Real Listening Beats ‘Customer-Centric’ Every Time with Bob London | EP13

Welcome to Account Management Secrets, the podcast dedicated to the unsung heroes of the business world— account managers. You're driving over 70% of your company's revenue, and I know how valuable you are. It's time you had the resources, training, and recognition to match your impact, and that journey starts here. I'm Alex Raymond. After working with thousands of account managers to improve their results and beat their targets, I know what it to excel in this role. Whether you're a seasoned pro or just stepping into account management, if you're managing client relationships, prepping for QBRs, or aiming to drive growth from your existing accounts, this podcast is for you. Each week, I'll bring you the insights, tools, and strategies you need not just to succeed, but to thrive in your career. How well do you really know your customers? Today, we're answering that question with Bob London, creator of the Radically Authentic Discovery Method, to uncover what it truly means to understand your clients beyond the basics. Together, we dig into what Bob calls truth-sparking questions that go beyond surface-level details and get to the heart of what your clients really need. Bob breaks down the 4 principles of Radically Authentic Discovery, including the power of curiosity, the art of silence, and the importance of broadening your view beyond your own products and services. If you're looking to build stronger, more profitable customer relationships, then tune into my conversation today with Bob London. Bob London, it's great to see you, my friend. Thanks so much for joining us on Account Management Secrets.

Alex, thank you for having me, and congratulations on the, uh, the launch of Account Management Secrets. It's very cool and very well much needed, I will say, in the community.

Yeah, it, it certainly is needed. Uh, someone told me that there was something like, uh, 500 podcasts for sales and only 5 podcasts for account managers. So I'm glad to be contributing into that discussion.

And don't forget the probably 200 for customer success.

Yes, correct. About 200 for customer success. So we're having a different set of conversations here on Account Management Secrets. One of the things that I've learned over doing interviews here, but also over the course of many years working in the account management space, is how important it is, and by the way, how overlooked it is, to really, truly, deeply understand your customer. When I talk to account managers about this and I ask them, how well do you know your customer? I tend to just get really surface-level stuff, right? Like just platitudes, maybe, oh, you know, here's where they went to college, or here's a sports team that they like, or they prefer golf over fishing, or whatever the thing is. And that surface-level stuff doesn't really get us very far. If part of our job as an account manager is to understand the needs, the goals, the aspirations of our customers, we really have to do what you would call, I think you would call, more radical discovery on our customers. And so I'd love to just kick off today and hear from you, what is radical discovery? How do we start to think about that? Why is it important? And why aren't people doing more of this today?

Yeah. So again, thanks for the opportunity to talk about this. And the term I use is radically authentic discovery. And the authentic piece is important because you're going to try and meet the customer where they are in terms of what their challenges are and their priorities. And you're going to ask questions that are based on their real-world situations. But I have to start with an anecdote since you brought up the question about like, hey, you talk to account managers and you say, How do you? How well do you know your customers? So a VP of happens to be a VP of customer success said to me this week she had just taken my online course called Radically Authentic Discovery, and she said she she was thinking about it when she went into a meeting with their largest customer, her company's largest customer. Before that meeting, she said to the account manager, "Hey, I'm going to talk to this customer of ours. How's it going?" And the account manager said. I think it's going pretty well. You know, I don't see any risk. I think there's probably some opportunity. Now, the VP of customer success had the call. The account manager was sick and couldn't make it, maybe fortuitously. And she came away, the VP of customer success came away with the knowledge that, oh, they're actually putting this out for RFP soon. So big red flag, big risk. How did she find that out? Because she asked the following question. Hey, if I could sneak into— hey, customer, if I could sneak into your board meeting, just like fly on the wall, if I could listen in, what's the biggest priority or challenge that they'd be— that I'd hear them discussing? So, and their customer started opening up about some of the new sort of procedural, logistical, and then procurement. You know, a lot of things have to change because of cost cutting, whatever. And as part of that, we have to, of course, do an RFP for this software that we're using that you guys provide. So I think that there is a mythology that has grown up around this concept of listening to the customer, understand, being customer-centric, all those terms that people use a lot. And I think that the mythology comes from the fact that we think we're listening, but customers don't feel heard and understood. And I know that. Because I've done 20, almost 2,800 B2B discovery conversations with all kinds of decision makers and users. And I don't ask about the product. I ask about them. I say, what's happening in your board meeting? What would happen if you got a call from a competitor tomorrow? You know, these are questions I ask that I've developed over the years that really get customers to open up. And so you have to— what I found is customers are very willing to open up and share. They'll give you the entire, all the playbook and roadmap for how to serve them and how to kind of help them into the future. You just have to be more curious about what's going on on their side of the fence. So, that's the truth that I've learned over the last, doing these discovery calls over the last, I guess, 9 years now.

I just did the launch program for Amplify this past week and the conversation was actually about How curiosity is a superpower for account managers. And as long as, you know, as we can be successful in really understanding our clients, as long as we're putting aside our assumptions, as long as we're willing to ask open-ended questions, and frankly, sometimes we're willing to be uncomfortable and ask the questions we may not want to hear the answers to. So how do you coach an account manager to get through that, to really Show up with curiosity, be willing to keep pushing on the questions, be willing to discover the truth, even if it's the truth that they don't want to hear?

That's a really good question because part of my job is not just to teach them the techniques, but it's to shift their mindset and basically say to them, you think you're listening. Customers do not think we vendors, and I include myself in that, are doing a good job of discovery and listening. So I give them statistics and studies that say customers, to a customer, discovery and listening are 2 of the most, the 3 most important sort of attributes or skills or parts of a sales process out of a list of, let's say, 15 that influence their buying behavior. But if you ask those same customers, How well do vendors do on discovery and listening? It's at the bottom of the list. They're poor. So I try to help them understand what it's like to be a customer. What's it like for a customer to have an account manager walk in with 30 slides or 12 slides? It doesn't matter. And some, some sort of cliché questions like what keeps you up at night or how are things going? that are not enough. First of all, that shows little effort on anybody's part to ask those questions. It's not— those aren't curiosity. You don't really want the answer. And to start by, you know, instead start by being more curious about not how they perceive your product or solution that they're probably using today, but what are the challenges that their business is facing at the company level? And as I said, I'll keep repeating it, even starting at the board level. They don't have to be in board meetings. Your customer doesn't have to be in board meetings to be able to answer, but they have to understand that what you're trying to do is ask them, start at the most important level for them. What's driving your priorities as a decision maker or user? And so I try to explain to them that there's, you know, these 4 principles of Radical Authentic Discovery. They have to start with a much wider aperture. So it's— aperture is the size of a camera lens opening, lets in more light the more you open it. And what that means is don't treat your customer like a customer. Treat them like a human being who has a job to do, and that job is only being funded. In other words, the person you're talking to is— the customer is only receiving a salary because the company thinks what they're doing is important to contribute to something at the company Priority challenge level. So open the aperture, ask much more provocative open-ended questions. I call them truth-sparking or disruptive questions. And then the acronym— next part is the acronym STFU, which doesn't stand for anything naughty. It stands for silence till you fully understand. And then the 4th part is connecting the dots with what you heard. Hey, customer, so if I understand correctly, So it's almost backwards from the way we do it today. Instead of saying, so our product does this and this helps with that, say, okay, let's— let me understand this. You're at the board level, your company is faced with this challenge, and here's the priority. What that means is your department or team and your role is challenged to accomplish X that lines up with that top priority at the company level. And we are hopefully a component of your job success. And here's how that all works. So, connect the dots for them and see how it sounds to them. And sometimes they just don't think of it that way until you bring it up.

I just want to make sure we got these 4 principles of radically authentic discovery correct. And that was firstly, widen the aperture. So, don't just show up and talk about your stuff, your service, your product, your whatever it is. Show up and talk to them about What's going on in their world. Treat them like a human. Don't treat them like a customer. That was point number 1. Point number 2 is then ask truth-sparking questions. So, don't do the typical ones. Don't do the ones that make you sound like everybody else. Ask the deeper-level questions. Be willing to go a little bit farther in your questioning where folks— that was number 2. Number 3 was silence until you fully understand, which is leave the customer with the awkward pause. Let them sit in silence. Until they come up with whatever it is that they want to share with you. And this is a really important skill, very hard to do. It can be very, very awkward and uncomfortable at times when you're sitting there, you ask a question and you just simply wait. So that's what silence till you— STFU stands for. And then 4th was connect the dots. And I always think of connect the dots as do your job as an account manager by helping them to see a bigger picture. Right? Your customer has got their day job and their day-in-the-life type of scenario, and they're only seeing one thing. As an account manager, if you're responsible for multiple customers, you've seen other use cases, you've seen other scenarios like this, you can help them to understand the world in a different way if you're doing your job right. So those are the 4 principles. And it sounds like, I mean, basically, Bob, there's landmines all over the place in here, right? There's all sorts of things. It's easy for me to say, here's the 4 principles. People are doing it and they're tripping all over themselves. Where are they tripping up the most?

Well, you nailed one of them, which is the ability to hold your tongue, ask a question, and then sort of force yourself to not only stay quiet, but really listen to understand versus to preparing your next response. And I'm going to give you the biggest pro tip for this. It's actually a— I call it a mechanical tip. In other words—

Yeah, we love pro tips. We love pro tips.

Yeah. Ask a question, preferably one of the truth-sparking questions that I teach. And there's a, there's a free cheat sheet on my website which people can look at at boblondon.co, and they can download this cheat sheet that's got questions and listening techniques. The pro tip is hit your mute button after you ask the question. What that does is it forces you to— it's sort of a self-editing tool. In other words, you hit the mute button and then you kind of go, oh, I have something to say there. You have to actually physically unmute yourself. You have to consciously do that in order to say something. And what that does is it prevents you from shifting the conversation, from getting defensive, from having any other sort of reaction other than finding out more about what that customer just said. And in the worst case, you start to say something, you're on mute, and then you realize you're on mute and you can say, oh, I, Maybe I didn't need to say that right now. It's— the mute button is free. It's built into every device we have. And so ask a really good question and hit the mute button. And the worst case scenario is a great scenario, which is that there'll be a little bit of a pause at the end. I call it the customer's verbal ellipses. The dot, dot, dot at the end of a sentence is you're not just waiting till they finish the last word. You're waiting until they hear themselves— they have to hear what they just said. And then they might think of something else, and that's the ellipses. Don't assume they're done, and the mute button is a beautiful way to accomplish that.

Yeah, that's a great idea. And the magic always comes after that customer ellipse that you're just talking about, when they get through with their entire thought, their entire monologue, and then, and then the nugget of information comes out, and then they'll help you to tie that stuff together. And so doing that is really, really valuable just to Be quiet. Let them really truly finish. Like I said, it can get a little bit awkward, but it works. Question that I have for you, Bob, is, you know, a lot of the training I've seen, a lot of the discussion on this is all about how to cast a very wide net with open-ended questions. Okay? So, I'm doing just like a general diagnostic or a general understanding of the situation. And I know a lot of account managers and CSMs also, you know, they're good at that.

They're pretty good at that or they're getting better at it, right?

Kind of asking the broader questions. But they don't necessarily understand how to do the follow-up questions. They don't understand how to do the really nailing the customer down on a commitment or a timeline or an issue or a risk or an opportunity type of stuff. So they'll happily sort of bounce between, okay, checklist. All right, great. I asked that question. Phew. Now I can move on to the next one. Walk us through the method for continuing the conversation, going down a certain thing, Especially in the areas where people may start to hear, like, maybe they just don't want to ask, are you going to stick with us for the next 24 months? Maybe they just don't want to ask, have you had a competitor walk in here in the last 90 days and taken their meeting? You know, this sort of thing. So, how do we get from asking broad, open-ended questions to being more prescriptive and more, I guess, concrete in our follow-through?

So, I'm going to start by sort of saying that the beauty of being, having a niche like I do, which is discovery and listening, is that I stay in those lanes. And so, when it gets into sales techniques of how to move the conversation into a commercial conversation, but in terms of questions that, you know, there are a lot of techniques out there that are more choreographed where the customer, as someone, I can't remember who on LinkedIn says, customers don't want to be processed. You know, they don't want to feel like they're being sold to. So my thing is get them into a conversation by asking questions that those questions might make you as an account manager or a CSM uncomfortable, but that's good. And I'll tell you that the data is on our side because customers love these questions and that the best recommendation is— so I'm going to use this example. I quickly referenced it before. So, and this is how I ask it. So let me ask you this. If you got a call from one of our competitors tomorrow or an email, how would you react on a scale of 1 through 5? 1 is you'd probably ignore it or delete it. 5 is you'd pretty quickly get back to them and find out what they're all about, what they— what it costs. Just let the question land. Force yourself to just ask it and then be silent. And the customer will say, huh, well, you know, it's interesting. We get those calls all the time. I'd have to say 4. So that, in other words, close to 5, which is I'd get back to them. Now, the instinct is for you to feel, uh-oh, something's wrong. They're going to— they would reach— they would hear— they would get back to our competitor. But the average answer is, in fact, above 4 out of 5 in these many conversations I've done. And what's the most common thing they say when I say, I don't assume anything. I don't— you never assume why they said 4. Oh, 4. Can you— thanks for being candid because you want to reward their behavior. You know, I want you to be candid. That's what this is about. I want the truth. Why did you say 4? Well, first of all, we try to be courteous. I mean, it's one of our values as a company. So I try to get back to people. It's not always possible, but I try to. Number 1. Number 2, you know, I'm one person using one product for one use case. I never know when I'm going to learn something new that's going to help me do my job better. And that is one thing that another company can share with us, an insight. Number 3, I have a fiduciary responsibility to my company to be aware of what's out there. And I don't want to ever get the call that says, how do we know we are getting the right value for the money we're paying? We're paying a lot of money for this. How do we know? I want to be prepared for that. And in order to do that, I need to be aware of what else is out there. So you go from— get up all your courage and ask that question. The customer starts by saying 4 out of 5. You think it's bad news. You think it's bad news. So you've gone from that to now the customer is being really open with you and you have a chance to say the following follow-up question. So, well, let me ask you this. Is there one thing in particular that a competitor might bring up that would definitely get you to react and respond to them? Well, you know, it's funny you mention that because, you know, we are expanding globally. You guys, incumbent, have talked about global capabilities on the roadmap, but I, you know, I don't know that we've heard back on that for a while, candidly. So that's one thing a competitor might say. The other is, I have to say, The product you guys offer is great. We're happy with it. But, you know, I would say reporting, which is part of the product, but it's hard to get information. I'm just giving you common examples of what—

Yeah, sure.

Yeah. So reporting. Okay. So imagine if every account manager on a team for a month asked every customer about the competitor question, think, and then said, what What is it that would make you respond to a competitor? Imagine if you catalog that or use, which I do, GenAI, ChatGPT, or one of these others to categorize it and catalog it for you. Imagine the kind of insight you'd have to hand to the product team and say, okay, after 200 conversations, we asked this one question, 40% of them said global capabilities, 10% said reporting, and the rest were like 1%, you know, just, it really is game-changing for companies that embrace this that way. And account managers, I don't know, think of themselves as a whole as being strategic for their company. They're trying to hit numbers and keep customers.

That's a really important point, is so often account management leaders will say, I wish I had a bigger seat at the table, or I wish, you know, we got the recognition that we deserve. And I wish the rest of the company understood the client as well as we do, you know, for example. And to your point is like, yeah, sometimes we've got to turn around and tell them we have to take the results of all this data. We've got to take the results of the interviews. And share them with product and marketing and sales and find, you know, whoever, whoever needs to be involved, because we are the internal evangelists for our customers. We also then need to make sure that our company is aware of all the great things that we can do for our clients and where our clients want to go. So we, we as account managers should be influencing roadmap, marketing messaging, value propositions, the websites, etc. And We can't just go in there and assume that everyone knows everything about the client just like we do. They don't know them as well. They can't read our minds. But what we can do is do this type of radically authentic discovery, gather the data like you're saying, and then digest it or summarize it and make sure that gets back to everybody else. And so many account managers are failing to do that part. They simply don't take what they're learning and then make sure it gets percolated back throughout the whole company.

Right. I'm going to— I want to double down on what you just said because I'm seeing it every day, this issue. So we're all familiar with the term voice of the customer, right? It came from GE probably decades ago and— or Bain or somebody. Very, very— it's clever. It makes sense. Voice of the customer.

Okay.

Look on everyone's org chart right now. Who is the ear of the vendor? Who is—

Ear of the vendors?

The ear of the vendor. Who is in charge of listening to understand the customer today and as their needs evolve? Who is in charge of synthesizing all that information into a way that other departments can digest it? It's an opportunity. I can tell you right now, I'm a former marketing guy. Marketing doesn't do that. The product team probably doesn't talk to enough customers to do that on a regular basis. They're You know, they're doing their thing. I mean, and I'm not criticizing any other group. Sales is very focused on what's right in front of them, trying to sort of come up with the value prop and positioning for, you know, and use case for the customer they're talking to. So I think account management, because they're talking to someone in such a— the relationship's already been formed and there tends to be more, you know, the decent amount of trust and we can get to that level of candor and openness through asking better questions and listening. And once you do that, you get access to so much amazing insight. And then it's a matter of saying, oh, we just heard something very clearly. It's our obligation as a team to turn and bring that to, you know, our leadership. Or instead of sort of one account manager hears something once and runs to the product team and says, I just heard this, that's annoying. Forgive me, you have to— there's strength in numbers in terms of data. So anyway, that's a bit of a rant that I have because it's a huge opportunity for account managers and customer success, but it's also a glaring weakness of most companies that don't have an ear of the vendor.

Hey there. One of the reasons I created Amplify is because there's really no such thing as account management You can't get a degree in how to keep and grow your customers, and there isn't a playbook for how to get promoted in your career. We've built Amplify into a full-fledged platform with a single mission: to help make you the best account manager you can be. Hop into our community and you'll see why it's so much more than a discussion forum or yet another Slack group. When you need to get ready for a QBR or prep for a renewal call, when you're trying to wrangle an uncooperative client, or when you need to come up with a customer engagement strategy for your whole company, Just go to Amplify and you'll find answers to all those questions and lots of help from account managers just like you. If you're listening to this podcast and you haven't joined our community yet, go check it out at amplifyam.com. It's got expert-led courses, a peer community, and a really great library of tools and templates that you can implement right away. So don't wait, visit amplifyam.com and we'll see you inside the community. We're not closing the feedback loop, and therefore, it's no surprise that the rest of the company doesn't know what the account management team actually does, right? They're not sure about what, you know, who all these nice people are, what they're actually doing day in and day out. Part of our job is to make sure that we are being that ear of the vendor, as you say. We are getting the information back to everybody else. You know, this conversation, Bob, almost wants me to like offer a challenge out to all the listeners of Account Management secrets and basically say, over the next 90 days, can you and your team get out there and have these kinds of questions with your customers and ask them on a scale of 1 to 5, if a competitor approached you today, how likely are you to get back to them within 72 hours or whatever the specific question is? And what would make you a 5 out of that? So, I mean, what's most important to you? And can we ask them the question about, if I were a fly on the wall in the board meeting, what would come up? What are your top priorities? You know, I almost want to say to people, hey, can we do this now? Can you take this period of time in Q4, get out there, do this, have those conversations, and then make sure the rest of the company is learning from you? The rest of the company will be amazed to understand what you are uncovering in those. What are your thoughts on other great questions that we want to be compiling here, or like how to approach that if someone says, yeah, let's go all in on like deeply understanding this process?

So, another question that you can ask, you can't ask it too early in the relationship and you don't want to ask it right before the renewal. So, it's like 4 to 6 months into a 1-year relationship. So, let me ask you this. What's the biggest thing that surprised you since you started working with us? Like, since day 1, you signed the contract. Now, as someone who's, I guess I'm—

A realist.

or maybe a little on the cynical side of realism or skeptical. I thought that question would generate a lot of negative surprises, but it doesn't have the word negative in the question. Like, what's the worst thing that surprised you? What's the biggest thing that surprised you? You know, about half the time it's a positive surprise. Something like, we were just blown away by how quickly you guys hit the ground running or got up to speed or got us the time to value, whatever. A lot of times it's people we love, the team, and we were amazed. It surprised us even though our expectations were high. On the negative side, it could be reporting, it could be the global thing. But it's such an honest question. It's such a candid question. It telegraphs authenticity that you want the truth. Otherwise, you wouldn't ask such a bold question. And that's another one where if you catalog all those surprises, whether they're positive or negative, My recommendation is always just take the biggest piece of data, the biggest insight. If you go to any other department with 5 insights, it's very difficult for anyone to digest. Which one are you going to hang your hat on as a team and catalog those? Which negative surprise, let's say, we were disappointed about X. Hey guys, this is, this is so prevalent that we had to bring it to you. We are obligated to bring it to you in the product team or whatever. And we want to talk to you about what it means and give you some color. We want to play you some clips of customers saying it in their own words. And we want to talk about what can be done. Because if you go to another team and say, you need to fix this, that's just a different conversation. That doesn't always get the same reaction. So going to them with data, one thing, maybe 2, Insights that they that that are gonna that are gonna change the outcome of the company, right? Not it's not just for account management. It's something and I'll give you a quick example. I had a client and they they were so good about jumping in and asking a lot of these questions. What's the biggest surprise? And that they got this answer over and over again. It happened to be a services company. The and and the answer was. You know, we, we, we were really surprised at how quickly you guys understood our business and then got started, started activating in market. I don't want to say what I can't give it away what it was. And I, and then I looked at my client's website and it said, we do ABC, like it was just a very flat generic. And I said, why don't you, if all your customers are saying how surprised they were, Maybe that's a differentiator that you should be featuring in your go-to-market. Like the website saying, you know, we'll get you XYZ faster or even a guarantee, something that speaks to your strength. And they really did embrace that and it really made a big difference in what they were doing. But that's an easy example that came from—

Put some of these insights on the website, you know, like, hey, let's go, let's go. Lean in, lean into it on the marketing. So on a practical note, Bob, the account management team is out there gathering this information. They're meeting with customers. What are the things that we can do, like process-wise or operationally, to make sure that this information is getting fed back to the company? Do you do steering committees on this? Is there like a global customer, you know, internal customer board? Or what's the cadence on these meetings? How If an account management leader is excited about this and they want to make sure that they're setting themselves up for success, do you recommend we're doing a quarterly meeting to present stuff on an individual customer basis, or are we just looking across the whole portfolio, or how can they formalize that process?

So, you're saying, let's say they embrace the idea of these 4 principles and they start asking the questions, how do they bring it to the rest of the company? You know, I think that it depends on the size of the company. I hate saying depends, but it depends on the complexity of the internal structure. I would say that the, you know, so here's what I tell people. I call it a customer listening tour. So the account management team is gonna do its job and, you know, grow accounts. And keep them, keep them and grow them and upsell, etc. But along the way, they're going to be asking some of these questions. And the listening tour is simply taking 2 of these questions that I teach that are on this cheat sheet. And as you said, just use them in your next meeting and do it in every meeting for 3 weeks with every customer. That's a listening tour, right? It's for— it's not to help you close the deal. It's to help you gather insight. And tell the company, tell one team or tell somebody, hey, we're doing this listening tour. It's incorporated into our regular meetings. We're going to ask some kind of really big picture, kind of like really challenger questions. And in about a month, we want to meet and share what we learned. We don't know what we're going to learn, right? So you're not starting with an agenda. And then you just do it once, bring it to I'm always saying form a partnership with one other department. Like, don't try and get a cross-functional group together of mid-level managers. You know, come on. I mean, it's just hard. I've been in those meetings when I was in the corporate world. Everyone's got their turf. It doesn't help, you know, defeat the stovepipes or smokestacks, whatever you want to call them, silos. Form a partnership with one other team that what you've learned—

Like marketing, for example.

That's the biggest. Exactly. What you've learned in this listening tour, then you can say, oh, that needs to go to marketing. So we're going to invite marketing to a meeting and we're going to just share what I said before. There's some data. Here's what people said. Here are some clips of them saying it. Very important if you have customer clips. And I would always say, run the tran— if you record calls or call notes or CRM notes, Run them through generative AI. You'll be stunned by how, in many cases, how accurate and clinical and poignant and emotionless the feedback is. Because, you know, 'cause the reality is sometimes we only hear what we want to hear.

Yeah.

And GenAI hears, tends to hear the truth. Are there hallucinations?

Yes. So, I want to ask about something that you just said here. So, customer listening tour, I get it. Great idea. You know, we all want to be doing this as soon as we can to learn our customers better. Now, is this a separate meeting or is this the first 15 minutes or the last 15 minutes of a meeting? Like, how do I approach the customer about this?

So, again, in the course that I teach and the training, I have a few templates. One of them goes like this. It's an email that you would send to a customer before a meeting that you have scheduled next week. Hey, Adam, looking forward to next week. Just wanted to let you know that we'd love to, at the beginning, have a few minutes for a little bit of a step-back conversation. That's how I— that's what we phrase it as, step back.

At the beginning. So you're doing it first. You're not doing it at the end of the meeting. Claim the time.

Well, yeah, because then if you hear something that— you might hear something that changes the emphasis of which slides you need to show versus the ones you don't. It might impact the talk track. But yeah, so it doesn't have to be 15 minutes either. It could be just 5 or 10 and just say, we'd love to take a step back with you, ask some— understand some bigger picture questions about your business. It's painless, I promise. And then, and then, then we have our agenda. No one has ever— I've never gotten the feedback that that's been declined by a customer unless there's a burning issue on the table that the customer says, why are you asking me for a step back when you haven't delivered this other thing that we're dying to have? And you know it, we're pissed off.

Sure.

So, so yeah, so it's a simple template. You don't even need my template. You can just use what I just said. We'd love to have a step back. A few minutes to sit back because then when you ask the board question, they're not surprised. It's like, hey, as I mentioned, we wanted to take a step back and ask some bigger picture questions that might not have anything to do with us. Here's the first one. So let me ask about your board.

So, and I think it's really important to iterate, this doesn't need to be a separate meeting and don't leave this to the end. So don't leave this to the end because meetings, you know, start late, run late, you know, then you wind yourself trying to do all this in like 3 minutes. So, make sure you carve out the time at the beginning. So, as an account manager, maintain the courage and the discipline to start the meeting with this. Don't put it off and hope that you're going to get there at the end of the meeting. Do it right up front. Another question I've got for you, Bob, is on follow-up. So, one of the things that everybody hates about NPS, one of the things that everyone hates about just general customer satisfaction surveys is there's no sense of closing the loop. There's no sense of, I heard you, and therefore here's what we're doing about it. What are your recommendations when I'm on a listening tour, I'm getting all this information? Tell us about how do we follow up with the customer? What's the cadence there? What do we need to be committing to? Does that go into our account plan? Like, how do we do the follow-up based on the things that we've learned?

Well, so I will say that that gets into an area where I can talk— I'm happy to talk about that. But I think that every company is so different in the way they want to do this that I don't have a best practice to say.

You've got to do it. You've got to do follow-up. That's non-negotiable, I assume.

You know, here's a strange thing. Here's what I hear very much. By the end of a discovery conversation I have— so I do a lot of these listening tours for my clients. Hey, Bob, come in and talk to 20 of our customers and then write up a report. What's on their mind? What's important? Where's the business headed? At the end of a lot of these conversations, which are about 30 minutes with my clients' customers, the customer thanks me. So they just gave me their time and they thanked me. I am always curious. I say, oh, I should be thanking you. Why are you thanking me? Well, you know, I just really felt like these questions were different than we usually hear. I felt like we were— we got much more in depth. than we usually do. And honestly, we don't have vendor conversations like this where we get to talk about what's most important to us. So thanks.

Mm-hmm.

Okay, I'll pass that along to the people that hired me. You're welcome. And what I think that means is, like many things in life, including, I'm sure, people's relationships, people will remember that you made them feel heard and understood more so than the substance. I think, I'm not saying the substance isn't important, I'm saying that the main priority is to leave the customer feeling like this was a different conversation. I was able to express some things. These guys seem authentically curious about what's going on in my business. Now, the follow-up is, and I think what you can do in the beginning is say, look, I'm going to tell you right now, we may talk about some things. I mean, hopefully, you know, you'll be very candid with me. I'm not here to collect a list of things to fix. Like, I can't promise you that we're going to fix everything, but I can promise you that these kind of conversations are what great businesses do to get better and make sure they're getting better. And then, of course, if there's one big thing I keep mentioning, the global capabilities or the reporting, you know, if you hear that and it's a big deal to them, then you have to figure out how to get back to them on it. But You can't, as an account manager, there's nothing you can tell them if you know it's not on the roadmap.

Okay, so we're responding to the data that we're learning, we're understanding what's coming from the customer, some of it is going to be action item follow-up appropriate, some of it is not. And in the most case, the benefit comes from the customer simply being, simply expressing themselves and their needs.

Well, so that sounds very soft. And I did say that. So I just want to emphasize, you said something really important, like we don't know what the action items are going to be yet because we don't know what we're going to hear from everybody. And obviously, you know, we're obligated to talk to, you know, a big swath of our customer base and find out what's important to people. But I know for a fact it does start with Leaving the customer feeling heard, and that's what they'll remember. Put it together in a very simple format with customer clips and tell the rest of the company or, you know, the right department. And then that way you can actually feel confident on customer calls that you can impact things, you know, instead of just saying, yeah, I'll check and see where that is on the list.

Now, I got 2 more questions before we wrap here, Bob. First is, we can all imagine the scenario where it's very easy to have this conversation. The customer's open, they've got the ideas, they've got insights, they're willing to share. We can also equally imagine the scenario where you walk in there and the customer isn't opening up, or they don't know, or they pretend, or they say they don't want to share, or they're somehow resistant, or there's more friction in there. How do we deal with it? with a customer who just doesn't want to open up?

Well, first of all, I'll say that if you position the request the right way in advance and they say, sure, we can have a step-back conversation, and then at the beginning of the call you say, as you might remember, I asked if we could have some bigger picture step-back time, then It's unusual for them to not have anything to say unless there's a problem somewhere that they're not indicating. So it's your job then to find out, is there is there something else we should be talking about? Or we can just launch into the agenda. You're not a can opener. Your job is not to pry them open. Like if they can't and won't, they won't. I'm just saying it doesn't happen if you've done it. If you've set it up the right way, it just shouldn't happen unless there's a problem that they haven't expressed. I had one client. Unfortunately, tell me like, "Hey, we did the listening tour and it was it didn't go well." Oh, well, tell me. You know, I always have to say like, I can react to that emotionally, but instead I'll say like, "Take me through what happened and what." Well, we started the meeting by introducing our new pricing price increase, and I and you know, okay, and I'm quiet. I'm just listening. I'm on mute. You know, listening to my client, and they got finished, and I said, "Well." My guess is that it seems like if I were a customer, as soon as I hear a price increase, the rest of anything else you say is— there's no oxygen left for that. Like, you can ask me questions all day long. All I'm going to be thinking about is that price increase, which I didn't know about till today. And it sounds simple and basic, but that's what happened. And, you know, I think it was an honest error on their part, as they acknowledged later. But, but usually I had one out of the 2,800-ish calls I've done. I had one guy, the CFO of a hedge fund, notoriously busy and kind of gruff. And I started the call and he— and I asked the board question. He said, hold on. He said, I thought this was just a regular old, like, customer satisfaction call, like a survey. I can answer like 1 to 10, how happy am I? But that's— that question you just asked me requires me to actually think. And devote some energy to this, and I'm— I can't do that right now. And I said, well, you— thank you for telling me that instead of me trying to like keep pushing. And also, you just actually complimented the methodology without realizing it, because yes, we are trying to get people to think, and I'm happy to reschedule. And he said thank you, and then we hung up. So that it— and, and he got a message that said, hey, can we have a step back? You know, just didn't work.

Just didn't work that one time, but But if we prep it properly, if we're clear about the expectations going in, then the customer in most cases, what I hear you saying, in most cases, they'll be willing then to engage and to have that conversation. Let me ask another thing that I'm sure is on everyone's mind when they're listening to this, which is, hey, Bob, this all sounds like a great idea, but I've got 25 customers in my portfolio. I've got short-term revenue goals to hit. I've got QBRs to do. I've got renewals to to get done. I've got a million other things to do. How do I find the time or how do I balance what is obviously valuable but time, like a lot of time commitment goes into this. How do I balance that? How do I find the time for this given all the other obligations I have?

Well, I would question the— I would suggest that there are some ways to treat these so-called obligations as Hmm, why do we do it that way? I'll give you an example. Why do we have 30 slides? Why do we hold onto those slides like gold nuggets and don't reveal them until the beginning of the meeting? Why don't we send them in advance? And with a 2-minute Loom video that says, hey, here's what we wanna talk about. There's 20 slides, but we don't need to go through all of them. Here are the 3 things we wanna talk about most. Another thing is stop doing lengthy introductions of the 6 people that you brought to the meeting. Because that takes 10 minutes. Like, so there's a lot of waste. There's a lot of stuff that you do because it's muscle memory. The customer gets no value to the customer. The customer does not see value in just, oh, I see the slides at the beginning of the meeting and now I get to react fresh to each one of them. Who cares? They want to— if they want to watch the slides and the Loom video at 11 PM the night before, let them do that. What's the big deal? So some people say, oh, well, if we don't hold on to the insights until the meeting, they won't show up to the meeting. Well, guess what? That's not a very good excuse to, you know, you're kind of holding the slides hostage, you know, to get the customer to the meeting. So there are ways to do that. But I would also say you can ask one really good question and get them to talk for 5 minutes and get great insights. So it does not have to be a full sort of invasive discovery conversation that's going to take up a lot of the meeting. But look, I go back to the beginning. You and I agree customers don't do a great job of understanding what's really most important to their customers. So someone's got to do it. Someone's got to be the ear of the vendor. You'll find that if you can give up some of the routine things you do about the way you handle slides and hold on to them and lengthy meeting introductions and blah, blah, blah, You'll find that there's plenty of time. That's my experience.

Great. Awesome. Well, hey, Bob, this has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you for opening up about understanding that there's not just the voice of the customer, there's also the ear of the vendor. And the most important thing here is building a relationship and making sure that the customer feels heard. So really appreciate your radically authentic discovery method. And thanks for joining us here on Account Management Secrets. Great to see you.

My pleasure. Thank you so much for the opportunity, Alex.

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