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

Share this:

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.

Share this:

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!

Share this:

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.

Share this:

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.

Share this:

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.

Share this:

Marketing’s 4 P’s are obviously outdated–so marketer- and brand-centric. “It’s about OUR PRODUCT.” “WE need a pricing strategy.” You can almost feel the dust flying off of those we-centric, textbook-sounding words. Just look at the image below; even 4 P’s graphics look corporate and dull.

As B2B customers and prospects increasingly control and drive the decision-process, THEIR P’s are the ones that matter. And marketers and brands would do well to focus on them. Here are the Customer’s 3 P’s, as well as questions you should be asking to uncover them.

Priorities

What business priorities do you have to accomplish in the next 12 – 24 months? Not the entire list, just the top 2 – 3–the ones you might get passed over for promotion for not achieving. What priorities are the board paying close attention to? How much of the company’s (or your division’s) future is riding on these priorities?

Problems

What do you and your team need to get better at in the next year? If you replaced yourself today, what would you identify as immediate challenges? How do those impact the Priorities we just talked about? How are you addressing these issues today? What’s the risk of not getting better at them? What are the obstacles to improving?

Perceptions

What are all the ways you’ve thought about to address the Problems above? What else would you consider? What’s your biggest fear in investing in a solution or solutions? How do you categorize or differentiate vendors in this space? Which ones seem to “get it,” which ones don’t–and why? What would make you a customer for life–figuratively or literally?

Bottom line: Re-orienting B2B marketing around the customer’s perspective is critical to success in our new buyer-centric world. Try using the Customer’s 3 P’s–or a similarly market-oriented framework–to re-orient your own thinking and your organization’s.

Share this:

THIS IS THE FIRST EPISODE OF “LEADERS WHO LISTEN,” FEATURING INSIGHTS FROM EXECUTIVES WHO KNOW WHAT THEY DON’T KNOW–AND ARE CURIOUS TO FIND OUT.

This fun, 6 minute conversation with two leaders from Excella Consulting –a multi-year Inc. 5000 honoree–explains how their culture of curiosity gives them a more intimate and continuous view of their target audience’s perspective.

I’ve had the opportunity to work with Excella several times over the years, and their commitment to “always be improving and listening” is very impressive…and a big reason why they are successful. Check it out.

(And don’t miss the outtakes at the end.)

Share this:

First, if you are involved in or oversee Sales, I recommend you check out Ian Altman’s fantastic Same Side Selling Academy group on Facebook. Ian, a world renowned speaker and expert on sales strategies and techniques, is building a group of enlightened executives who want to maximize their effectiveness without the tired and sometimes trashy practices of the past.

Go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/samesidesellingacademy and request to join the group.

Now, about this video–which was originally broadcast live on the Same Side Selling Academy. In it, I chronicle some of the most cliche questions that customers and prospects are still asked–as well as some fresh, proven alternatives.

As always, you can download my Customer Re-Discovery Playbook absolutely FREE at www.chieflisteningofficers.com/customer-discovery-playbook-2.

Share this:

Still asking customers, “what keeps you up at night”? Well, 1995 called, and they want their question back. When you ask cliche answers, you don’t get insights–you get cliches.

Instead, here are a few questions that will help you discover fresh, actionable perspectives from customers and prospects.

As always, you can download the Customer Re-Discovery Playbook, absolutely free, at www.chieflisteningofficers.com/customer-discovery-playbook-2.

Share this: