5 Tips for Developing a Learning Mindset for Customer Conversations
Have you ever walked away from a customer conversation grinning ear to ear thinking to yourself, “Self, we bloody nailed it!”?
You’d spent the past hour with one of your top customers reinventing your collaborative world, leaving no doubt the pronoun “we” would be the descriptor used you’d both be using to describe your partnership for another two years.
You’d spent hours preparing. Pouring over two years worth of data to identify trends, support your claims & build the case required for your service contract to be re-signed.
It paid off. So well in fact, you figured you’d take the same approach with another customer, due to re-sign their service contract later in the week.
This time though, you’d walked away feeling frustratingly discombobulated.
The productive & practical discussion you were hoping for, replaced by what felt like an emotional overreaction by your customer to a seemingly trivial situation, between one of their customer’s & your service.
Actually, it was multiple situations impacting multiple of their customers, but you didn’t hear that bit. Your blinkers were on.
You were determined to stick with your original plan & show off the colourful data you’d painstakingly prepared. “The overall data looks great, they’ll be right.” You thought. Eager to get to the next slide.
You were politely dismissed five minutes later & to top it off, your contract wasn’t re-signed.
It turns out what was trivial to you, wasn’t trivial to your customer & you totally missed it.
Ouch.
How did your customer feel?
Frustrated you didn’t understand what was important to them
Hurt you didn’t care about their feelings
Dismissed by your preoccupation with getting a contract signed
Like they couldn’t trust your business with their own customers
As though their business & success didn’t matter to you
Annoyed they’d have to explore the market for a new service provider
Perhaps if you’d prioritised learning rather than telling in the conversation, the outcome could have been dramatically different. You may have reached the outcome you were looking for & the customer might have too.
You would have connected.
Conversation is one of our most powerful tools for fostering customer trust. It can also fracture it in a heartbeat if we are too distracted by our own agenda - determined to follow a script, fixated on delivering the perfect slideshow, or our minds preoccupied by what we are bursting to say.
Experience has taught me when it comes to customer conversations, less is so often more.
Focus less on ourselves, more on our customer.
Say less words, allowing our customer to articulate more.
Minimise the distractions of past & future, to focus more on the present.
Align & sharpen your value, rather than throwing all you have in hope something will stick.
How do we prepare for a conversation of “less” to deliver an outcome of “more”?
We prepare a learning conversation which prioritises human connection from the outset.
Our aim, to improve the effectiveness of our conversations, & to recognise them as a powerful tool in developing trust.
Here are five tips for prioritising a learning mindset when entering & navigating customer conversations:
Deliberate planning with questions
Mental thoughts in the car on the way to a customer conversation isn’t planning. Planning is creating deliberate time space & brain space to outline what you would like to achieve & how you intend on getting there. It organises your thoughts & reduces anxiety.
Momentum Mindset™’s planning with questions framework keeps you focused on the customer from the outset:
What is the outcome you are looking for?
What information is required to achieve that outcome?
What are the questions you need to ask to uncover that information?
Planning with well crafted questions reduces your self orientation, strengthens your customer focus & fosters trust.
Understand your Customer’s conversation goal
If you’ve followed the “planning with questions” framework, you will know what you want to achieve from the upcoming conversation. If you aren’t sure of your outcome, it’s worth asking yourself ,”should I be having the conversation at all?” No one wants their time wasted, including your customer.
Share your intention with your customer in advance, giving them time for forethought.
Then revisit at the start of your conversation. “Let’s confirm what we’d each like from this conversation today?” is an easy check-in & also clarifying potential assumptions.
This sets you both up to walk away satisfied.
Recognise the conversation type
Sometimes all the planning in the world won’t prepare us for a customer who goes off-pisté. It’s the sense we get in conversation when we feel like we are on a different page, or start thinking “there is more to this than what’s being said.”
The question we need to ask ourselves - “What is this really about?”
We have two options, 1) press on with our original line of questioning or 2) explore the message our intuition is sending.
Presence & patience are paramount.
It’s a critical moment for customer connection.
We fail to “read the room”, the impact can be destructive. Our customer feeling unheard, & misunderstood.
Conversation Matching
By recognising the type of conversation our customer needs in the moment & matching accordingly, we can tap into a powerful connective force.
I often say, emotionless facts won’t resonate with emotional beings. A customer focused on the past, on their frustrations & anxieties, has an empathetic mindset. A compassionate approach offering stories for context, more likely to connect & influence.(1)
Whereas a customer peppering you with analytical questions & asking for data, is demonstrating a cost & benefit sense of logic. They are ready for the numbers.
Persisting with an approach which isn’t aligned with our customer in the moment is akin to putting the blinkers on. We are no longer listening.
And don’t forget if we aren’t sure, we can always ask! Often, coaching clients will say to me, “how do I know what my customer will want?” My response generally, “Who’s the best person to answer that question?” It’s a lightbulb moment.
If we recognise something isn’t right during a conversation simply ask, “would you prefer if we explored this rather than pressed on with our original agenda?”
Reciprocation
Listen for the emotion behind your customer’s spoken words.
Planning a learning conversation from the outset encourages us to pay attention. Not only to spoken words, but to the undercurrent of feelings which act as clues for buying behaviour.
Reciprocating with your own, discreetly shifts the conversation from mental to emotional engagement. The impact of shared vulnerability creating safety, instilling confidence to share the deeper heart reasoning behind decision making. It’s the why things matter behind what’s important to our customer.
(A worthy note, it’s a balance of how much we reveal about ourselves, to whom & at what stage. Be mindful.)
Adopting a new behaviour takes effort. We must make a conscious decision to change, learn & course correct as we go.
Six years ago, I set out to consciously adopt this mindset for client conversations.
I’d made a commitment to myself to develop new professional habits. They had to nourish not drain my well-being. Each aligning with the four core needs of my mind - a sense of meaning, connecting with others, giving & continually learning. Insights from British psychologist Fiona Murden’s book Defining You, which deeply resonated with me. (2)
I’ve never looked back.
What do I love most about this approach? Each time I enter a conversation I am subconsciously giving my customer a gift.
We are connecting, continually learning & establishing a sense of meaning for our partnership.
It’s mentally nourishing & we both walk away energised. Now that’s what I call added value.
Peta x
Sales Coach | Commercial Growth Consultant
Mental Health Speaker for Beyond Blue
Founder of Momentum Mindset™ online course with coaching support for sales professionals
Author of My Beautiful Mess - living through burnout & rediscovering me
Book Recommendations
Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg
Defining you by Fiona Murden