Podcast Ep 78 | Four Questions Leadership Teams Need to Ask Customers

Some of the best intel for lead­er­ship team mem­bers comes from cus­tomers, and some of the best cus­tomer data becomes avail­able when lead­ers talk with cus­tomers direct­ly. In fact, if they’re not ask­ing the right ques­tions, lead­ers could be miss­ing out on 70% to 80% of the most valu­able infor­ma­tion they could have.

Sur­veys are good, but you can’t rely on sur­veys. You need to have lead­ers talk­ing to customers.

This week, Brad and Kevin share the sim­ple sys­tem of 4 ques­tions that every lead­er­ship team should ask. They dis­cuss why it’s impor­tant, and how to imple­ment this valu­able prac­tice in your business.

EPISODE TRAN­SCRIPT

Please note that this episode was tran­scribed using an AI appli­ca­tion and may not be 100% gram­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.

Brad Giles 00:13

Hi there, wel­come to the growth whis­pers where every­thing that we talk about is build­ing endur­ing, great com­pa­nies. My name is Brad Giles. And as always, I’m joined today by my co host, Kevin Lawrence. Hel­lo, Kevin. And how are you doing today?

Kevin Lawrence 00:27

I’m doing great Brad. Actu­al­ly, I’m set up in a new spot, kind of a new loca­tion. So like a new mini stu­dio. So I’ve been scram­bling around today to set up and every­thing’s work­ing. I worked so hard to make sure I had all the things I need­ed, and I for­got one part. But thank­ful­ly, there’s a store about 15 min­utes away that had the part I need­ed. And so I’m good. grate­ful that peo­ple stock every elec­tron­ic gad­get you can imagine

Brad Giles 00:53

close by. Okay, too. Hey, are good. Yeah, I’m good. I’m good. I had four days, four days in our South­west, beau­ti­ful part of Aus­tralia. and came back last night here for record­ing today. But yeah, just spring in the south­west of Aus­tralia is a very, very spe­cial, a spe­cial place. So um, yeah. And so to me, we always like to start with our Word of the Day or phrase of the day, what is on your mind?

Kevin Lawrence 01:27

Mine is wind­ing down, are sum­mer is end­ing. It’s get­ting cold­er, dark­er, ear­ly, or? Yeah, so it’s kind of like wind­ing down. Tran­si­tion­ing from sum­mer to fall. But I don’t like the idea of wind­ing down, tran­si­tion. That’s my word.

Brad Giles 01:49

Awe­some. Awe­some. And mine would be slight­ly relat­ed to today’s episode, cus­tomer feed­back. So the place where I stayed, there’s a QR code on the wall. And you can use your smart­phone. And it’ll take you to a Google form. And it just asks you some sim­ple, some sim­ple ques­tions about your style in a way that I had­n’t seen before. So yeah, cus­tomer. Yes, cus­tomer feed­back, is what I’m think­ing. So wind­ing down cus­tomer feed­back is the mash.

Kevin Lawrence 02:27

Inter­est­ing. We’ll take that. Alright. We actu­al­ly want to wind up cus­tomer feed­back, which is actu­al­ly what we’re talk­ing about today, which is a beau­ti­ful tran­si­tion into today’s top­ic, Brad. So why don’t you tell us what we’re dig­ging into today?

Brad Giles 02:41

Yeah, so we’re talk­ing about four Q, or the four ques­tions. And this real­ly is a part of cus­tomer feed­back. And what if we take a step high­er than cus­tomer feed­back, what we advo­cate is that lead­er­ship, team mem­bers have a qual­i­ta­tive and quan­ti­ta­tive point of data from both cus­tomers and employ­ees. So we’ve got qual­i­ta­tive and quan­ti­ta­tive from cus­tomers. And we’ve got qual­i­ta­tive and quan­ti­ta­tive from employ­ees. And that should frame all of the lead­er­ship teams think­ing because you’re get­ting real and accu­rate feed­back. Now, the quan­ti­ta­tive often takes the form of some­thing like a net pro­mot­er score, or a cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion score, some kind of num­ber base that we can work on, where­as the qual­i­ta­tive comes from actu­al con­ver­sa­tions with employ­ees and actu­al con­ver­sa­tions with cus­tomers. And so that last point is what we’re talk­ing about today. The four ques­tions that we advo­cate that you as a lead­er­ship team mem­ber, talk with cus­tomers about.

Kevin Lawrence 03:59

Yeah, and this is a seri­ous prob­lem in a lot of com­pa­nies is that it’s won­der­ful when com­pa­nies start to get data on employ­ee engage­ment, and cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion. The prob­lem is, is one you can get lost in the num­bers in two union real­ly got to hear their voic­es. So you know, the peo­ple that cre­at­ed the Net Pro­mot­er sys­tem for employ­ee and cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion. You know, they say con­sis­tent­ly, it’s the sys­tem, not the score, mean the sys­tem, you got to read the com­ments and hear the feed­back. So I was in a meet­ing this week in the US. It was nice to be back in the US again. But I remem­ber we were get­ting some they some of the best data on report­ing cus­tomer and employ­ee sat­is­fac­tion where they’re at by loca­tion, every­thing was real­ly great data. The chal­lenges is we did­n’t get any of the com­ments, or the com­men­tary. So basi­cal­ly, we got the scores, but we did­n’t get the spe­cif­ic trends of what Peo­ple were lov­ing and load­ing or you know, con­cerned about or gaps. And it’s so what hap­pens is, is exec­u­tives try to fly by num­ber too much, some don’t fly enough by num­bers, they don’t have enough data, but some over rely. And I just fin­ished a real­ly good book this week by the CEO of Best Buy. And he was the CEO who turned Best Buy around, and his name is Her­bert jol­ly, I believe. And the book is called the heart of busi­ness. I got both of those things, right? That’s awe­some. A real­ly good one of things he talked about when he turned around Best Buy, is he went and vis­it­ed stores. And in stores, he watched and learned because he was new to the busi­ness. And he talked to peo­ple and talk to the asso­ciates. And he learned a ton about what the needs were and under­stood the busi­ness bet­ter now. That’s great. And some peo­ple might do that in the begin­ning. But some of the best exec­u­tives and Steve CEOs stay con­nect­ed, not through data and reports, but direct­ly at the front lines and what they end up doing. And we see this all the time. And this is why for cue was invent­ed, peo­ple just play office too much. They’re too busy admin­is­ter­ing the busi­ness and work­ing on stuff, which is their job, but there’s not enough time direct­ly con­nect­ed to employ­ees and cus­tomers. So today, we’re going to talk about direct­ly con­nect­ing with cus­tomers and what peo­ple should do.

Brad Giles 06:31

If you don’t con­nect with cus­tomers, you make deci­sions based on per­haps not a full suite of infor­ma­tion. So let’s dig in and just clar­i­fy, what are the four ques­tions that we’re talk­ing about? The first ques­tion, how are you doing? So this is real­ly just fram­ing, fram­ing the con­ver­sa­tion in the way that the con­ver­sa­tion will be com­plete­ly about the oth­er per­son? So how are you doing? Now you can as a recip­i­ent of that ques­tion, say, Oh, well, I’m good. You can make it real­ly, real­ly quick. Or you could imme­di­ate­ly jump into, I’m ter­ri­ble because your sys­tems suck. Or

Kevin Lawrence 07:20

you could find out the oth­er dog just died, or they just got a pup­py. Yeah, it’s like, it’s a human con­nec­tion point. And this is this for Q is a mini sys­tem. So it’s a way to just, you’re gonna learn all kinds of inter­est­ing stuff, you might just con­nect, or you might get some­thing incred­i­bly rel­e­vant that will relate to your conversation.

Brad Giles 07:40

Yeah. And then the sec­ond ques­tion is what’s going on in your industry/​neighborhood now, that’s obvi­ous­ly con­tex­tu­al­ized, for b2b or busi­ness, to busi­ness type sales or busi­ness to con­sumer type sales. And there could be some­thing that’s hap­pen­ing in your indus­try, if you’re B to B, for exam­ple, we’ve got mas­sive demand, and we’re hav­ing sup­ply chain issues, or it could be any­thing at all. But that’s anoth­er point of data that you can take back to the lead­er­ship team equal­ly, in terms of your neigh­bor­hood. Yeah, they could be some­thing that’s hap­pen­ing in your neigh­bor­hood that’s rel­e­vant. So we’re try­ing to mine for any of the data that we can.

Kevin Lawrence 08:27

And they’re experts in their neigh­bor­hood and experts in their indus­try, and they’re going to know stuff you would nev­er have a clue about. So you’re tap­ping into their core exper­tise, and what they spend their days liv­ing and breath­ing that you can get from them in two minutes.

Brad Giles 08:44

Next, is the inter­est­ing the third or four ques­tions, what you hear about our com­peti­tors? Now, we don’t have any oth­er oppor­tu­ni­ty to ask this. And would­n’t it be inter­est­ing to take some of these answers back to our lead­er­ship team? Now? I’ve been run­ning these ques­tions for many years with lead­er­ship teams. And some­times recip­i­ents will say, Well, I don’t think that’s real­ly appro­pri­ate for me to answer. Okay, no prob­lem. It’s just a sur­vey that I’ve been asked to ask you,

Kevin Lawrence 09:16

but many will have and many will have lots to share. Yeah,

Brad Giles 09:21

but oth­er times, we’ve got some amaz­ing, amaz­ing insights. I heard that they’re shut­ting down. They’re such and such oper­a­tions. I heard this start­ing up this, some peo­ple are more than will­ing to share some­thing about our com­peti­tors. That can be fan­tas­tic info. And then the fourth, and arguably one of the more impor­tant ques­tions is how are we doing? And this is qual­i­ta­tive. So it’s not just a num­ber, because that’s where we can real­ly begin to get the insights. How are we doing?

Kevin Lawrence 09:56

Yeah, and again, these so basi­cal­ly the four ques­tions How’re you doing? What’s going on your indus­try or neigh­bor­hood? What do you hear about our com­peti­tors? How are we doing? And the chal­lenge is, a lot of peo­ple will just go to Hey, how are we doing? Yeah, are we tak­ing good care of you, but you miss all that oth­er scoop that can help you. That oth­er stuff helps you as an exec­u­tive, more than it prob­a­bly helps you with that spe­cif­ic cus­tomer right there. They’re help­ing you with your Intel. So you know what hap­pens and the chal­lenges because we said ear­li­er on, peo­ple are so darn busy, they don’t do this. And when they do go and get a chance to talk to some­one at one of their clients, does­n’t even know what to ask. And these four ques­tions are great. So you could be the CFO, and when you’re talk­ing to their CFO about some­thing and whether it’s on the way to a meet­ing or at lunch or on a call. You know, it could be any­one that you’re talk­ing to any­one in your orga­ni­za­tion talk­ing to their orga­ni­za­tion as a nice lit­tle sim­ple check in. And it’s a won­der­ful, won­der­ful way to do it. Now. Notice I found some points, I want to talk about it. But the first real main rea­son why this is impor­tant, it’s you know, is that I call it not play­ing office or play­ing office too much. Brad calls it leav­ing the ivory tow­er. But the idea is the same is just it, get out there and get the goods get a real pulse of what’s going on. Because what hap­pens is peo­ple become way too insu­lar. If you stay inside. If you go and talk to a bunch of cus­tomers, you can’t help but pick up on dif­fer­ent things and have dif­fer­ent thoughts and ideas.

Brad Giles 11:43

Yeah, absolute­ly. And these, these ques­tions are framed, as you said, like this for a rea­son. It’s all about them. But the oth­er thing, it has­n’t been pol­lut­ed by oth­er areas, such as mar­ket­ing, because mar­ket­ing could want to get ahold of this and say, How about if we change the equa­tions? What about if we asked about some­thing about our new prod­uct or some­thing that and then sud­den­ly, it’s gone from four ques­tions to 11 ques­tions, and no one wants to answer 11 ques­tions that are about your prod­uct, because all of these ques­tions, impor­tant­ly, are about them. And so when we’re talk­ing about leav­ing the ivory tow­er, you know, if we’ve got a CFO, for exam­ple, on our lead­er­ship team, this per­son would very rarely get to inter­act with cus­tomers. And so then when we’re meet­ing, as a team, they don’t real­ly have that depth of expe­ri­ence in direct­ly com­mu­ni­cat­ing and under­stand­ing what the cus­tomers want. But the impor­tant point is that it can be quite uncom­fort­able for some peo­ple to have these types of con­ver­sa­tions. So an option around that is to have the CFO at our com­pa­ny, talk to the CFO, at our cus­tomers com­pa­nies. So hav­ing them talk to the rel­e­vant per­son in cus­tomer com­pa­nies, which is a lit­tle bit hard, admit­ted­ly, in a retail­er in a b2c area. But we want to get peo­ple out­side of the ivory tow­er, we want to get peo­ple to be actu­al­ly com­mu­ni­cat­ing with cus­tomers, there was a retail­er that I worked with, and they had­n’t spo­ken to cus­tomers in this sense for, I would say it would have been about 10 to 12 years where the lead­er­ship team had actu­al­ly got­ten out. And they made a whole range of assump­tions. And so we set a quar­ter­ly tar­get where we had to have 13, four q con­ver­sa­tions, each lead­er­ship team mem­ber, at least one per week. And the insights and the way that we change the busi­ness was remarkable.

Kevin Lawrence 13:48

Yeah, because you’re more in touch with what the cus­tomers want. Again, the busi­ness exists to take care of a cus­tomer. Yeah, which is kind of the third point, which is under­stand­ing what’s impor­tant cus­tomers cuz you’re gonna hear from them. And whether it’s in a retail envi­ron­ment, a busi­ness to busi­ness envi­ron­ment, does­n’t mat­ter whether it’s in a board­room, or the bath­room, or the boil­er room does­n’t mat­ter where you’re pick­ing up stuff. And it’s just it keeps you super in touch, because you’re lis­ten­ing to them direct­ly ver­sus think­ing about your­self. The sec­ond one, so the first one is leav­ing avatar. Sec­ond is val­i­date your strat­e­gy. This is also a great way to pick up some intel of what cus­tomers are think­ing about you and think­ing about your com­peti­tors, you know, under­stand­ing their per­cep­tions. And then you could also even once you’re in a con­ver­sa­tion like this, it’s an oppor­tu­ni­ty to run some oth­er things by them, you might be think­ing about, like, Hey, you know, based on what you’ve said, How would you feel about this, right? Because you know, you’re into a, you’re into the con­ver­sa­tion, you can use them as a sound­ing board as they are, if they’re part of the buy­ing deci­sion, or the one of the users of what­ev­er it is that you have to offer. You can get some addi­tion­al until it’ll help you

Brad Giles 15:00

Yeah, under­stand­ing, you know, what is it that mat­ters to our cus­tomers, you know, the data that we can pick up through that is, is real­ly, real­ly vari­able. Obvi­ous­ly, that leads us on to the next one, learn about the indus­try. Because some­times peo­ple in a lead­er­ship team may not have worked for many of our com­peti­tors, or the indus­try may have evolved, and they haven’t got some of those insights. So it’s easy to think about this as a sin­gu­lar. But I think about anoth­er team that I work with, and we’ve done it for, I would say, four or five years, every sin­gle quar­ter, we’ve gone out, and we’ve had at least one or two 4k con­ver­sa­tions in prepa­ra­tion for our off­side quar­ter­ly. And the stuff that we’re learn­ing. It’s real­ly affect­ed the pri­or­i­ties that we set and the strat­e­gy that we said, because we’re learn­ing sort of up to the minute Intel about the indus­try. Yeah.

Kevin Lawrence 16:02

And we don’t have enough time to learn all those things. I was in a con­ver­sa­tion just over the week­end. And with a with some­one who I just met at an event. And I was ask­ing them ques­tions about their indus­try, that and what’s going on out of per­son­al curios­i­ty, the amount of stuff I was learn­ing about some changes and things that were hap­pen­ing was out stand­ing. And I am curi­ous by nature, so with new peo­ple, it’s nat­ur­al. It’s those exist­ing rela­tion­ships. And as we do this, I’m just think­ing, I had a con­ver­sa­tion with one of the CEOs who work last week, and I should have used the darn for cue ques­tions, I was just check­ing in how things were going, we’re talk­ing about things. And I should have asked them and I did­n’t, I missed the oppor­tu­ni­ty last week, it was­n’t top of my mind. So hope­ful­ly, for those of you lis­ten­ing, it’s going to be a good prompt for you. This is not rock­et sci­ence. But when you’re next with a cus­tomer have a chance, some great ques­tions to answer.

Brad Giles 16:58

say, Oh, it’s impor­tant about that is it this is struc­tured feed­back. So we’re forc­ing lead­er­ship team mem­bers to talk to peo­ple, which is impor­tant, but then we’re forc­ing them to lis­ten. So because those four ques­tions are all lis­ten­ing ques­tions about them, and then doc­u­ment them, and then share them on a reg­u­lar basis with the lead­er­ship team, for

Kevin Lawrence 17:19

sure. The next one is learn about com­peti­tors. And again, as we’ve touched on a bit already, but there’s no it’s some­times hard to get infor­ma­tion on your com­peti­tors. And or it’s sit­ting there wait­ing for you, you just have to ask, like a lot of things. When you meet a human being, you could ask them 1000 dif­fer­ent ques­tions. And when­ev­er you pick will set the tone of the con­ver­sa­tion. And so so if you miss that oppor­tu­ni­ty, there’s great com­pet­i­tive Intel await­ing you all the time. You just got a prompt it and there’s things that your com­peti­tors are doing that are good, or not good. And just don’t being able to see and hear what’s going on is incred­i­bly valu­able. Again, not rock­et sci­ence. It’s just it’s a great oppor­tu­ni­ty to dig into it, rather than hav­ing it ran­dom­ly show up occasionally.

Brad Giles 18:06

Yeah, what if? What if we had enough of our four key con­ver­sa­tions come back with what you know, what mat­ters to us is on time deliv­ery. And that was all that was in there. If you heard that once, or if you heard that 40 times, that’s going to affect your busi­ness, because it’s real time feed­back from a diverse enough group of cus­tomers, or any­thing else. Now that could be com­ing, because they’re say­ing, What do you hear about our com­peti­tors? Well, you know, they are real­ly focused on being on there on being on time deliv­er­ing hav­ing net­work. Yeah,

Kevin Lawrence 18:46

yeah, or they’re doing some­thing around pric­ing, or they just lost some key peo­ple. Or there’s, you know, one of our clients, we heard with a com­peti­tor, we heard that there was a pres­i­dent, a vice pres­i­dent of a divi­sion that was loved by his peo­ple and the indus­try. And we heard that he had left. Well, it became a recruit­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty. We don’t know where he went. But we know that he left him and we were able to in the end, we could­n’t recruit him. But we were able to hunt him down. And then it also gave us a chance to go and direct­ly con­tact some of his sales peo­ple because he was lead­ing the sales team. Because we know when a key leader leaves, peo­ple get a lit­tle bit loos­ened up some­times and some peo­ple are more will­ing to leave, espe­cial­ly when there’s a leader they loved. So that lit­tle bit Intel that I’ll make it up that Frank was leav­ing the busi­ness. Frank was amaz­ing, tried to recruit them, but then we were able to con­tact some of those peo­ple because they would be the most open to hear­ing from us they ever would have been. Again, just lit­tle things like that.

Brad Giles 19:54

Awe­some. And then I guess num­ber six is learn about our per­for­mance. How are we doing? That it’s such an open and vul­ner­a­ble ques­tion that it invokes trust and you have to as a cus­tomer, you have to respond to that. You have to say some­thing, it’s very hard to say, well, you’re doing good, if you’ve been real­ly, real­ly let down, and you’re think­ing about going to anoth­er com­peti­tor, or trans­fer­ring some rev­enues. It’s great to have acco­lades, but we don’t want the acco­lades here. What we want is, you’re doing real­ly good, but this per­son named Bob­by in sales. He’s, he’s this, he’s got no fans in this firm, I’ll tell you that. Yeah, needs to go.

Kevin Lawrence 20:42

And that’s the stuff that you need. And you might not always get that in a sur­vey. And it’s also the fourth ques­tion. So you’ve already talked about a whole bunch of things, and they’re warmed up, and you’re more like­ly to get as long as they’re not in a hur­ry, more like­ly to get more goods as the con­ver­sa­tion goes on, and peo­ple set­tle in. So the main point here is, it’s not rock­et sci­ence, peo­ple just, you know, with great inten­tions, get busy play­ing office or doing their jobs, and for­get to reach out and talk to cus­tomers. It’s also a lit­tle awk­ward for some peo­ple to do it unless they’re in sales. But this is a struc­tured way to get and push the team to get back into the mar­ket to see what’s going on, and under­stand and get a much bet­ter grip. So I’ll review the over­all so the four key ques­tions. Num­ber one, how are you doing just check­ing in with the human and how they’re doing? And what’s going on? Those lots of points of con­nec­tions that often come out about what’s going on in your indus­try or neigh­bor­hood, depend­ing on the sit­u­a­tion? What do you hear about our com­peti­tors? That’s a very juicy ques­tion with lots of Intel in it, how are we doing? and not being afraid to dig in and get some more details about specif­i­cal­ly what they like or what they don’t? And then on those ques­tions, Brad, you want to run through the six kind of dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives there? Yeah.

Brad Giles 22:02

So why are they impor­tant? Num­ber one is to leave the ivory tow­er, we want to get the lead­er­ship teams out of the ivory tow­er where they’re only talk­ing to one anoth­er, we want them to get some actu­al phys­i­cal feed­back from a cus­tomer ver­bal­ly, not on a sur­vey, not on a sur­vey, or val­i­date your strate­gies. Num­ber two, so this helps us to under­stand that our strat­e­gy is work­ing or isn’t are the things that we’re start­ing to change are actu­al­ly res­onat­ing. Num­ber three, under­stand what’s impor­tant to cus­tomers. Because if we think that qual­i­ty is what mat­ters, and all they tell about is on, tell us about is that things have to be on time, then then we should be respond­ing and under­stand­ing and dig­ging deep­er into that issue. Num­ber four is to learn about the indus­try. We don’t know every­thing about our indus­try, we have dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives and dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ences. So we will con­tin­ue to learn about what’s hap­pen­ing. And of course, they’re not num­ber five, which is learn about com­peti­tors. We’re under­stand­ing what are our com­peti­tors doing by ask­ing that ques­tion num­ber six, of course, is to learn about our per­for­mance, to learn about how we’re per­form­ing the last ques­tion, and what can we do bet­ter? Always min­ing for gold in that area? Good chat today. Good chat. Yeah,

Kevin Lawrence 23:24

it is. It’s just a basic dis­ci­pline that peo­ple don’t do enough of includ­ing auc­tions. I caught myself not doing it last week when I could have and should have. And like Brad said, the thing that we’ll often do with teams is to push them to go and make it a chal­lenge over a quar­ter to go gath­er a whole bunch of feed­back, par­tic­u­lar­ly lead­ing into a strat­e­gy ses­sion. And that way, if every­one’s do it, it makes it a bit more palat­able. And you know, noth­ing like a lit­tle peer pressure.

Brad Giles 23:50

Yeah, isn’t it? You know, sur­veys are good. But we can’t rely on sur­veys we need to have lead­ers talk­ing to cus­tomers. So thank you for lis­ten­ing to the growth whis­pers I hope that you’ve gained some val­ue today. As always, we’re talk­ing about build­ing endur­ing great com­pa­nies. That’s what we talk about all the time. You can find the video ver­sion of this on YouTube, just by search­ing the Growth Whis­pers and of course we’re on all the good pod­cast chan­nels. So thanks for watch­ing and lis­ten­ing today. We hope that you enjoyed it and we will look for­ward to chat­ting to you again next week.