Stop selling and listen!

“We’ve been focusing on selling and just shooting ourselves in the foot.” That’s an exact quote from my phone meeting with Dave this morning. He and I have been working on a project to identify the most receptive market segments and buyer personas for his product. Here’s more of what he told me . . .

“The CEO and I spend a lot of time talking to customers during and after the sales process, so I assumed that we knew our audience. Now I realize that when we’re in sales mode we’re preaching our message. We don’t get to just listen and not take a position, so we haven’t been getting the right information.”

It was early morning when Dave and I talked, but I was suddenly wide awake. I grabbed a pen and tried to write down as many of his words as I could. Here are the other parts of my notes that I can read:

“First I listen to one person and they tell me something. When I get to the next interview I build on the points from the first meeting and I learn more. The more time I spend talking to people the more comfortable I get. I don’t even need to be creative. I just listen and see the same theme emerging over and over again.”

Dave started this project with a fairly typical problem – the company got started when the founder saw a need to solve a specific problem. More than a decade later, the company is up against a guerilla in that space. They have customers in other areas, but every sale is unique, and each new account results in a new set of enhancement requests. The company doesn’t know where it can effectively invest in selling and marketing with predictably favorable results.

Because Dave got out of sales mode and started actively listening, he knows that his horizontal (read scattered) solution can answer a pervasive, unsolved problem in the insurance industry. He still has meetings and phone interviews scheduled in one other segment -- I'll be anxious to hear how that goes. He also has a starting point for building the buyer personas that he will need to target through marketing programs, and has the core elements of his messaging strategy in the first industsry. He even has a new approach to developing highly qualified leads.

When I started working with Dave I sensed that he’d be good at this process. He is open-minded and curious, and is very knowledgeable about the value of his products. We spent some time together at the beginning of this project, getting to the heart of his distinctive competence, analyzing the aspects of the product’s current successes and failures, and applying that insight to potential market segments. Then it was up to Dave to listen and see what he could learn from the only people that matter – the target buyers.

Near the end of our phone call this morning I asked Dave the question that keeps ME awake at night. Why don’t more product marketers get out and listen to the people who aren’t their customers yet? At the risk of irritating him, I asked the question directly --You’ve been at your company for a couple of years now. Why didn’t you get this done until now? I wrote down his reply

“Sales people keep saying that they just need more leads, ROI calculators, and that sort of thing. We are so busy working on our marketing checklists, there is never enough time to get out. I always knew that my opinion was irrelevant,” (a reference to one of my favorite quotes from the Pragmatic Marketing training that he attended), “but I didn’t realize that the opinions of the salespeople were also irrelevant.”

I changed Dave’s name and carefully avoided saying anything here that might reveal his company or solution, but everything in this post is true, I promise. I’m keeping Dave’s secret about what he heard from the market -- the insights that he has about his buyer personas are now his company’s best competitive weapon.  But I'm going to tell eveyone who will listen how he got that information, hoping to inspire just one more person to stop selling and start listening.

Comments

[Bruce McCarthy]

"Dave's" comments (both in your quotes and in his comments above) are a really solid argument for keeping product marketing and product management separate.

I've written some about this here: http://www.userdriven.org/blog/another-reason-why-product-management-shouldnt-be-part-of-ma.html.

What he's saying is you can't listen while you're selling and you can't innovate without listening.

The fact that leads and press are down while he is listening means that they need someone to do the marketing job while he does the product management job. There's no reason they can't go on in parallel if the company has the budget for two people.

Incidentally, I agree that good salespeople do a lot of listening and asking questions about needs. What I have found, though, is that the mental filtering that goes on in the sales cycle is different. Human beings naturally filter out what's irrelevant in a conversation and focus in on what they need to know. What a salesperson needs to learn about is what problems the customer has that he can solve with available products today. What a product manager needs to learn about is what problems he or she might be able to solve tomorrow.

[Rex Chubas]

I think the idea of Listening is like motherhood and apple pie. No one can really be against it. However I must take extreme issue with your comments about sales people.

The fact is that sales people who don't listen wash out of the field pretty quickly. Especially in enterprise sales where executive time must be gained to advance the sale.

If you read any good text on sales, you'll find the key skill is asking questions and listening to the answers. I think if you interview any consistently top performing sales person, you'll find they are professional listeners.

What you are perhaps missing in your piece is the fact that customers in general say different things to different people. The same questions asked by sales will draw different answers than the ones asked by marketing or by a CEO.

To expand on your theme, an organization that doesn't engage at multiple levels with their customers will have a very hard time being successful

[Dave]

Hi Adele

This is “Dave” who is mentioned in your blog post. The blog is pretty accurate overall but what it perhaps understated is how profound a difference it makes to spend significant time with customers and prospective customers. The information I’ve gleaned even at this relatively early stage make a huge difference in how we will be setting product development priorities, sales strategy and even pre-sales and consulting methodology. It is as though our promotions strategy is the last thing that will be affected (although it will be and significantly so).

The downside of spending all this time on research is that our “leads” are down, our web traffic is down and our press coverage is down because I have not had the time to devote to this. I am lucky to be able to do this because in my case I am a partner in the business and therefore senior enough to be able to directly access the CEO and board. I am able to get the buy in because I can convince my organization that gross lead volume is a poor measure of achievement and in and of itself is largely irrelevant.

I think most companies are sales led and don’t have the stomach for making that sort of investment in getting their research right before they act. And in many cases companies like us are living on a high burn rate and are under tremendous pressure to bring in sales – you can only say “we need to do more research before we decide our approach” for so long.

Thanks Adele!

Regards
“Dave”

[David Martin]

In order to listen we also need to have good questions to pose to our customers. Do you have a list of sample questions that would help jump-start the dialogue with a customer and, in turn, create buyer personas?

[Pamela Hudadoff]

I have found it interesting that many marketers and sales people don't want to really listen to their prospects or customers. We think that with a couple of sound bites from them, we know it all. Once they become a customer, we don't really want to know what they think. I believe that one reason we don't listen is because we are scared of what we will find out.

When I worked at large companies, I've watched when "listening" suddenly becomes important for some business assignment. (Have you ever heard of voice-of-the-customer?) In these situations, we craft these carefully orchestrated events (think customer councils, user groups, customer surveys...)where we create a controlled environment to safely hear what we want to hear.

I've lived this in so many positions and yet I still don't understand it. When you don't listen, you are blind. (Yes, I know that is a funny statement, but it is true). As a marketer, I absolutely hate being blind. All sorts of bad things happen when you aren't listening - a key customer suddenly dumps you for a competitor, a disgruntled customer tells his story on a popular forum... They would gladly tell you their story if you would listen. Sometimes they even tell you when you aren't listening.

When I listen, my customers will tell me everything I need to know to make and keep them happy. That's all the incentive I need.

The next challenge is proving to sales that by letting marketing in to listen to the discussion, marketing won't derail the sale. But that a topic for another day.