Bob London argues that slides distract from real customer conversations. Instead of presenting decks, ask customers about their strategic challenges and how work gets done. Use Christy Falterusso's Customer Objectives Review framework if you need slides at all.
Chapters
What's up everybody? Welcome back to Customer Discovery with Bob and Mike. I'm Bob London, customer discovery expert. I've done more than 2,600 customer discovery conversations. This is Mike. We're continuing our conversation about the 6 myths of customer intimacy. We think we're doing all these things to bring customers closer and to learn more about them, but, but we end up just talking more about ourselves, which pushes them away. Today's customer intimacy myth is number 4 out of the 6 total. Hopefully you've been following along. Hey, you always need a bunch of slides and stats. I don't care if it's PowerPoint or Google Slides or Prezi. It's like a third, actual third entity in the meeting. Hello customer, I'm Bob. I'd like to talk to you today, but I'd also like to introduce my friend Pete the PowerPoint. Just look over here for a while, look at Pete, and then look back at me, or try to listen to me while you're looking at Pete. PowerPoint and slides is something that actually gets in the way of what customers want, which is something called authentic curiosity. And the more customers I talk to and the more teams I work with— I train teams to do what I call radically authentic discovery— the more I do that, the more I see this, that customers love when we ask about them, not just what they think of our product. There's a famous movie quote, "That's enough about me, let's talk about you. What do you think of me?" What I'm talking about is asking about What's going on in the highest levels of their company? How are broader trends affecting their company? How are the company's priorities and challenges evolving? And how are those evolutions of priorities and challenges at the highest levels of the company affecting their job? What is expected of them? We want to help them get their jobs done better. So I want to make a point because people say, oh, well, we need slides because we have to deliver information. Of course. So there's a framework for that. My friend Christy Falterusso published this epic, epic session on how to do a customer objectives review. What I'm telling you is I'm hearing this from a lot of people. My good friend Jeff Kushmarik mentioned this recently. I've heard people talking about Christy's COR approach as being very useful. I've heard it on online discussions. I've seen it on Gain, Grow, Retain. So here's the QR code and the link to this, again, epic web session she did. I suggest you check it out because when you do slides, and you will need slides, this is how you do it. That's all for today. Stay tuned for tomorrow for Customer Intimacy Myth #5 out of 6. Thanks for listening.
