Stop Asking "Would You Renew?" Ask This Instead ft. Bob London

There are questions that are more appropriate towards renewal. And this question I've been told by numerous CS leaders is the best predictor they have of risk and churn. So I accidentally came up with a question that gives them that level of insight.

Yeah, I want that. I was just going to say, I didn't want to cut you off, but I really wanted to hear the renewal question. But the typical question that I would think that most people would think would be, if your renewal were tomorrow, would you renew? Right? That's it, right? That's what everybody would guess. And that's what LinkedIn would tell you. Okay.

I'm sorry. That's not a very— I'm going to I'm going to poop on that for a second. I know that people use that question. You're putting the customer on the spot. You're saying, tell me something I want to hear. Tell me, you know, and confront me with the truth. If so, I'm going to give you an alternative.

You're listening to Unchurned, brought to you by the Gainsight Podcast Network. Subscribe to our Substack at unchurned.gainsight.com, where we go deep on every episode, like how one post-sales team at Cloudbeds built over 150 AI agents. That story and more at unchurned.gainsight.com. Hello, everybody. Welcome to this episode of Unchurned. I'm your host, Josh Schachter, Senior Vice President of Strategy and Go-to-Market Development at Gainsight. And I'm very excited to be here with a community industry friend that I've known for several years, Bob London. Bob is the— oh geez, Bob, we've rehearsed the title we were going to give you, Chief Listening Officer, but it's not that. It's a customer discovery and listening expert.

Yes, I respond to either. Chief Listening Officer seems to be sticky, so I don't mind that.

I like it. I mean, everybody needs to be listening these days, right? You got the whole 2 ears, one mouth thing.

Especially these days, yes.

Especially these days, yeah, yeah. We had, I'm going to jump right into it here. We had Adnan Rahman, who is the head of Global Customer Success and Partner Success at Paycor on the show about a month or two ago, and he was talking to me about some really cool stuff that he's done as part of a transformation in his team to bring a value realization framework into the fold. And during that conversation, he mentioned your name. He's like, oh, we brought on Bob. We brought on the Chief Listening Officer, as it were.

Cool.

And I was like, oh, I know that guy. I know Bob. Come on. Like, we go back from my Update AI days, and I know all the amazing stuff that he does with companies. So, Let's get him on the show and let's talk about like the cool stuff that you did with Paycor and with other folks. Walk me back to when Adnan reached out to you. He presumably had a problem or had a growth opportunity. What was that?

Good question. First of all, thank you for having me. Really, really appreciate the opportunity. And I think it's smart to do what you did of creating through lines between episodes. I just, I don't see many people doing that. And I think that's good for, For viewers and listeners. So if I took Adnan's, if I went back and looked at his sort of filling out the lead form, I guess, for me to put it in crass commercial terms, it said something like, the team needs to get better at having more strategic open-ended conversations to understand how customers define value on their terms. Now I'm injecting a little bit of my wording in there because I've been fortunate enough to put my wording out there enough that people, when they fill out the lead form, they've responded to the idea that I present that their team— I'm going to read from his recent LinkedIn, Adnan's recent LinkedIn post. He said, for years I've told my teams to be more strategic. It was a mistake, which I don't know where he came up with that hook, but it was pretty hooky. That's not direction or leadership. It's just pressure with no path. We did something about it. And somewhere in there he mentions The work we did together. So if I took all the lead forms that I've ever gotten and put them into ChatGPT and said, give me one abstract for all of them, it's kind of what it would say. It's like the team is comfortable talking about product solutions below the line. They're not confident or curious enough, or probably both, to ask the customer, make the conversation, as Adnan said, stop talking about our products, start talking about their business. the customer's business. And his value realization framework was a reason, um, that to, to, to look for ways to have more strategic conversations. And I'm thrilled that they landed on me.

What do you think was the symptom of that? Like he, he, how do you think he knew that the team had problems talking above the line to, to leaders in the buying circle?

Well, first of all, I mean, the first thing that comes to mind is This customer doesn't seem healthy, or we're predicting churn. Why? And the diagnosis of that, which sometimes is an autopsy after the fact, is that we just simply didn't understand value the way the customer defines value. So I, that sounds so basic to me, but I also understand that that's how we're trained, many, in many CS teams and even sales teams. is to push what we offer and to define value the way we were told to define it in some training. And it doesn't really leave room for the customer to express how they define value on their terms.

So if you're a leader that's listening here and that all makes sense and you want to shake things up a little bit, you want to help customers define value on their terms and help our teams listen to them very intently. What's the first thing that you have to do to disrupt the current patterns of how you're operating?

So, um, that's a really good question. The first thing you have to do is talk about the— there's a mindset shift that, hey, I'll channel sort of a VP of CS. Again, it could be sales too, but in this case, CS. I'll channel what I think I hear and what they should say is, hey team, um, we've asked you, just like Adnan, we've asked you to be more strategic. We haven't really showed you how to do that. And so the mindset shift we want you to have is that customers are actually really pleased and open when you ask what's going on in their business, and they're less enthused and engaged when you try to push adoption stats or metrics or product updates. And so let's use that opportunity that customers are so engaged when you ask about them Not a new concept. It goes back to Dale Carnegie and Socrates, you know, to be interesting, be interested in other people. And we leadership are going to give you the tools to do that. The tools being how to sort of shift your mindset, how to ask more strategic questions, how to pause and catch yourself from pivoting back to your agenda too quickly. These are all things that I talk about all the time and how to stay, try to stay anchored in what the customer said is the company priority all the way up to, if you can, the board level. So you can see how your value aligns, not just with the person with whom you're speaking, the customer contact, but with who may leave or change, but their business. And that's how you do it. So that's what leaders start with, the mind shift, and then they shift to the, okay, you understand the mind shift we're trying to accomplish and why. Here are the tools. And that's generally where I get involved. Well, I'm helping with the mindset too.

Yeah. What are the types of, I mean, where should we start here? I want to, I want to give some tactical value to folks that are listening. Like what are the types of questions that they should be teaching their teams or you lead me here? Like how do they get going with this?

Yeah, I'll, I'll give a couple examples and I want everyone to imagine an inverted pyramid. So the It doesn't matter if the conversation is a 30-minute discovery conversation or a 5-minute beginning of a QBR or other meeting. Inverted pyramid, big and open-ended conversation at the top. It gets more narrow as you go down the questions. So a question I always ask, and I frame it and I teach it this way, and you'll hear why in a minute, that you have to, you can't just jump in with a big picture question because they're not used to it. They do like it, but they're not used to it. So you say, as we begin the call, we found that our most successful customer relationships and longest-standing customer relationships, periodically we take a step back with them. We take a step back. We're going to talk about the day-to-day, no, as always, and we're going to make sure everything's going well towards your value expectations. But can we just take a step back for 5 or 10 minutes here in the beginning? Sure. No one ever says no to that unless there's a problem that's unresolved that they're like, why do you want to take a step back when X is broken? So you can—

Because when you say that, by the way, when I, what I hear, like there's an emotionally, what I hear, how I feel, I should say, is like you care more. It's like, let's not rush forward and be an aggressive salesperson and try to chase this down. Let's take a step back, take a deep breath, like really try to hear each other. That's, that's kind of emotionally what I feel when you say that.

I'm sorry, you are such a good interviewer and such a good listener. I had to say that. So, um, yes, 100%. But you're also signaling to the customer that you don't just see them as, you're my customer and I have to squeeze stuff out of you. You're signaling to them by asking that question that they are a human being just trying to do a good job, get some recognition because they've connected what they do to something that's important to the business at the, at the C-suite level, right? I mean, that's the only reason they're drawing a, your customer draws a salary is because they're supposed to deliver something, contribute something. When the customer feels like, oh, they're not just, they're not just here to ask me things that they need, you know, uh, renewals and yes, how can we drive adoption? I don't know that they're, you're here to help them achieve what's important to them. And that is what you said. It's the human shift into seeing them more holistically to use a word from, you know, um, sort of a, I don't know what that is. Holistic. Some people think is a too fuzzy kumbaya word. I like it.

Eastern medicine, Chinese medicine. I don't know, wherever it's from. Yeah.

Thank you. For some reason I was thinking of something different, but yes, Chinese medicine, Eastern. So, you You're just seeing them as a human being trying to get their job done just like you are. So the step back does that, I think. And the first question really does it, which is, okay, 30,000 feet. If I could sneak into your next board meeting or your last board meeting or executive leadership meeting, what do you think would be the big topic of conversation that's being discussed? It could be a priority, a challenge, a mission. It could be a goal. What's the one big thing you think we'd hear? Or if I could sneak in, what would I hear? And they kind of go, whoa, first of all, this is not a normal vendor I'm talking to, you know, which is good because you want to differentiate the experience that you're giving them. And also because you're curious about what's important to them, as I said before. So you're doing 2 things with that question. You're disarming them because they're not forced to sort of like, okay, let's go through the adoption stats. Not that there's anything wrong with it. I know I keep rolling my eyes, but the typical stuff we need from customers. You're disarming them because you're asking about them and you're differentiating from other CSMs or sellers or vendors. The second thing is what the answer you're going to get could be the first dot in a series of dots you can connect to the value that they need you to deliver. What's important to the business at the strategic level? And then the next question would be, what's difficult about your job in achieving that? Like, what's in the way for you? And then how do we fit into your equation? 1, 2, 3. It's very simple. And, um, so I can give you more questions, but that first board question really seems to set the tone for a conversation that's more open. It's more, I'll use the word customer-centric, even though I hate that term, but the customer feels it just the way you did. The step-back conversation, board level, I know there are people listening who will say, my customer doesn't sit in on the board meeting. It doesn't matter. You're asking them what they think I would hear if I snuck in. Generally speaking, they have a relevant, insightful answer, and then you can go from there and bring it down to their realm, as I said, and you can say, all right, so if that's the, if that's what's happening at the company level, how has that changed or impacted what you need to deliver? in the next 6 months and make it more personal and relevant to them.

What I like about that, that board question is a couple things. So it's, you paint the scene, you're not just saying what are the top priorities of the company right now? You're, they're closing their eyes and now they're sitting on that mahogany desk or whatever, right? They're in the room, which allows them to be much more concrete. And I also think that you're, empowering them, flattering them, whatever you want to call it. People like, oh, he wants to, he thinks that I have some insight into what the board is talking about. Like, that's cool. I'm only quote unquote a director, but you know, but yeah, okay, let me tell you what I think the board is talking about from what I understand, right? Like, I think you put them up a little bit on a pedestal, which is in a very good way. So I really like the words, words are powerful. And I think those words that you use operatively are very powerful.

Well, customers seem to feel it, uh, as you, as you did. They feel empowered, they feel disarmed, and it's not manipulative. It really, uh, because you're, you're, you're not trying to just flatter them. You're trying to say, I see you as a whole human being.

Yeah.

Again, I'll repeat, trying to get your job done, feel good about it. And by the way, sometimes I even tell them, imagine this conversation's gonna be sort of an inverted pyramid. Like I've found that there are ways to just, Be very explicit with them about what you're going to ask. And I've, it's not just me doing this. I've taught thousands of people the same approach and gotten fantastic results and feedback from that. But telling them, you know, for example, that, hey, in the beginning of this QBR, I'm going to, would love to take a step back. And if you don't mind, I'm just going to go into listen mode. Like, just tell them. And you say, you might even see me on mute. It's not because I'm multitasking. It's because I really want to focus on what you're saying and I want to respond and ask questions in a relevant way. That it's a very human thing to do. And as long as humans are having customer and prospect conversations, we need to get good at that stuff.

What's the lifecycle and the, or the meeting type for specific, speaking specifically around CS that you would ask this question?

Well, the way I answer that with clients is I say, let's try this. Let's, so we do a workshop and then the team is kind of forced to go out into the cold world and ask these questions and use the listening techniques. And once they come back, we get a better sense of which questions work at what parts of the lifecycle. But there are questions that are more appropriate for a kickoff. Uh, onboarding. There are questions that are more appropriate towards renewal. And I'm, when you're ready, I'll give you an example of one of those.

Yeah, I want that. I was just going to say, I didn't want to cut you off, but I really wanted to hear the renewal question, but whenever you're ready, I'll throw it back at you. Awesome.

So, and this question I've been told by numerous CS leaders is the best predictor they have of risk and churn. So I accidentally came up with a question that gives them that level of insight. The question is, so, and it, this is, I'm doing it this way because I'm pretty conversational. So—

By the way, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to set up a straw man for you before you say what this like golden bullet is and you release this on the world. Uh, the typical question that I would think that most people would think would be, if your renewal were tomorrow, would you renew? Right? That's it, right? That's what everybody would guess. And that's what LinkedIn would tell you. Okay.

I'm sorry. That's not a very, I'm going to, I'm gonna poop on that for a second. I know that people use that question. You're putting the customer on the spot. You're saying, tell me something I want to hear. Tell me, you know, and confront me with the truth. If so, I'm gonna give you an alternative. Okay? The alternative is, um, and it's very much in the spirit of the board question you'll hear in a minute. So, hey customer, um, if you, let's just say you got a call or an outreach from one of our competitors. Uh, tomorrow. On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you react? A 1 is you would ignore it, delete the message. A 10 is you'd make a point of getting back to them for whatever reason. And all they have to do is give you a number. Now, for those people listening to this and freaking out because Bob London said you should raise the word competitor, um, number one, the answers they give have nothing to do with competition. Um, the answer has to do with authenticity. And so they, all they have to do is give you a number. If you just take a guess, Josh, of the, so I've done 3,000 discovery conversations and I've taught this all over the world. What do you think the average number is that customers say, my clients' customers and other customers say, what do you think the average number is? One is they ignore it.

And just to confirm, the question is if a competitor, it's not, you don't have to name a specific competitor, but if a competitor reached out to you and you said one is what? One is no chance.

One is you ignore it. And a 10 is you get back to them for any reason.

And I think you're, you asked me to take a guess and I think you're probably, you know, the suggestion is that it's higher than I would probably think. So that's playing into my calculus here. I'm going to guess it's an 8.

Oh, wow. Holy crap. Excuse me. It's close to a 7, but most teams are scared by that. So when they hear 7, They go, oh, well, what are we doing wrong? Or what's the problem? Let me tell you, the right approach is you hear 7 or 8 and you say, thank you for being candid. Number one, appreciate your candor. Can you tell me what's behind that number? Okay. And I'll paraphrase and ab— I'll abstract what I hear. You know, we're not looking around. If we got a call from a competitor, You know, I'm one customer, one person using one solution for one use case inside of one business. I have no context for other great ways to do my job, other capabilities that are out there, other, just other methods, best practices. So if a competitor calls, sometimes I look at them as a source without committing anything to them. I look at them as a source for insight to help me do my job better. It's as simple as that. So that's, that's, I'm abstracting the typical answer. And then you have a chance to say, the second follow-up is, again, really appreciate the candor. And, you know, tell me, is there something a competitor might bring up in their outreach or in a conversation that would just be a real head-turner for you? Like, whoa, I haven't heard that. I haven't heard of anyone solving that problem. I haven't heard about that capability before. Is there anything like that? And don't lead them, just put that there. And then they'll say, well, you know, we are expanding globally and I know your platform was supposed to be global. It was on the roadmap, but we haven't heard about it in a while. So I think there's some curiosity there about what's going on, but they'll give you the gap. What's the gap between where they are now and where their curiosity has taken them? But they also say, If I talk to a competitor, I'm not really that interested in switching. So I'd probably come back to you and say, Josh, if you were the CSM, Josh, I've kind of got my ear to the ground, or I went to a conference and someone was talking about ABC capability, and I know you and I have talked about this. I don't think it's on the roadmap. Where are you guys with that? It's really becoming important to us.

Yeah.

The, a last comment. The reason I said it's similar to the board question, all the questions have a word in them that triggers something in the customer's brain that says, that question's about my world, not the vendor's world. The board, it happens in the customer's world. Competitors, a lot of times they'll start their answer by saying, just happened yesterday. Like they get calls, they get outreach, they're on email lists, they go to webinars. So by asking questions that feel like they're about the customer's world and not our world, it's just, it's like an unbelievable, you know, it breaks open a lot of insight. It just cracks it, you know.

It makes the types of questions, I don't know the proper label to use in a design thinking type of construct, but the types of questions that you're asking, the way you're asking them, It goes back to painting a scene for that person rather than asking the generic question. So, when I was working at BCG and we were doing a lot of design thinking, user research, we would ask questions like, I don't know, how often do you do X? And how often are you stuck in the— to take our example, Bob, for a half hour, go, how often are you stuck in the waiting room on a Zoom call and you can't get in? Whatever, fine. Oh, every other month it happens. Okay, fine.

Yeah.

Um, but it's not, that's not, it's like, okay, great. Well, then tell me the last time that that happened. Like, give me that situation. Yours is a little reversed. You're, you're talking about like hypothetical, but it's the same type of thing. It allows somebody to like kind of close their eyes and think about the scene, whether it's a real scene or it's a hypothesized fictitious scene. And I think there's a power in that.

I love that. I'm going to probably steal that, the painting the scene. But the key is, as long as you're painting a scene that the customer relates to really strongly. The reason I say that is one of the other questions that's at the board level is, so have you ever gotten an email from finance saying they need a bullet point for a slide for the board pre— the next board meeting? And you get that email the day before and like, oh my God, yes, it's happened recently. And that gives you a chance to say, well, what is your contribution to the board meeting? Like, what would that bullet point be about? You don't have to ask. So the scene you're painting is their scene, not yours. So it's not a scenario that's leading towards you. Right.

It's not, it's not, tell me, tell me a situation in which you would love to use this new feature. It's right. It's exactly. Okay. I get what you're saying. How do I, I don't know. Listen, I don't know what your cost structure is. You know, you go to a team, they're going to work with you. They're going to, or just, they're going to invest their own time and efforts into creating better listeners and better conversationalists in that sense. How do they measure the ROI on asking better questions, getting better answers, having better conversations that ultimately drive more value realization?

Yeah, and that's always a good question and a challenge when you're talking about enablement, behavior change, and measurement. So I think, and I had this conversation with Adnan and his team at Paycor after I saw the Unchurned episode where he talked about this. And one thing that they, so there's 2 things. The ROI only happens when there's adoption and an embrace of the methodology that the behavior changes. So I always joke that, and it's, I think it's in my proposal, it says, At the end, it says these methodologies do not adopt themselves. Like, we're going to have to work on this. I'm here to help, but you have, you as a leader have to incorporate the methodology and elements of the methodology into your one-on-ones, into your team meetings. You can do an incentive or recognition around this behavior. You put keyword, measure key, track keywords in Gong. For example. So there will be no ROI or measurable ROI unless you're doing things on the front end after the workshops, after the coaching to track and make sure people are doing it. And it's, you could call it babysitting or handholding, but once the funny thing is once the CSMs do it, and this is what I heard from Adnan and his team, then they like, oh yeah, this is the part of the job I really wanted to do, but I've been too busy. And so you're also taking them away from some of the firefighting, Stuff. Then the question of ROI comes. Okay. And this is a question I ask everyone. If the CFO, if I ask the CFO what they need the ROI to be, what would they, how would they measure it? How would they do it? And I think that I'm most confident saying that if you just use, if you compile anecdotes, so what I do is not cheap, but it's also not hard to generate ROI with 3, avoiding 3 surprise churns, uh, or being able to rescue and, uh, prevent surprise churn, uh, just simply identifying it, the risk, um, expansion opportunities. It only takes a couple of those. So if a team is 20 people and 4 of them achieve one of those things, the ROI is gonna be really positive.

Yeah.

But it's, it is hard to track the, the beha— on the behavior side, the last thing, it's not ROI, but it's, it is sort of measuring behavior change. AI has been a game changer. So now I have a custom GPT trained on my methodology and on the backend, I use that to do call assessments. And it does it, it would take me 2 hours per transcript. And I'm not sure that's the work I actually want to do anyway. So I have this tool that I created. It's been extensively trained on my methodology. And it gives a really rich, accurate, detailed, helpful coaching summary scorecard with a timeline that says, hey, at 21 minutes, the customer said this. Look at what you said next. Were you really digging into what the customer said or were you starting a new thread? And then the third, that's column 1 is what the customer said. Column 2 is what you said. Column 3 is, um, the RAD, Radically Authentic Discovery is the method. It's the rad coaching point. Like, here's what you probably should say next time in that kind of situation. So by batching the transcripts before the training and running a, an abstracted report on 10 or 15 transcripts, and then doing the same thing later after the training, you can get a pretty good sense of how things have improved.

Yeah.

Showing up in the numbers is harder. Everyone knows that.

How'd you get into all this, Bob?

I got very lucky in the sense that I was, um, so I, first part of my career, I was a marketing manager up to CMO, and then I became a fractional CMO. I didn't like the corporate world. I never liked the corporate world. I can admit that.

Oh, it's so much fun though. Yeah.

So, um, I remember the unfun parts more than the fun parts. And, uh, so I hit, sort of hit a ceiling and became a consultant. Well, I got fired. We'll just say what it is. It is what it is. And it turned out that I was much more gratified and fulfilled by doing the thing. So in the corporate world, I would say, guys, we're here in a conference room in Centreville, Virginia, 8 of us. We are all from the same demographic and we're trying to figure out how to market this product in Malaysia. The answer is not in this room. And not only did I get tired of saying it, I got Tired of, like, I thought it was going to be a Hollywood moment where the skies would open and the angels would sing and Bob's right. Everyone would follow me. And I just didn't have the, that wasn't me, right? So on my own, I could kind of decide how to do engagements where we're going to take the customer and dive into their world. And as a fractional CMO, I'm not going to, do an engagement on strategy and brand and positioning unless we do that first. And it turned out I really loved doing the customer interviews and I've done 3,000, as I may have mentioned. And then one day I was introduced by JMI Equity, which is a private equity firm that they backed Churn Zero, they backed Benevity, they backed, I think, Conga and a number of others, Open Sesame. I just, Many. These are, those are the ones I've worked with. And they were having an event and they said, you should meet our operating expert for customer success. And I'm thinking, what is customer success? This was 6 years ago. Who is that? It's Jay Nathan. So that's how I met Jay. He put me on stage and helped me understand what CS was and why they needed these skills. I didn't have a training offering at that time. I didn't even know I had a methodology. And so that's how I got into it. And I think I'm going to be just very candid and say that every year has gotten more satisfying. Like I didn't, I thought I was really good at marketing. Okay. But you sort of work with a company and there's no guarantee they're going to adopt what you're recommending. So then I had some services to kind of drive adoption of positioning, brand, whatever. But this is different. This is kinetic. I'm sitting with a team. I'm seeing the mystery behind their eyes when I tell them about the mindset shift. I tell them about these questions. I see that they're like, competitor? Why would we ask that? Seeing the light bulbs go off, seeing the behavior change is the most gratifying thing I've ever done. Ever.

I love that. I love that. You sound very self-actualized. I don't know if that's a word, but it sounds like you—

Eastern holistic. medicine.

That's exactly—

I don't know what that means, but I do feel fortunate. I do feel fortunate. I mean, it's not a 100% bed of roses, but if you, if you like, if you like the kind of professional life where you seek out what you're really good at based on other people's feedback and you're able to do that work and make the right living, yeah, it's pretty good.

Bob London, expert, over 20-year expert in how to have more effective, more strategic, more valuable conversations with your customers. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Thank you. And thank you for what you're doing in the community. Interviewing Adnan was a huge, like, wow moment for me. And I'm glad we were able to make this work and you're, you're doing great service to the community, Josh. Thank you.

Thanks. Thanks, Bob.