Bob London, a B2B customer discovery expert, argues that sellers win by listening, not talking. After asking a question, hit mute and let silence happen. When prospects pause, resist filling it with pitches. Instead ask a follow-up question like "Why is that important to your customer?"
Chapters
Hello everybody, welcome to Customer Discovery with Bob and Mike. I'm Bob London, customer discovery expert. This is Mike. This is our last in the series of 6 customer intimacy myths which I have been absolutely demolishing. These are based on the more than 2,600 customer discovery conversations I've had with B2B decision makers, and this is an attempt to help you understand the world from the customer's perspective. Today's customer intimacy myth: you have to keep talking. Just keep talking. You have slides to present, keep presenting, keep going through bullet points. This is perhaps one of the hardest myths to burst because we are trained to talk, we are trained to pitch. We don't practice listening, we practice speaking and presenting. There is no Toastmasters for listening. The reality is that the mute button can be your best friend. What do I mean by that? Try going on mute after you ask a question of a customer. Because the reality is, just because they pause doesn't mean you have to jump in to solve a problem or sell something. It just means they may be thinking. A pause might mean that they're still thinking and they have more important things to say about what's important to them, not about your agenda, not about your product. Remember, one of the other myths is they open up so much more when you're authentically curious about them. So try and use the mute button. The worst-case scenario is if you're on mute and you think about saying something, you start to say it, then you can kind of self-edit and you can say, hmm, maybe they had more to say there. Maybe I shouldn't have jumped in to solve or sell something. If you do go off mute, what you can do is ask a second-level question like, that's interesting, what did you mean by that? Or why is that so important to this other department that you work with? Or why is it important to your customer? So think about using the mute button. I have a gigantic lighted mute button that plugs into my MacBook, and it reminds me when I'm on mute and when I'm not on mute, and it's a really cool tool. With that, I really appreciate you paying attention for these 6 customer intimacy myths. Here's a link where you can find them all on YouTube in a nice neat little playlist for your reference. Thank you very much. Take care.
