get them engaged. But we were talking about all this and I was giving them all these questions and tools and I got a text. So then I was on the train back to my. My home in Washington D.C. and I got a text from the team leader. He said it went well. But more importantly, we had a call with a Customer after your session.

Yeah.

And we asked this question. And I'll tell you the question, because I think it's important for people to start using these. The question was, so if you got a call from one of our competitors tomorrow, how would you react on A scale of 1 to 5? A 1 is you'd probably ignore, delete the message. A 5 is you'd listen. You'd pretty quickly get back to that competitor and ask, you know, what, What. What do you do? What does it cost? So he said, we asked that question, and we were nervous about asking it because we didn't know the answer, but the customer said five. And that helped us understand that this account is at risk. And we had no idea. We had no idea. We thought they were incredibly happy. They're a reference account, but for whatever reasons, it's not important for this conversation. They were shocked, but they said, so now at least we have a chance to save the customer. Other than just, we would have in without these tools. We would have just found out after the fact, they've decided to move on. And that was very compelling for that team and for me. And I've got, at this point, dozens and maybe even hundreds of those anecdotes that add up to the fact that you don't know what you're going to learn. And that's exactly why you have to ask the questions. And then again, just listen. Go on mute. Hear what they had to say. Because if you. If you start debating them and saying, well, we're doing a good job, you know, that's not listening. That's making the comfortable customer feel like they should shut up. And that's the opposite of what we want.

Fantastic. As you, as you. You speak a lot at events. You speak to executives a lot as well. What is their general feedback? What is everybody's general feedback about radically authentic discovery?

You know, I. I think what people really appreciate is what I hear is, oh, Bob came, and he didn't just talk about principles or platitudes or cliches. He gave us the actual tools to do this. And he told us why it's important. And he addressed some of the speed bumps or concerns we had without us. In other words, when I started doing this, I realized these people are uncomfortable thinking about asking these questions. So then I started writing down who's uncomfortable? Like, I would ask the question, who's on. Who thinks they wouldn't ask this question? People raise their hand, and it gives me a chance to address it. The other thing is when I, by and large, When I do training, I actually pre record a conversation with my clients, one of my clients customers. And that has been a game changer because then the audience of, let's say, executives or customer success folks, they're hearing the customer's voice in a way they've never heard it before. They're hearing insights, they're hearing the customer go on and on in answer to a really good question. They're hearing that the customer doesn't have any issues with these questions. They're hearing that the customer is appreciative of the conversation because they don't. Once in a while the customer says thank you. And I said, why are you thanking me? You just volunteered to spend 45 minutes talking and recording. And they'll say, because I don't think we've ever had a conversation with a vendor where we've gotten to focus on what's important to us. And so that's another piece of feedback I get, is that people are so riveted when they're hearing a recording of their own customer talking about things they've never talked about before, only simply because we asked the right question in the right way. So those, those, those are the things I hear. And of course, the return on investment, it's, that's the most important thing. And when you start at, wow, we saved one customer, or we identified an opportunity once because we found out about an acquisition that we didn't know. But you know, those kinds of things add up and it doesn't take more than one story per customer to pay back the cost of the training. So I'm always excited about that.

Absolutely. And that I will admit that was a leading question because I like I'd experience that. And I really appreciate you sharing those. Andrew has shared some feedback here. He appreciates this conversation. So great conversation. And Bob, you've used some really nice examples. That's somebody that is giving you live feedback here as well.

Oh, thank you. Really appreciate it.

One takeaway for our audience today.

The takeaway is you will never learn something while your lips are moving. Now, I'm going to say this too. In the US Here we have today the results of an election. Now, I'm not going to get into the politics of it, but what I will say is that if people could just do 1% better job every day of understanding someone else's perspective, especially if they disagree, the world would be a better place. It would take a while. So a lot of people, it's very top of mind today, they disagree with this or that or they're upset or whatever and other people are happy. I. I've spent the last year trying to understand both sides, and it's put me in a place of. Because I study listening. But it's not just listening. It's making other people feel understood and heard. That's what makes relationships. So I would say trying to get one. Everyone should try to get 1% better at just not just listening, but understanding the other person and their perspective without arguing, without disputing, without defending, and certainly without attacking. Let's try to get 1% better every month. And then at the end of the year, we'll be 12% better and be very happy. Everyone will be better. We'll all be friends.

Well, that's at least an aspirational no.

It is aspirational, but it is. It is something that's diminished in our society. People can talk at each other, especially on social media, without having to deal with the realities of people's feelings. And it's not good.

That's because it's uncomfortable.

It is uncomfortable. And I'm sorry that I didn't land on a radically authentic discovery tactic, but with my answer. But I think it's the most important thing right now.

I think that answer is pretty poignant. And I said at the beginning of our conversation that there were a couple quotes that I remember from your posts or conversations that I listened to in the past few months. And you actually hit that one. One was listening has become ephemeral, if I'm pronouncing it correct. And half the world, half. Half of us are not really listening to the other half. And those were the two things that stuck with me. And it is truly. And can you just speak to the ephemeral?

Yeah. I mean, what I realized was it's so ephemeral is the word that describes, like Snapchat. You post it and then it goes away.

Yeah.

After a while, I don't use it. So that's my understanding. So ephemeral is something that dissipates and goes away very quickly. When someone says something, it. If I'm not listening and I focus on my own reaction immediately, what they said just goes. It just evaporates completely. And that's disrespectful. And it doesn't help me learn and it doesn't advance the cause of anything. Now, if they're shouting at me, that's different. But if so they listen, they say something, it goes away right away because I don't let it in and I don't follow up on it. What do you mean by that? I guarantee you in this country or anywhere, if you go back to the Venn diagram and say, what do we agree on and what do we disagree on? There'd be so much more that we agree on that's really important than we realize. And yet through various, for various reasons, which I'm not, I'm not a. I'm not a behavioral scientist or a social scientist, but, you know, social media is not helping because you can say whatever you want and, and the people around you will agree with you in your bubble and you don't. It's not how it used to be. It's not how it used to be. People had to work it out and work it out together. So listening helps with that.

Well, towards. Towards a better world, towards a better tomorrow. And hopefully we do right by the next generation exactly as we take things forward. So, Bob, it has been an absolute pleasure. I always enjoy our conversations and I am so glad that my audience got to listen to you a little bit and I look forward to continuing this discussion.

Well, thank you, Rajita. And it's a privilege for me to be able to speak to an audience like this and to you because I consider you one of the smartest people I've met in the last several years and very in tune. And I really appreciate the audience questions because they were clever and smart and got me to think and that's the mark of a great audience. So thank you very much. And it's a privilege.

Yes, you have preempted me. I did want to thank our audience as well. And then also, most importantly, the Thinkly team, they do a phenomenal job. They are a lean team and they do a phenomenal job of supporting me and supporting the communities. So thank you.

That's awesome.

All right, have a fantastic rest of your evening or rest of your day and I will see you on the next conversation. Thank you, Bob.

Thank you. Thank you, everyone.