Bob London debunks the myth that customers won't discuss their company's top priorities. Drawing on 2,600 B2B conversations, he shows that asking "What would be the biggest priority discussed in your board meeting?" consistently gets prospects to open up about real business needs, not just product features.
Chapters
Welcome to today's episode of Customer Discovery with Bob and Mike. I'm Bob London, customer discovery expert. I've done 2,600+ customer discovery conversations with B2B decision makers, users, customers. This here is Mike. I want to continue our discussion where I absolutely just crushed, demolished the 6 myths of customer intimacy. All the stuff we do that we think is helpful to our customer relationship. And it turns out we're pushing them away. And that's again, based on my experience doing all these customer discovery conversations. Customer intimacy myth number 5: Customers won't— they're not interested in talking about their top-level business priorities or strategy. They'll think it's annoying. They'll wonder why we want to know. Wrong, wrong, wrong. In all my customer discovery conversations, when I ask— I'll give you an example. I ask these disruptive questions. The first one I usually ask is in fact about their business priorities or strategies. Hey, let me ask you this. If I could sneak into your company's board meeting or executive leadership meeting, what do you think is the biggest priority or challenge that I'd hear them talking about? The most common reaction is, hmm, that's a good question. Good, then they're engaged. I'm making them think. It's disrupting a part of their brain that they're not used to because I didn't dive in and start asking about features. It is disarming to them because it tells them that you are what we talked about in the last video, you're being authentically curious and they really respect that. In all those customer discovery conversations and all the times I've coached CSMs, account managers, and sales folks to ask this question, never had a rejection. Never had a customer react by saying, "Why do you need to know that?" That's in our heads. It's in our heads. It's because we've been trained to talk only about ourselves, our company, our product, our features. The fact is when you ask about them and the context they're dealing with, what's going on at the highest levels of the company, What are the 1 or 2 or 3 big priorities the company is focused on? That leads into a discussion where they are very open, very, very open and very concrete about what they need to accomplish and how that connects to what the company is trying to accomplish. And great news for you. Why? Because then you can align the value of your product or service or solution with what they're trying to accomplish as a business, not just to make them happy as a user. This part about talking your ear off, I just want to say, So many times we get to the 29th minute of, let's say, a 30-minute discovery call. I say, um, hey, I want to be respectful of your time, we'll wrap it up. And they say, no, Bob, this is important because we never have vendor conversations like this. We never get to talk about what's really important to us. So if you want to keep your customers and you want to grow them, do this: ask that strategic question. Far from them getting turned off, they will fully engage. Try it. All right, join me tomorrow for customer intimacy myth number 6, our last and final one. Very sad. Have a great day.
