Want to know your target audience’s “truth”? Can you handle it? These real-world, unfiltered perspectives will open your eyes—and open up new growth opportunities for your business. Based on in-depth, one-on-one Agenda-Less Listening conversations with more than 1,200 B2B decision-makers.

Here’s the link.

Why is no email registration required? Because asking for your email creates a non-customer-friendly barrier between you and this content. And I believe these rants and insights are so important, I want every B2B CEO, CMO, CRO and Customer Support/Success executive to read and (hopefully) share them. Without any obligation to receive follow up messages–unless of course they request a follow up.

Happy reading.

Bob London, CEO, Chief Listening Officers

We all spend a lot of time–much of it in grueling brainstorming sessions–debating, honing and delivering OUR messages. From our perspective. Based on what’s in our own brains. (Sometimes I worry that we’re continually brainstorming only because we’ve become addicted to that sickly sweet smell of DRI-ERASE Markers!)

Want to know what THEY–your target audience–are REALLY thinking? What’s on THEIR wish list?

Here you go:

9 Actionable Insights from In-Depth Conversations with 1,200+ B2B Decision-Makers

1. Understand—or at least ask me about—my goals.
2. Stop trying to upsell me before you’ve even solved one problem really well.
3. Am I doing this right? What are industry best practices?
4. Educate me on what’s coming next.
5. Make more useful content available on your web site. Less fluff.
6. Send me an SME instead of a sales person.
7. Stop saying you’re my “partner,” and find tangible ways to align with my interests.
8. Explain your sweet spot without saying things you competitors also say.
9. Be in touch when you don’t need anything.

(Click on the image below for a larger, printable version to post in your office.)

Feel free to contact me any time at 240 994 7644 or bob@chieflisteningofficers.com to discuss how these insights apply to your specific priorities and challenges.

And remember: Burn the Whiteboard! Stop Brainstorming, Get Out of the Office and Ask Customers Questions Your Competitors Aren’t Asking.  Get a detailed playbook at www.customerrediscovery.com.

I had a wonderful experience doing a talk/workshop with a group of CEOs, courtesy of Lee Self’s Renaissance Executive Forum. We discussed the importance of discovering the customers’ Elevator Rant (every customer has one!) and the method for doing this, Agenda-Less Listening.

The group was incredibly interactive and creative in their understanding and interpretations of the content. These are the best workshops–when the teacher learns something new to make the next workshop better.

Thanks all!

 

I’m pleased to introduce yet another company that has adopted and benefited from the “Agenda-less Listening” approach.

After hosting me at her EO Forum Retreat, Sabina Gault, founder of Los Angeles, CA-based Konnect Agency, embraced the need to ask current, former and prospective clients some disruptive, thought provoking questions, then let them talk about what THEY think is important and just…LISTEN!

Congrats to Konnect’s Christina MacKinnon, who led the process and whose excellent listening skills and judgement led to critical insights. Perhaps her most memorable comment: “I was surprised how much people wanted to talk to me…how they were ready to talk to me.”

Konnect Agency  is a national PR firm whose clients include Krave, FatBurger, Dave & Busters, AMF.

And here’s the full interview (9 minutes):

If you haven’t looked at the data Facebook has collected on you, I suggest you do so immediately.

Here’s what I learned about myself:

1. I searched for information about my sons girlfriend—to verify if she was Jewish.
2. I clicked on pictures of a competitor’s house to see if it’s worth more than mine.
3. I “liked” an ungodly and embarrassing number of koala bear videos.
4. The percent of Facebook friends I don’t actually know is 38%.
5. I’ve saved 21 hours by typing “HBD,” instead of “Happy Birthday.”
6. I’m being heavily retargeted by stool softeners.
7. It takes me an average of 0.6 seconds to click on a new notification.
8. Stormy Daniels refused my friend request–twice.

 

As marketers and sellers, we’re pretty excellent at pushing our own perspective out into the marketplace: Our messaging, our content, our pitch deck, our value prop. Perhaps this explains why the deluge of B2B content marketing and thought leadership has basically created a giant wall of noise between companies and their target audience.

What we don’t get enough of is the target audience’s perspective. What are decision-makers are really thinking about on the other side of that giant wall of noise we’re creating? How do they go through and perceive the buying process?

That’s what you’ll learn when you visit the How I Buy blog by a company called nudge.ai. Just go to https://nudge.ai/blog and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Interviewing a brand strategy firm can be tricky and frustrating.

It’s easy to get caught up in their animated, graphics-rich presentations (with file sizes so large they can’t simply be emailed to you after the meeting, they have to be Dropbox’d); shiny objects (their latest AR/AI/VR campaign); industry awards (“here’s our content marketer of the year award from the content marketing awards show, sponsored by the content marketing association”); and the introductions to team members with an artful array of job titles (Brady the design thinker, Seychelles the UX lead, Marianella the Instagram rockstar).

Sometimes you find yourself 20 minutes into a one-hour meeting wondering when the meeting’s going to start.

Here are some tips for your first meeting with a B2B brand strategy firm to ensure you get what you need–including one HUGE topic you absolutely need to ask about. (HINT: This post was inspired by getting some pretty blank looks when I asked several CEOs who recently embarked on rebranding or branding efforts, “Did the agency interview your customers?”)

Tips for Interviewing Brand Strategy Firms

1. Contact each agency via their web contact form. Someone should get back to you by the next business day. Deduct 2 points for every day after that. The person who contacts you should be a principal or partner. If it’s a lower level employee or business development person with no branding expertise, deduct 1 point.
2. Tell each agency the initial meeting is 45 minutes, while marking your team’s calendar for an hour. That should focus everyone on getting to the point, while allowing for 15 minutes of overtime. If an agency squawks that they really need 90 minutes, deduct 1 point and tell them you’re interested in a conversation, not a dog an pony show. If the agency still shows up with a massive slide deck, deduct 3 more points.
3. Some agencies like to bring numerous staff members in an attempt to demonstrate something called “bench strength.” This only wastes time on introductions and micro-digressions on non-critical topics (have you tried Snapchat filters!??!). Encourage agencies to bring 2 – 3 representatives max and deduct 1 point for every additional staffer.
4. Start the meeting by asking why companies do or don’t choose them. Deduct 1 point every time they mention, “people,” “service” or “creative.” Add a point for “sales,” “revenue,” “ROI” or “business objectives.”
5. When they list their full range of capabilities, ask how many they are great at. Deduct 1 point for each capability they say they’re great at beyond 3.
6. Ask about their staff experience. Deduct 1 point if the average number of years out of college is below 10 and 1 point if their staff’s aggregate experience is less than 25% on the client side.
7. Now, here’s the 800 lb. gorilla:
   • Count how many minutes before they ask about your customers’ problems, priorities, perceptions and preferences–or talk about their process for gaining insights into your target audience. The over/under is 7. Add a point for every minute below that and deduct 1 for every minute over.
   • Ask which agency executive will lead the customer insights process and which will lead brand strategy. It’s critical that nothing get lost in translation between insights and strategy, so if these are two different people, deduct 5 points. And don’t settle for having a less experienced staffer in charge of insights and strategy. If it’s not an agency principal, deduct 15 points.
   • If the agency doesn’t recommend interviewing customers and prospects, deduct 5 points. If the lead executive personally conducts the interviews, add 10 points.
   • Follow up by asking what percent of their total project hours, on average, goes into understanding your customers’ problems, priorities, perceptions and preferences vs. design. Deduct 1 point for every 10 points below 30%.

BOTTOM LINE: The only purpose of your brand is to make a rational and emotional connection with your target audience. Yet too many branding engagements give lip service to understanding the voice of the customer. Why? Because that’s not where agencies make most of their money. They want you to buy more profitable brand identity, web design, content marketing and digital campaigns, where they can bill out lower level staffers at high rates. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with this model, per se; but as always, it’s “Caveat Emptor.” If you’re hiring a branding firm, it’s your obligation to understand what you’re getting and not getting. If you need their help understanding your target audience, this post will make sure they’re up for the job.

At this point, every B2B company should be exploring and refining some sort of content marketing strategy. We know that customers and prospects don’t just value the insights vendors can provide–they are coming to expect them.

But too many vendors still create content just to fill that dreaded slot in their next monthly e-newsletter–instead of investing time and energy to produce valuable and relevant insights that actually help the target audience do their jobs better. And there’s the rub:

To produce insights your target audience finds valuable and relevant, you have to intimately understand what your target audience needs.

Here are three no-B.S. tips to increase customer intimacy–and the impact of your content marketing:

1. When “content marketing” was conceived, I wish it has been named “insight marketing” instead. This would have helped raise the bar for content marketers to produce useful content vs. drivel. Anyone with a laptop can (and unfortunately does) sling content, but content that doesn’t provide a relevant insight that addresses The Audience’s 4 Ps (problems, priorities, perceptions, preferences) should immediately be scrubbed from your editorial calendar. Replace or rework it with insights derived from actual customer and prospect interactions. What does your target audience struggle with on a daily basis? What are the knowledge blind spots that prevent them from doing their job better?

TIP: There’s an obvious and dead simple way to make sure your content delivers real insight and value: Ask your customers. For example, a great question is: “Let’s say you had a free hour with a renowned industry expert. What’s the first thing you’d ask them about?” They’ll gladly open up to you–and you can use their answers to fuel your content marketing efforts.

2. Most readers can quickly tell when content was written by a non-SME, i.e. a young marcom staffer who may be a good writer but has little or no understanding of The Audience’s 4 Ps. Dead giveaways: An abundance of marketing-speak and one or more exclamation points. The non-SME may have interviewed and SME, but too often, much of the insight is lost in translation…and replaced with vapid narrative.Such content is quickly dismissed by the reader as noise (best case), annoying (next worst case) or detracting from your brand (worst case).

TIP: Read your own content with extreme and brutal skepticism before publishing. The CMO’s job is to be very strict about ensuring that substance and value are obvious to the audience–in their real-world language, not marketing-speak. So don’t just approve a piece of content because it fills this week’s slot in the editorial calendar–or because you’re tired of rewriting it. Send it back again and again until it delivers value to the audience. If the CMO doesn’t understand what the target audience would find relevant and valuable, then you have a much bigger challenge.

3. In the haste to scale the reach of their content marketing via social media, PPC, email, etc., marketers often neglect the audience that most needs–in fact expects–your insights: Existing customers. They crave and often expect knowledge that is personalized to their specific situations; and you as their vendor are uniquely positioned to provide it. Vendors that invest the time and effort to do this will tend to have “customers for life.”

TIP: Don’t just spray content online. Train your sales, sales engineering and support teams on how to (a) review insights with their customers; and (b) help customers take action on the insights by interpreting them into specific steps. By the way, if your sales, SE and support folks hesitate to do this, it might be because the content is terrible. In this case, go back to points 1 and 2 above.

Bottom Line: Consistently creating valuable content requires you to have an intimate understanding of your Audience’s 4 Ps (problems, priorities, perceptions, preferences). The great news is that customers and prospects will gladly share their 4 Ps with you. All you have to do is ask the right questions in the right context–and listen between the lines to understand what’s really important to them.

For a free Customer Re-Discovery Playbook with all the questions you should ask–and tips on how to ask them–please visit www.chieflisteningofficers.com/free.

When you pack for a trip, you don’t put your entire closet into the suitcase and start pulling out what you don’t need.

But this is the approach companies often take when formulating their messaging. Like the traveler who says, “I need to make sure I have outfit options in Paris,” companies feel compelled to jam everything they do into marketing materials and sales conversations. In both cases, the villain is indecision and an inability to determine what’s most important.

Luggage over-packers risk sore backs and exorbitant overweight luggage fees. Messaging over-packers risk weighing down their audience with so much information that they don’t retain any of it.

The wrong way to “pack” your messaging.

• Start by pasting in 50 slides from your most recent sales presentation or 4 paragraphs from your About Us section–and then try to whittle down from there.

The right way to pack.

• Start with a blank document–an empty suitcase if you will.
• Now, write a sentence that communicates the most essential thing the audience needs to know. (The most essential item for your trip.) This will likely be your unique value proposition or the problem you solve for your target audience.
• Add a second sentence with the second most important thing the audience needs to know. This should include the value prop or problem, whichever you didn’t “pack” in the first sentence.
• Now, add the third sentence with the next most important thing. This can be a credibility statement (“We serve 80% of the Fortune 500.”), a claim (“We’re going to be the Uber of microbrews.”) or capability (“We have developed a patented approach to electron fragmentization and deconstruction.”)
• Now, here’s the key: Stop adding sentences as soon as you have given the audience the gist of your pitch–the basic contours of your topic (capabilities, product, investment opportunity). Probably 15 seconds total. The analogy is trying to close your suitcase to see if everything fits. This is a critical step that gives you a chance to check in with your audience to see if they’re with you–or whether you’ve “overstuffed” your message to the point where they’re confused. This check-in step is a great opportunity for the presenter. It’s where the audience often reveals their pain points, skepticism, lack of knowledge, etc., all of which are important signals that you can use to guide the rest of your meeting. Of course, after the check-in, you can fill in details on a range of topics, such as use cases, product specifications, customer examples, key features–whatever helps the audience fill in his or her knowledge gaps.

So next time you pack for a presentation (or a trip), remember to start with what you need most–and don’t overstuff.

To: Amazon.com

From: The Powers that Be in DC

Subject Line: The real reason you need to choose DC for HQ2

Dear Amazon:

If we’ve learned one thing here in DC, it’s that when all else fails, you resort to a power-play. You’ve seen House of Cards, I’m sure.

So we’re not going to pitch you by spouting all of the typical reasons why you should locate your second headquarters here. You know, business-friendly atmosphere, educated workforce, innovative, tech-oriented people, great universities, quality-of-life, public transportation, blah blah blah.

Those aren’t differentiators. You want to differentiator? Here you go.

If you don’t relocate here, we will regulate your Starbucks-swilling, low-margin asses back to the Stone Age. We’ll create a special tax just for companies whose name starts with an A, ends with an N and contains a Z. We’ll file so many court briefs you’ll have to hire a thousand more lawyers.

Now that’s a claim no other city can make!

That’s right, go ahead and choose another city. We dare you. We’ll unleash the full fury and might of the Federal bureaucracy–wave after wave of extraordinarily harsh, unfair and unprecedented treatment at the hands of the FTC, SEC, FCC, DOJ and a dozen other federal agencies.

A threat? Perhaps. Extortion? Welcome to the real world. We’re just competing by using the most unique and powerful lever at our disposal.

But there are real benefits here for Amazon.

Think proximity to power. With a DC area HQ, you can drop in and the FTC to lunch anytime (note the $25 gift limit). You’re just a 10 minute Uber ride from the Capital where you can walk the halls, twist arms, line pockets, etc. And you can sponsor tables at all of those fancy political-military-industrial events where you’ll hob-nob with Federati elites.

Think about it.

We won’t make this offer a second time.