Bob London debunks the myth that customers will tell you what matters most. Drawing from 2,600 discovery conversations, he shows how "disruptive questions" with a hook-and-twist structure uncover priorities customers never volunteer, even when they're critical to their role.
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Hello again, it's Bob London, customer discovery expert. Welcome to Customer Discovery with Bob and Mike. We are on location today, a beautiful, sunny, breezy location. We're going to continue with exploding, just demolishing the 6 myths of customer intimacy. The things we think we're doing that are helping relationships with customers, but not really. All based on 2,600 customer discovery conversations that I have had the privilege of doing, which have helped me understand why customers engage and contrarily why they don't engage. That's what I'm going to try to help you with, because you cannot get customers to show up and open up if you don't understand what they're really thinking about their level of engagement with you. And if they don't show up and open up, you can't grow the business, you can't keep the business, and you can't get insights that are going to help your company grow. So here we go, customer intimacy myth 3 out of 6. Yeah, if it's important, customers will tell you. Wrong. This goes back to myth number 1, that it's all about your product and that all they think about, all the customer thinks about is your product. Not true. It's a myth. They're not sitting there thinking, oh, let's prepare for our QBR by coming up with new ideas and important things. It's like, you know what, they got a million things going on, a million QBRs with a million different vendors. So you have to ask better questions to get them to open up. And in my experience, asking— I call them disruptive questions because they trigger just a different part of the customer's brain. You ask them a better question that had— once some thought went into it, they respect that and they kind of go, "Hmm, that's a good question," which shows that they're engaging. Sometimes they say, "No one's ever asked me that before." And of course, if no one's ever asked them that before, whatever they're about to share with you, they've never shared before. So ask disruptive questions. You can always hit me up on LinkedIn, by the way, if you have questions about this. Just search Bob London. I'll give you a quick example of a disruptive question. So, let me ask you this. Your job description, you know, what you signed up to do in your, in your role, is probably a couple pages long. You know, single-spaced. It's very dense. A lot of bullet points. A lot of things in it. But a lot of times, there's one thing in that job description that your company is absolutely counting on you to get done. This year? Is there something like that for you? And you can hear the conversational way that I pose the question, and it really works because it has a hook. Every question I teach to teams has a hook and a twist. The hook is the job description. They can relate to it. It's not a vendor-driven, jargony question about our product. It's about them. And the hook gets them to lean in. And then the twist is, is there one thing in there that's like the most important, the essence of your job? Uh, because let's face it, we all have job descriptions. Well, not me. I'm a solopreneur, as they say these days, fancy word. But if you work in a company, uh, chances are there are things on your job description that, eh, if you don't get them done, it's not going to be the end of the world for the company. Um, but no one's going to point those out to you. You have to think about it. And what's interesting about when you ask customers this question, you get to hear their thought process. You get to hear them open up about why this is the one thing, and you get to hear them filter through like, well, it's kind of this or this. Well, actually, the one big thing is this. And only then can you understand how to align the value of your solution with what's most important to them, with what they need to get done, right? So think about it that way. Next, tomorrow, we will reveal myth number 4 out of the 6 myths of customer intimacy. Look forward to sharing that with you and look forward to your feedback. Have a great day.
