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Real Importance
With all of the fires in southern California, I was reminded this week that we often have to decide on what’s really important. If you have to leave your house and nearly all of your belongings behind, what would you choose to take?
In a broader sense, every decision we make about job, communities, love, and life can create the same burden on our consciousness. Every choice to accept carries with it a choice to reject. And we all know it is often difficult to chose to give something up.
Interestingly enough, we only hesitate when we think about giving up the things that have good memories associated with them. Few of us think very hard about decisions to take out the garbage even though it has the memories of our past week within the bags. We seldom think about giving up abject poverty when we have a choice to do so. I was listening to a podcast with Michael Gates Hall who wrote How Starbucks Saved My Life. He learned about job satisfaction the hard way.
Parenthetically, business owners and direct sellers in particular discover this early in their professional start. The slings and arrows from disbelievers are difficult to avoid for very long.
Customer Centered Listening
We were coaching a group last week and the core knowledge that we were talking about was customer centered listening. You might call it active listening, reflective listening, or heart centered listening, but the core of all of those is precisely where we were trying to focus. The essential lesson is a simple one: the business relationship you build with 
your customers depends on you listening to them as people, and not as the purchasers you want them to be. While we all know and engage in the behaviors, we seldom put it together in a list. As a group, we discussed seven concepts.
- Be physically available. Hold yourself nonverbally open and attentive. Don’t forget to nod and smile.
- Be mentally open. Engage in minimal interruptions while staying focused on the conversation.
- Use door openers like “You sound excited! I love your enthusiasm. What’s going on?”
- Be verbally extending. Ask for more details.
- When you hear a metaphor being used, keep it going. “I am so tired of just being another player on the team.” “I understand. You want to be the captain.”
- Be verbally summarizing. Paraphrase.
- Be verbally shaping. Reframe the conversation. (Think about the 50% glass—is it half empty or half full?)
“I tried weight control pills before. It didn’t work.”
“Are you saying the supplements weren’t right for you?”
“Yeah. They may work for some people but I think my G.I. system is more sensitive.”
“So the supplements worked, you just needed better direction on which ones.”
“I guess you could say that.”This is not complex. We do this stuff all of the time when we are in conversational mode. The difference is that we seldom do this when we are in a selling mode. We know the answers even before we hear what our customer says, and that leads us to misunderstand what is being said.Once the group seemed to have a good sense of these seven items, we pushed the envelope a little. How can you engage in customer centered listening on the telephone? Interestingly, the list of behaviors didn’t change very much, but the lack of nonverbal clues require a more intense focus. Telephone calls in a car fly right out of our memory because we are focused on driving not conversing. Without a set of eyes to look into, our attention wanders. Probably the most common activity is email scanning or internet surfing. I was surprised to discover there is a word for this, snurfing, which means surfing the internet while talking on the phone. There are worse offenses like washing dishes or visiting the bathroom, but they are less common. In all of these situations, we still pretend to be engaged, but our presence is really not there. We give more of a more “uh-huh” response so our customer knows we haven’t hung up when we should have a “tell me more” response. We can’t do the latter because we lost the train of thought when our attention wandered.The group came up with some interesting solutions. The key is to make your nonverbal communication match what you do in a face-to-face conversation.
- Find a quiet room. One young mother took the phone to the bathroom because her children won’t interrupt her there. Just don’t use the facility.
- Shut your computer off.
- Put a mirror by your phone and write on it “Smile Nod”.
- Take notes on the conversation and only the conversation.
- Set a timer so you don’t drag on and get bored. I know it sounds too simple, but it works. When we focus, we engage and the timer gives us an urgency to stay focused and get done.
The next question was harder and it belongs in its own post. Here’s the question so you can work on your own answer: How do we extend customer centered listening to a blog, webpage or website?
What’s in Your Headline?
With our recent family move, one activity we are engaging in is the search for a new church to join. If they were all the same, we would look for one based on geographic proximity and be done with it. The process is, as you might expect, a little more complicated. Dana and I will visit a church for a month or so and have periodic discussion around the question of “Is my soul being fed?”. I was thinking about this during the service this past Sunday and came to a startling conclusion.
One of the pastors we were recently visiting chose to speak on a particular Biblical passage that we had recently heard elsewhere. In one instance, the church bulletin described it as “God’s Bountiful Blessings” while the other described it as “Ask for Forgiveness.” The same text can be captioned in either positive or negative terms. The headlines shift perspective on the text. In one case it is treated as a gift and in the other it is a requirement.
That led to my personal revelation. I am by no means describable as a hermeneutic scholar and I can be accused of oversimplifying. My conclusion, though, is a simple one. A combination of only three words can make a profound difference. Now I know some of you are saying, “Duh.” Others (with marketing expertise) are going, “That’s branding, Dude!” I just am amazed, not by hundreds of pages of text, but by overwhelming power of individual words. Speaking of which, I would be remiss without pointing out that the Book of John would agree.
Radiohead Lets You Pick Your Price
I am really puzzled and excited by all of the buzz that has developed around Radiohead’s announcement that consumer’s could set their own price for the download version of their newest CD set. I’m not a numbers maven when it comes to marketing, but it makes psychological sense when you think about concerts, CD sets, and publicity.
Seth Godin, while not talking specifically about Radiohead, made a recent entry to his blog about the importance of “a price” instead of “no price” and noted that companies might want to think about the promotional value of their offers. As he says, “If you make something with low marginal cost like a CD, consider offering a second one (same title) for a nickel or a dollar. Why? Because if a customer buys a second as a gift, they’ve just helped you spread the word…” Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, makes a similar point because the marginal cost of a download is close to nothing.
My best guess is that Radioheads motives are “pure.” They are trying to do a good deed for their customers. And the shine of that action will prove meaningful for them. I would always remember, however, that the cost to them is negligible and the buzz is priceless.
This is a great lesson for entrepreneurs and sales leaders. Be smart about what you give away. It has to be meaningful, but that doesn’t mean it has to be costly.
Electronics and Democracy
One of the newsletters I read religiously comes from the Institute for Global Ethics. A recent commentary reminded me of how natural electronic communication has become and how impossible secrets are. We don’t recognize these facets of our lives because they have become ordinary truths. It’s only when they are extraordinary, do these gems shine. You should read the commentary called, “Let Freedom Ring” and then think about the ordinary parts of your business and your life that didn’t exist a few years ago.
Without belaboring the obvious, the democratization of the web has had an enormous impact on marketing and sales. Communication from everywhere to everywhere for virtually everyone has become commonplace (at least in the U.S.).
What is not so obvious is that this influence has become so pervasive that we don’t notice it anymore. It has become a part of the scenery of our life. It’s like living in a city. You don’t notice all of the street lights because they have become a part of the landscape. We feel awkward during a power failure because the street lights aren’t on. The “natural darkness” appears completely unnatural. The internet has become a way of life. The absence of email seems unnatural. If we have a question about anything, we Google or Ask or Yahoo or Wikipedia it. We can find the popularity, problems, fans, and unhappy consumers before we ever invest our time or money in anything.
Now imagine trying to control the flow of information. It’s impossible. For anything other than a temporary silence, it can’t be done. Control has become unnatural because what you want to know is out there somewhere. The lesson from all of this is that we shouldn’t try to control what we can’t. If our business has to be transparent, then it should. The business of sales is much easier if we are open and visible.