Radically Authentic Customer Discovery with Bob London

Welcome to Future Customer Value, where global thought leaders share their career-defining moments. Welcome to the latest episode of Future Customer Value. We've got an awesome guest on the show today, Bob London. Welcome to the show.

Oh, thanks. Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it. I'm excited to be here.

Yes, same here. And I'm particularly intrigued for this conversation because your background is not in SaaS predominantly. It's not in customer success or post-sales. You are a customer discovery expert. And for those of you who do not know Bob, I'm going to give a quick intro into his background and why this conversation is going to be so compelling for, for our show. Bob is a customer discovery and listening expert, which I love that term, who teaches companies how to have more strategic and revealing customer conversations that drive engagement, insights, and most importantly, revenue. Over the course of conducting more than 2,700 customer discovery conversations with B2B decision makers— this is SaaS, non-SaaS, professional services— Bob has developed a series of disruptive questions and bold listening techniques called the Radically Authentic Discovery Method, which gets customers to open up, let their guard down, right, and open up about what's most important to them. So through that journey, you have also touched the post-sales world and you were named by Success Coaching one of the top 25 CS influencers in 2022 and 2023. And Bob is an entrepreneur in residence at the University of Maryland's Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship, a board member at Mindshare, among many other communities, including Grain Protein being very involved there. So Bob, super excited to have you on. Thank you again for joining and would love to hear if you have any immediate thoughts you'd wanna share with our audience before we go into our conversation.

Well, like many people, when they hear themselves being introduced and they hear, like for me, the thing that jumped out is I, I never thought I'd hear my name and the word influencer in the same sentence.

And you're on a podcast now, so you're doing something.

You're on my Right. To me, you're an influencer. And then in my house, it's a big joke. Oh, whoa, the big influencer. But it's awesome to be here and I'm a fan and listener of your podcast. So it's cool to be on the, I guess, in the hot seat as it were, instead of just a viewer. Great.

Well, thank you for being here. This podcast is brought to you by Foresight, a full-service value realization platform designed to help you unlock growth in every single account. For more information on Foresight, please email them at info@gainforesight.co. That is info@gainforesight.co, and they'll be in touch. And what I want to start our conversation with is your unique lens into discovery, customer listening, and You have this term, which I think is fantastic. It's, it's how to be the ear of the company to the customer. And so let's unpack that a little bit. And what, what is a moment in your career or in your recent experiences that shaped your understanding of this is something I need to focus my time on? I need to build a business around this. I need to build a service offering around this. What was that aha moment for you?

So I've been in marketing most of my career up until about 4 years ago, manager up to CMO, and then as a consultant, sort of a fractional CMO focused on positioning, brand strategy, and messaging. So I would meet with founders and CEOs all the time. And I would ask them, who's your customer? Why do they buy from you? Why do they sometimes not buy? Why do they leave or stay after a year or two? And one day, I was meeting with a a particularly curious and enlightened founder, I thought. And I asked him those questions. And as he was answering, he was signaling that he wasn't sure, he wasn't confident in his answers. And I'm pretty authentic and transparent, or at least I try to be. And so I said, look, I'm not sure, but it seems like you're, you're not sure of the answer. So instead of just sort of shooting the lock off of the wallet and spending all kinds of marketing dollars, Why don't we start with a customer listening tour? I had never done one before. The words just popped out of my head and he said, yes, and that's a good idea. And so I think that moment and the journey starting that moment of doing that was, you know, a couple thousand discovery conversations ago of going out and talking to customers about them, what's going on in their world when there are no vendors around. Because let's face it, customers aren't, as you know, they aren't obsessed with our solution. They're obsessed with their problems, priorities, and challenges. And then when we're in the room, we think they're all focused on us, but they're probably still thinking about what's going on in their world. So it was really enlightening for me to uncover that, and it just helped fuel a whole new chapter of my professional career, which led me to the work I'm doing now of teaching this stuff— how to get customers to open up, what questions to ask. So it really was that moment. I have just incredibly strong and fond memories of that actual moment.

I really love that example because what you said that resonated is behind closed doors, our buyers are always talking about us, other vendors, of course, their business. They're going to be a lot more authentic and transparent with themselves. And there's always going to be a filter mechanism when it comes to talking to you about what they want to reveal. And so being able to— there's this term that I like to use is how can we create a mechanism that is a bug in the buyer's universe. Just listening in, right? Observing, consuming, and synthesizing. And if we have that capability and we develop it through process and conversation and the right framework to ask the right questions, or you have a technology platform that can help you do that, or another solution to do that, that is so critical. But you have to do something about it as well. You can't just capture the information. That's true. So What— so tell us about your methodology around the Radical Authentic Discovery Method. From that customer listening tour, what did you realize has to be a part of this method? What is so important to be focused on in those conversations?

Yeah, that's great. So I'm going to answer that by starting with something you just brought up about the bug, you know, almost like if you could place a listening device in In the customer, you know, I think that what the first thing I learned is customers have a lot to say when you ask about them. They are not protective of that information. They are happy to share. We are not asking about them. We jump in with our 50-page deck and our talking points and we, we go and go and go and don't catch a breath. We don't leave them space. So my, I guess my point is, it's, I don't want people to think that, oh, you have to uncover secrets. Customers will share. And, and so that's what I learned. What I learned about the approach that led to the formation of this kind of methodology, Radically Authentic Discovery, is that they're happy to share if you ask questions, more thoughtful, open-ended questions about them. And I'm happy to give you an example right now for the audience because they can use it today. So the first question I ask in discovery calls, and this first question I teach people to ask, is, so let me ask you, and I— this is how I say it: if I could sneak into your next senior leadership meeting or board meeting, uh, you know, if I was a fly on the wall, what would I hear as the biggest priority or challenge they're discussing, like, for the next year, year and a half, 2 years? Full stop. Let the question land. Let them marinate. Think about it. And what I learned was by asking that question at the beginning, number one, you're differentiating yourself because you're asking a question they've never heard before. You're asking about a topic that is something that goes on in every company where they go, hey, the board meeting is coming up. We need your bullet point from your department. You know, everyone understands that there's stuff going on. And then the board meeting readouts, senior leadership meeting readouts get filtered down. People know what's going on. So you're, you're disarming them by asking about them, not leading with, hey, we'd like to talk to you about your usage or adoption statistics on our software, our SaaS platform. The other thing, of course, is that you're getting an insight as to where the budget and energy will be flowing for the next year. And that helps you align the value of your solution with what's most important to them. So that's just a— it's not a trick, it's just a tip. Like, it's— you're not trying to trick them to revealing something. You're just asking an authentic question about their world. And it is kind of magical when they hear that question and they start to realize, oh, this conversation is about me, the customer. Then they really do— that sets the stage for a productive 20, 30 minutes following that where you're Continuing to ask. And then of course we can get into the listening piece because once you get them to open up, it's so important to let them go, go with their flow. Right. So we can— let's separate that and I'll just stop talking for a minute.

Yeah, I love the— especially these are questions that you would find in really any sales discovery, but being able to transform that into a unique, authentic question that disarms them, you know, hey, I'm in the board meeting, what are you talking about versus what are your biggest challenges for the year, Bob? Right. Everybody gets that question. But being able to come in and ask it in a way that gets me like, huh, that's a really interesting scenario, I think is important. My retort/subtle challenge back to you here is what about the situation where you have, how do you balance this, right? Because as a salesperson and I'm selling my software, I've worked with other companies or working with other salespeople, You have an agenda, you have to sell something, right? You have to at some point transact, otherwise there's no point. Uh, it has to lead to revenue. So what I've observed is when you ask the open-ended questions, it's amazing to get that nuance, that context, that richness. But if you got 30 minutes for discovery call and the customer starts going off in this direction, but you need to pull them back to the context of the discovery for your solution. Hey, how do you think about X, right? How do you think about Y? How, if you're selling a CRM platform, you know, how are you tracking your deal state? Like starting to bring them back to, uh, So how do you balance the open-endedness with the need to get them on a track and make— and the authenticity that might be sacrificed as a result?

What are your thoughts?

Yeah.

Yeah. So I hear you loud and clear. And I will say that you and I both operate a lot in the post-sales world. And I would say that that question and all of the 16 questions in the toolkit that I teach and deliver It's up to you to decide which ones work best for you at what stage, right? So some of them are sales, some of them are post-sales. With that said, I think one of the things that's important to note, and I appreciate your challenge to this because it's important, is that I think we, we don't want to be in a situation where we're always pulling them towards our solution and convincing. At some point, there has to be an open-ended understanding of what's most important to them. If they go off in a direction that has nothing to do with us, then our job is to say, okay, I understand that. And what do you— what are the 3 most important things to get you to that place that you're trying to get to? And if they don't talk about something that we're interested in, of course they know, right? In sales, they know what the— they know who you are. They know what product or solution you're representing, generally speaking. Then to say, like, thank them for being open and saying, that's great. What about in this area? So just gently start to tease them towards the category or the job or the problem set. And I, I guess what my final point on that is, if it's not important to them, it's not important to them. Yeah. Why are we still spending time on that? Sure. When we could move on to someone where our marketing team has, or our BDRs have identified like, no, this person already has the problem.

Yeah.

So let's focus on them. So I hear what you're saying. I think the world is heading towards a place more and more quickly, especially with all the money that was spent on go-to-market over the last 5, 6, 7 years where customers are kind of sick of being choreographed. And so if you, if you find someone that, if you're able to be in a position where you're focused on people that have, generally speaking, you think they might have the problem that you can solve plus or minus 10%, just focus all your energy on them and, and just let go. I know it's hard. Let go of the ones that are just looking off into space and wondering why they're in the meeting.

This is— yeah, this is a powerful point because my— going back into— and I know we share a lot of sentiment around the SaaS industry and some of the reckoning it's going through right now. But what I feel is a lot of SaaS companies are chasing everyone as a buyer who they think fits into their ICP. But the ICP, ideal customer profiles, should actually be pretty narrowly defined. And I'm going through this journey myself as a founder. And realizing we have to— half the people we're selling to are not our buyers. They're just not, if I'm being honest with myself. But I, I'm eager, I want to sell, right? I want to grow. So I'm engaging everybody with the leading questions that, hey, I want to, I want to get you to buy my thing, right? I've done that in the past as well. But I think what's really important here is that self-awareness that says if they don't care about what we have to offer or if they're not— they don't have that problem right now, and that came out through that authentic experience, we should not pursue them. Keep them warm, nurture them. They might have a problem that comes up later, but I think a big piece here is product-market fit and ideal customer profile fit. Companies need to focus on who the right fit customers are for them and map what the customer's saying to be their pain points, priorities, and challenges to something that can actually move the needle. And not look at everybody the same and say, hey, everybody's a prospect because they inbounded and came into my funnel. So going back to that point around product market fit, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this is who owns that from your perspective or who should, right? In knowing that we have a customer who didn't really fit our criteria to serve in the questioning and the discovery. But who kind of should make that call, right? Is it post-sales? Is it the salespeople? I feel like that's a contentious—

Well, I guess I would say that it depends on the size of the company and the stage because— and I'm also going to say I'm really not qualified to answer that question or give my opinion. I can give an opinion, but that's all it will be. Yeah. No, I think in companies of the size I deal with, which some of them are global, you know, 10,000 people, but, but the vast majority that we're talking about or that your audience might be, would be companies that are still trying to figure it out. And there, they might be 100 people, they might be 1,000 people. And I think at that point, I can't think of anybody other than the CEO who is the decision maker. And the inputs though, are the question is, who— what are they considering? It's just like the Jeff Bezos thing. Like, you can get all the data you want. At the end of the day, someone has to make a freaking decision. And so the best companies, I think, started with a CEO/founder who was curious, open to feedback, honest, self-aware, as you said, and that they are deciding, here's where we're going to go. I mean, it's just like the captain of a ship, just like anything else. Um, I— can I go back to something?

Please.

Yeah. Yeah. So The other aspect of if you're in sales and you've got a great product, as you do, and you've got an audience with someone you think is the right person. I'm gonna tell you a story that I think I got from either the Challenger sale or from the Challenger customer. Okay. And it relates to a dental tool for dental practices. A much more lightweight cordless drill, right? For all the stuff— I'm not gonna get into the unpleasantness of what the use case is. We all know, we've all been to the dentist. And they thought it was the best product ever and that they had gotten input that, wow, yeah, that's gonna be really cool from customers, dental practices, dentists, and no one bought it. When they did real discovery, the type that I would recommend, And they said, well, what's your big issue in your dental practice? Forget drilling teeth. What is your biggest challenge? Oh, it's, um, uh, hygienists and doctors, dentists who get carpal tunnel syndrome. Why? Because the drill's too heavy. Oh, and then what happens? 'Cause I love that part. Like, so, so they what, get carpal tunnel syndrome? That, well, then they leave. Or they have to retire or they get— or there's turnover. Oh, okay. So if we could solve that for you in any way, would you be interested in hearing about that? Yeah. So in other words, while you could hear that question, you could hear the answer of turnover or carpal tunnel syndrome. Let's say turnover, because that's probably the biggest issue. And say, oh, they're going off in another direction. That's not helpful to me. And you would completely miss the opportunity that this company, right? So that, that's why you're, you're, this is why you and I get along is 'cause we have the same goosebump reaction, I think, to these stories. And it, some people would call it positioning. I think that's too lightweight. I think it's much more strategic than that. And, and positioning is very strategic. I, I don't mean to demean it, but I think people get hung up on positioning is a words on a slide. That came from marketing.

Then I don't know, right? That, that is a— right. Your voice, what do you think is best out? But it's different than what you're saying.

Right. And it's— there are millions of— probably thousands of stories exactly like that that I would love to hear. But that's a— that's one that stuck with me. And I guess it reminded me of if you're in a meeting, find out what's important to them first. Don't make it— don't assume it has nothing to do or doesn't lead them to a conversation about what you can solve. That is positioning. That is— it's what, man, maybe there is a link between what they said and what we can help with.

That's so fascinating because it's the same product, right? It's literally the same product, the drill bit. And it's all of how is it perceived. It's not how it's positioned inside out.

Impact and value, right?

Yes, it is how is it perceived outside in. And you can change the perception through how you ask questions and and how you engage with the customer. And that resonates so much because I've seen so many deals be lost, not because there wasn't a fit, but because the mapping didn't happen, right? The customer perceiving that they had a problem that you could solve never connected, that there was no, you know, like I think the space docking systems, right? As the ISS trying to dock to the thing in space and it just misses because it didn't orient itself correctly. That's what this is all about.

No, I think, I think you said it. I think the mapping, I teach it as connecting the dots. Like, you cannot just hear a yes, no on the problem. You have to tease it out and see where it leads to connect the dots. And if you can't, you can't. But, but I guess, I guess it's just you asked such a good question about like, hey, I'm in sales, I want them to start talking about the problem that we solve. Just think, ask open-ended questions first is my point.

Yeah, that's great. So let's take this to a more tactical example, something I've been hearing a lot from leaders that I work with and I sell to. So I sell into the SaaS space. I know that's not your focus entirely, but you have a lot of experience there. And I sell to CROs, I sell to salespeople, and a big part of my business is the account management, customer success world. And I think salespeople are, are not all of them, but they're more naturally attuned to doing discovery because they have to, right? They have med pick in their Salesforce. They have fields they have to fill out. They have to do that. In post-sales, I've not observed as much training or as much investment in asking the right questions. So a lot of folks that I talk to and leaders are saying, I don't, my CSMs don't know what questions to ask. They don't know how to do discovery. They don't know how to have the right conversation. They don't know how to have the value talk, right? The quote unquote value talk is what I hear. So let's take that, all this open-ended question, the authentic engagement that you've been talking about today and applying it to a CS professional who is such a critical component of the company, right? And again, what you've said before, the ear of the vendor. So CS is in a bind. This is, I'm gonna now tailor down to my question. So CS is in a tough spot because a lot of CEOs and boards are looking at CS as we need to, get ROI on this investment. We're investing people, process, technology. We need to make sure they're increasing retention, increasing expansion. So if you're in CS and you have all this internal pressure to perform, but you don't have the right training and to be able to discover— how do you, how do you become a much more powerful ear?

Everything starts at the top. I mean, you, you have to be told by leadership of what is expected and then given the tools to get there. So one of the things that I guess I should say is that, you know, I think it's interesting that companies build products and ship them, you know, they go to market and then the vast majority of emphasis is on the go-to-market motions, including customer success. I don't see and hear a lot, maybe because of who I follow on, man, maybe we should go back and revisit the product itself. Maybe the product isn't all that and a bag of chips that we thought it was. And it leaves CS to, to pick up the pieces. And I don't think that's fair. And oh, by the way, CS, now you have to be accountable for revenue opportunities. Well, can we get some training or skills around that? Sorry, no budget. And I would say, or, or hey, Chief Customer Officer, yeah, we can talk about your budget after we get back from the sales kickoff in Bali, you know, where we've spent the budget and that's why you don't have money. So I'm—

Oh my God.

Well, I was thrilled to be in Las Vegas this year with a company that had a sales kickoff and brought their entire CS team and I was privileged to speak to that team. So I'm— there are teams that get it right. So I think that there, I'm gonna just address the speed bumps first that CS, that I've seen, I've witnessed in CS teams. First of all, you think you have to have the answer to everything. You, and you have to keep talking like you have to keep, and then you think that you, you're told that you have to convince the customer that there's value regardless of what the customer is saying. And I think that you, you get so much more by asking the customer their perspective and then listening. And that's really what builds trust and transparency. So you don't have to have all the answers. Customers enjoy being the teacher, not always the student. And you can be the student and learn and listen, especially if you're early in your career. It's— you get a lot of rope to be the person who's really curious. Person in the room is really curious. Maybe asking questions you think are dumb. Meanwhile, the customer loves the questions that I teach. Then that leads to the second is asking these truth-seeking questions. It might not feel natural as a CS person to read these questions when you first see them and use them. But I would just say there's a huge body of evidence now that I've collected and that I've witnessed that customers love these questions. They love answering them. That's why they talk 75, 85% of the time. And it gives you a chance to really listen. And practice kind of, you know, embracing the silence and going with the flow and asking follow-up questions. And I think it's so important to get used to asking questions you don't know the answer to. So this is what I teach. People can go to my website anytime, and there's a ton of free stuff. I probably give away too much. But there's a ton of free stuff on how to do this right, and, and, and also inspiration on why it's important. So I'm not sure I answered your question fully, but I, I went on a little bit of a, a rant here that I think it starts with leadership saying, it's, I'm gonna fight for my team to get skills to do the new things we're asking them to do so that our CS team becomes indispensable. One of the aspects of indispensability is not just listening better, but collecting that information as a group and saying, if we could only present one insight from CS customer conversations this month to one other team in the company, what would it be? Let's vote. Wow. Because the, what I hear too often is a CS person saying, well, I talked to product about this customer feedback. You can't do it one by one. No. No one wants to hear it. No one wants the death by a thousand cuts. In product. There's strength in numbers. Meet as a group. What are our customers saying? What's the biggest thing that would help us reduce churn this month or in 6 months? And let's freaking get them to build it, or let's not tell them, let's just collaborate with them. So that to me is ear of the vendor. So I still flinch when I see so much emphasis on voice of customer without like, who is supposed to be the ear of the customer?

Who's listening?

Is it the CEO? Is it the head of product?

No. It's—

everyone's listening. Well, then no, but who's the ear of the vendor is listening, aggregating, synthesizing. And this is where AI can really be helpful. When you feed your call recording transcripts into— Yeah. Your customer trans— call transcripts into a model or ChatGPT, just anonymize them. And this is what I've done. And it's stunning. The clarity that comes from it. Because why? AI is unemotional and unbiased.

Yes.

I know that there are issues with fundamental bias in AI. I'm not talking about that. I'm saying that AI will tell you, give you an accurate synthesis of what was said and help you more easily connect the dots because it's right there.

Oh, my goodness. This is like that. Yeah. I'm smiling a lot because, yeah, I mean, yeah, I don't want to talk about our product right now, but that's very much what we're thinking about and what we've experimented with is taking transcripts and parsing out into a structured data model, discovery answers to discovery questions because so something you said to go back to is voice of customer. Okay. Let's think about that. Your customer is speaking, they are sharing with you, what they are feeling and doing. But a lot of people say they're, they're hearing their customer. Are they listening to their customer? Those are two different things, right? Hearing versus listening. Okay, I'm in the room, I'm hearing what you're saying, but is that actually listening? Are you analyzing? Are you thinking about it? Is that impacting how you engage with that? Those are two totally different things. And you— that has to come through a framework, a model. And I really see your Radical, uh, Discovery method, Authentic Discovery method, as as that framework to take all this stuff and conceptualize it in the right way, right? And ask those questions where you can be thinking about it in the right way rather than coming with a scripted agenda. And you need to have that in order to observe the nuances from your customer and know what to focus on next. So I'll go on a little bit of a tangent here myself. I think this is one of the biggest existential problems that the SaaS industry has. And I'm gonna call it out because I'm in this industry, I sell to the industry. Good. And, you know, I'm a player in the industry. So obviously I want this industry to improve because I benefit from the industry improving, right? We all will win when the boat— the tides will rise. So I'm going to call it out. I think SaaS has an existential problem of not listening to the customer. We become selfish, we become a lot more self-obsessed and focused on vanity metrics of NRR, GRR, revenue, which obviously we need revenue in order to survive. I'm not challenging that, but what we've forsaken as a result is our purpose as a company, our purpose as an industry. Why do we exist? It is to improve the buyer's livelihood, right? It is to improve the buyer's experience and their business, their NRR, their GRR, their revenue. That's why we exist, not because of ours. And then, and your focus on the go-to-market, that speaks to it so clearly. We've become obsessed. The go-to-market industry is massive. Sales, technology, consulting process. What, go-to-market? Like you're selling to salespeople? Is he making a Boom, people are making so much money. But that, that is actually a very short-sighted approach because that, that is not connected to what the buyer actually needs in many cases. So we need to, to, to— and I think it's a CEO board problem, right? We talk a lot about CS and how CS is under duress and stress. And, you know, maybe this is challenging to folks, but that's not the root problem. CS is a symptom. The problem that CS is facing is a symptom of the root cause problem in my mind, which is that CEOs and boards are very focused on short-term results and pushing sales when they might have a deeper product-market fit problem. There's a lot of nice-to-have solutions, non-mission-critical solutions out there. There's a lot of solutions that exist because money was cheap and people are buying things and they got fake signals and they grew their companies. But now they're reckoning and saying, hey, people don't need our product. And they probably don't, to be honest. But, you know, you have—

I could not agree more. And I'm going to say two other things. Is product— I would wonder if product market fit is a polite way of saying your product sucks, not yours. Like, in other words, where is the brilliant computer science that is resulting in amazing value and customer experiences? How many companies have really done that? And once they've done it, how many of them are tuning it and revisiting it based on what they're seeing? It's the old Mike Tyson, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. That once, once your product hits the cold light of day, the bright lights, you know, are you then turning it over to the go-to-market team to convince people that there's value? And I think that it— I would say to you, the reason that the go-to-market industry has grown and become even a little bit overgrown is because it's easier to talk about it. It's easier to change motions and add motions and come up with playbooks and try things than it is to fix the product. And I reject that notion 100%. And I couldn't agree more. Investors, board members, founders, CEOs need to be a little more introspective and maybe go— not go all the way back to the drawing board, but just decide, like, I always think of it as like in Hollywood, they call it going straight to DVD. Like your product is not good enough to hit the theaters, so we put it in Blockbuster on the top shelf in the back. And that's— but the problem is there are customers using these things because they were convinced to use them and they let themselves be convinced. And, um, so I think you're right. And I kind of promised myself I wouldn't get too hopped up about this particular topic, but You know, I, it, this is the, it's the technological industrial complex at work. We built this, go figure it out.

Yes.

Yes.

And it's, yeah, this might be taking it too abstract, but, uh, late stage capitalism, right? It's, it's products becoming very commoditized. And I think that's another thing here. And I, I want to transition us to talk about solutions because it's not just a Debbie Downer conversation at this point, but it's, we need to have this reckoning. I truly believe it. To come out of it and in a better and more stronger form.

So just before you do, I mean, but why is customer success, which is the world that has embraced my stuff so heavily, why are they facing the reckoning alone? Like, oh, they're getting cut. But it's the same thing that I lived through in marketing years ago, decade almost, you know, long time ago. We need to make cuts because things have slowed down. What's marketing really doing? What— this is before 2010-ish. What are they doing? Well, they're doing events and they're having people, you know, write collateral. And are we using the collateral? Not really. You know, the sales team creates their own, and then that causes the reckoning until marketing can reinvent itself. Wow. We have ways to show you concretely at the board level that we are contributing to growth.

Oh my gosh.

And so that was very fair. And now it's very fair to look at CS the same way, but I don't think it's good to do that without looking at the underlying foundational issues of what is the product really worth all that.

Oh my goodness. I definitely got goosebumps there when you said reinvent yourself because that is exactly where we're at. You know, CS has been around for many years and I think the term has came about 15, 10, 15, 20 years ago. Gainsight, many others helped advocate and create that, which is amazing. But it's— we're now going through that reckoning and it's— it is a much bigger problem. It's a top-down problem that has to be coming from self-aware boards and CEOs. But in the world where there is less volume of pure technological advances and now much more business evolution, like the use cases of how do we take this technology and apply it to improve business workflows, that's a different conversation altogether. And there, that's where I really feel the listening, the mapping, the connecting the dots. That's where you're going to find success. It's almost like you've got your product market fit, but then you've got your, you know, uh, mapping market fit, or I don't know what you call it, but there's— that's what the other side is, is how are you listening and connecting what you have to those organizations, uh, and, and being able to guide the customer. So one other thing here that I want to have a final question for you before we get into a rapid-fire question is every, every transaction that happens in deal is ultimately a game of information asymmetry, right? Whoever has more information is going to win. If the buyer has more information, they know all the market, they've seen all the customers, the vendors, and they know that they can get a 50% cheaper but still same quality solution. You don't know that they're going to win. But if you know that they have a problem in the board meeting that they've been discussing, that their team does— has not been privy to. And you're saying, hey, this is what your board cares about, we need to solve this. And they say, is that what it is? They go and talk to the peers like, yeah, that's exactly what we need to do. They're like, my goodness, these people know what they're doing, we need to go and work with them, right? Right. It's a whole flip the script. And, um, I, I think that it's, it's just so important. So my question to you is, how do we help the CEOs and boards? So we talked about CS teams, we talked about sales and account management teams. But if you could give a word of advice or guidance to CEOs, I'm thinking about that CEO, that curious software CEO back in the day. What would you tell them in helping to keep their purpose as a company and be the ear of the vendor and serve the buyer the best? Like, what would you tell them?

Well, I guess I would say first things first, if they are So first of all, they have to have a compelling event for them to do anything differently than they're doing now. Okay. So if they are convinced or become suspicious that, that, that, that we don't know why we're not growing, like we don't know, we've tried things, we've tried a lot, and especially in the go-to-market side and We're not growing or we're losing customers, whatever. Then depending on the size of the company, you have to own the curiosity piece. You have to go talk to customers in an open— talk with, not at.

Yes. Yes.

And go on a little listening tour and find out the truth. And there are different ways to do that. You can do it. I would encourage CEOs and founders to not do it just with data. Like you can sit behind a dashboard all you want and look at it, but getting out and talking to people, and it doesn't have to be in person, and ask questions that establish openness and candor, not leading questions, and, you know, and then listen and probe. So I noticed that the CEO of Uber, knowing that there was a problem acquiring and retaining drivers. And I'm not going to comment on Uber, and I'm going to give another example, Starbucks, in a minute, um, of how they're doing or whatever. But the CEO of Uber went and drove an Uber. He used the app. He didn't just get in the car, he did the whole driver experience and was able to find out that sure enough, the person that worked for him who had said, you really need to get behind the wheel, was right, that there were huge issues. And so like, I'm not talking Undercover Boss type stuff. I'm saying be curious, be curious. And the CEO of Starbucks did the same thing. He was a barista for however long. He went through the training, worked behind the counter, whatever they do, and helped improve the experience there for employees and therefore for customers. So, you know, I think that that should not be the exception. It doesn't have to be the rule, but that, like, those are really curious founders and CEOs that do that stuff. The idea that you have an insight about a market and you're a founder and you raise money and you build it and it just happens to be the perfect solution and it takes off like a rocket, that's the dream. But how often does that happen? You have to be curious. You can be optimistic. But be curiously optimistic and optimistically curious about what's really going on. Even if you're killing it, crushing it, that's not the end of it. You still have to, you still have to be curious to keep the momentum and dominate, assuming that's what you want to do. So I, I would like to see more top-down curiosity, culture of curiosity. Um, and you know, the— I've had CEOs take my stuff and go on a road show. Customer listening tour and they ask the questions and they learn from it and they fine-tune and in some cases make big changes. And it's, you gotta like Jeff Bezos, start with the customer and work backwards.

I love this so much and staying curious and that never, this process never stops. You know, if we take that back to product market fit, product market fit, as a byproduct of being curious, listening, iterating, being agile and all that, all that good stuff is a continuous process. It's not like winning a gold medal at the Olympics where you won the gold medal and you have it forever, right? Exactly. It's like being the number one athlete in the world or tennis player. You have to stay at the top like you have to do the work every single day. If you go to the gym just because you're number one one day doesn't mean you're going to stay number one the next day. You have to keep putting the work in. Same thing with product-market fit, same thing with listening. And I think this is a message that rings so loud and clear for anyone in B2B, no matter if you're in SaaS or not. So, uh, super, super powerful stuff, Bob. Thank you.

Thank you.

Well, we're going to transition here to our final section, which is going to be pretty quick. It's called the rapid fire question section. So there's a couple of rules here, Bob. I'm going to ask you 8 questions and you have a 3-word max for the response. So first thought that comes to mind. Three words max.

Pressure.

Pressure. Pressure. Here we go. And these are questions that relate to SaaS. But if you want to speak to B2B as a whole, I'm totally cool with that. Doesn't have to be SaaS in particular. All right, here we go. First question, what's the best metric of success for SaaS or B2B?

As mentioned before, I'm, I'm not really good on the metric side. What's the best? Sorry, I'll pass.

Okay. All good. Worst. Okay, so the next one's worst metric. We'll skip that one. Most underrated part of SaaS B2B. I think I know the answer to this.

We touched on it being the ear of the— who is the ear of the vendor that is capturing and helping? Ear of the vendor. Cool. Hard for me to do 3 words.

4, I'll give it to you. Most overrated part of SaaS B2B.

Motions. Too many motions.

Love it. I agree. Current state of SaaS B2B.

Minor reckoning.

Future state.

Software will continue to eat the world.

Best book or podcast? This can be a business book, doesn't necessarily need to be SaaS.

Yeah, so I'm a big fan of what Jay Nathan and Jeff Brunsback are doing with Growth Curve. They are, and they listened. They've been in the CS side for a long time. So that was my short answer. Can I expand on it?

Oh, please.

Oh, so they saw that CS teams, but other aspects of SaaS companies don't really have a business view of an understanding of how their business, their own business makes money and also how their customers make money. So they launched a course. I think it's called, well—

Cover My SaaS or something.

Cover My SaaS and, or cover your SaaS. I don't know, but it's growthcurve.io. And they are teaching people the fundamentals. And I think it's brilliant. And I wish I had learned it 20 years ago.

I'm a big fan of Jay and Jeff and they've got a ton of great content out. Love it. Uh, if you could make— all right, so here's, we're, we're good with the questions here. Um, thank you for that and entertaining me there. So final question before we wrap is this podcast is called Future Customer Value. So thinking about the future, if you could make one prediction about where we're headed as a B2B industry, right? SaaS as well. What would you, what would you say?

Find indispensability. You got to— if you're not indispensable to your customer, you're at risk.

I think that summed up the entire conversation in two words here. Listen to become indispensable, right? Um, awesome. Well, Bob, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for, for joining me the last hour, uh, to talk about all these incredible topics.

You are a gifted interviewer, which includes being a really good listener. This is amazing. Congratulations on what you're doing here.

Thank you so much, Bob. I really appreciate it. It means a lot coming from you.

Bob, thanks for having me.

All right, well, we'll have to do this again in a couple months.

All right, all right, sounds good.

Thanks, Bob. Once again, thank you for listening. This episode is brought to you by Foresight. If you're interested in learning more, please email them at info@gainforesight.co. That is info@gainforesight.co. Thank you.