The art and science of listening

When David Ogilvy wrote what Fortune called the finest sales book ever written, it was universally understood that sales was about people skills. While there are undoubtedly countless technical innovations that contribute to or even drive sales these days, the skills remain and reliably inform the sales process. And while CS has come of age in an era of process, efficiency and automation, the best customer relationships are most assuredly built with people skills.

While there is a lot to being a world class CSM, I strongly believe that the foundational skill sets of listening properly are underrated, under-utilised and, if mastered, sure to set any CSM apart from their peers.

The art of listening

The truth is that listening is difficult. Most business interactions (agnostic of medium) are driven by a specific agenda and as such the instigators of discourse risk of talking more than listening before they’ve even started. Approaching a conversation with a preferred outcome but also prepared to make genuine space for just absorbing information and trusting to the process of exchanging value, takes skill and confidence.

What tends to happen in many CS engagements is anything but an exchange of value.

The first pitfall is talking at the customer or waiting for the moment to speak (i.e. preparing to talk at the customer). Often this problem arises in QBRs or campaign-driven internal sales calls, if assumptions have been made about value, challenges or even timing then the contact risks confusion, missing the mark or becoming coercive. In the worst cases this looks like two or more completely separate conversations happening at once.

The next common issue is thinking about your response while someone else is talking. It takes confidence to trust that the right response, question or suggestion will be available when it’s needed but crafting it while you could be gathering more information dramatically increases the chances that it will in fact be wrong.

The next issue is laying traps for customers. Many old school sales tactics follow the path of seeking the customer’s ascent on a seemingly innocuous or obvious truth and using this as a logical justification for given product or action – Aha! You said you like spending less so you MUST look at this or you’ll be revealed as a liar! You are often looking to match genuine solutions to scoped problems and where this happens as the result of curiosity and shared understanding, very powerful. Where it’s the cynical result of a prescribed or disingenuous talk-track, it represents a missed learning opportunity and risks a poor solution.

You may be aware of the myriad research examples that demonstrate how misunderstood most people feel (one such link below). Make no mistake, the ability to take and demonstrate real understanding of your customer, in the moment, is an exceptional attribute.

Anyone can learn to listen effectively, so long as they accept it must be learned. As with many skills the best way to learn is to practice - that means making listening the objective of an interaction and not just a means to an end. As an exercise, whether it's a contrived setting or an appropriate professional interaction*:

• Don't interrupt

• Be curious, ask authentic open questions (especially when you worry you won't like the answer)

• Don't finish their sentences or presume to understand, instead reflect and clarify

• Delay/ don't talk about yourself (or your company/ product)

• Delay/ don't make a suggestion (it won't be long before you have an interaction where realise that your first idea would have been under-informed)

(*Obviously not every interaction is an appropriate setting for this kind of intense listening and indeed there are settings where astute guidance / intervention is the priority.)

The science of listening

This is all well and good but personal connections are not possible with every customer and product and for those situations the CS discipline has evolved numerous listening processes including feedback loops, telemetry, NPS, CSAT, success architecture, ROI etc. I won’t go through specific methodology and best practice here but it is useful to examine how listening at scale is, and isn’t like listening at all.

It’s important to be aware that process-born listening like the methods listed at the top of this section, are subject to all manner of biases and heuristics before, during and after they’re generated. Extracting the best insight and value from these processes requires a degree of data literacy and in many cases require further context and investigation using direct contact and you’ve guessed it, listening skills.

Besides NPS and NRR, the most widely used “listening” tool could be a health score, a ubiquitous concept, uniquely executed from company to company. I am unconvinced on health scores as a useful tactical tool, like many aggregated metrics I find the value to be in its predictive capabilities rather than its ability to tell me something actionable. I firmly believe that it is important to understand what’s driving a health score and more than that, what’s driving the reflection, action or thought at the point that a signal is generated – a feat that can only really be achieved with curious, active, authentic, old-fashioned listening.

Another post (ensure you see your customers in three dimensions) explores the relative strengths of different metrics and sources, what I’d like to reiterate is that the relative weaknesses of different customer insight tools can be mitigated by drawing on many to reach conclusions. If you have a million customers, you must use scalable listening processes, but you also need to actually speak to some of them (preferably a representative sample). If you “only” have 50 customers you’ll likely speak to them often, but you’d also benefit from a wider range of process-born methods that provide factual observations and continuous signals about them all.

If you rely solely on telemetry, automated processes, aggregated scores or conversations to listen to customers, expect them to feel unheard.

What to do with all this

En masse, people make sense but when it comes to managing the risks and opportunities of a particular customer or contact, data can only paint part of the picture. Customers are sometimes emotive, irrational and unpredictable and while processes may start a conversation, listening can turn it into a golden opportunity.

Investing in the full breadth of listening skills allows CSMs to see what probable, interesting, odd or concerning from afar and what’s possible, true and false up close.

Embrace the advantages of data and automation and do not lose sight of the advantages you have over data and automation.

References and further reading:

• https://www.statista.com/forecasts/1021446/feeling-misunderstood-or-unappreciated-by-co-workers-in-the-us - misunderstood stats

• https://comeadwithus.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/the-theory-and-practice-of-selling-the-aga-cooker.pdf - David Ogilvy’s famous sales manual