“Time To Customer Acumen…..”

Preface:  This is long and very nerdy.  But I think it’s important to share the details of this fascinating research project.  We struggle with the idea of, “How do we develop better business acumen with our sellers?  How much time, how much investment, when will we see the results?  What this project shows is “Time to customer acumen is amazingly short–and simple!”  Enjoy!

Yeah, you know I’m a broken record on customer, problem, business, and financial acumen. I bore you with ideas and data showing how developing and implementing these skills is critical in driving our customer relationships and trust. You are tired of the data that shows people leveraging Business Focused Selling 2x their win rates, reduce No Decision Made by a minimum of 20%, and reduce buying/sales cycles by 30-40%.  Or when I cite data on improving retention/renewal/expansion through the trust we build in the process.

“Yeah, yeah, Dave, we get it, but we gotta build pipeline, make more calls, do more demos… Yeah our win rates are sliding, percent of people making goal is declining (14% of our sellers do 80% of our revenue). Our ability to hit our revenue/ARR targets is plummeting. But we got the formula, we’ll just do more…….. sigh…..”

“Plus, it takes so long, we can never shift our people to doing this….. We’ll just suck it up and keep doing the same thing…..”

The amazing thing is, this transformation doesn’t take long at all! Imagine in 3-4 conversations going from having customer acumen scales measured a “1” on a “1-5” scale, going to “3.” And after another few conversations, moving it to 4-5. The results are greater seller confidence in having these conversations, and customers getting much more out of them—wanting to continue.

For the past two years, I’ve been collaborating with Dr. Howard Dover, his team and the students at the Naveen Jindal School of Management’s Center for Professional Sales School at the University of Texas at Dallas. We’ve been working on:

“How to increase and leverage customer acumen in our prospecting calls?”

I’m going to nerd out a bit, their research is so fascinating, but bear with me.

 This research has been conducted over the past 2 years in the Digital Prospecting Course.
 The students have conducted over 1500, 30-45 minute interviews of targeted personas. Typically, sales/marketing management roles.
 The target customer interviews have spanned industries, company sizes, and geographies.
 At the beginning of the semester, the students are given the assignment to do a certain number of these interviews. They use the “Customer Focused Brock Questionert” to do this. This consists of 15 questions to help them better understand the customer, their jobs, challenges, workflows, metrics and other things. (Ask me for the Questionert). The questions are all about their role and what they do. It has nothing to do with selling them anything.
 These interviews are recorded and analyzed. Some preliminary results are shown below.
 After they are have completed the interviews, a portion of them are tasked with selling something. Usually it’s attendance at a job fairs or networking events of some sort. They call into the targeted personas, but not necessarily to the people they have spoken to. Howard and his team are working to track the results of teams using this approach versus before, where there was no training in customer acumen.
 All of this is done in a semester, Howard and the team has been doing this research over the past 4 semesters, so we have lots of iterations.

There is so much we can glean from the results of this work–both quantitative and qualitative. I’m just going to show one snapshot of one student’s progress. (And we see the same with virtually every student, even the one’s that groan about how this “homework” cuts into their free time.)

Now let’s walk through this chart:

1. This shows the progress a person made through a series of 10 different interviews with similar personas.
2. We analyzed the recorded interviews across 4 dimensions of curiosity and 4 dimensions of business acumen. What we were looking for was confidence, relevance and customer engagement in the conversations. These were rated on a 1-5 scale. (Several conversational intelligence tools were leveraged to help this analysis.)
3. By background, most of these students had little or no formal business background. They had little formal sales training. They were primarily undergraduates (juniors/seniors).
4. I anonymized the customers–they represented managers/execs in small to large companies, manufacturers, professional services, technology.

While this shows just one person, this is very consistent with the overall results. 

What’s amazing to see is how quickly this individual learned and applied their experience from preceding conversations.  After just 4 calls, this person had doubled the call quality/engagement. After a total of 8 calls, their ability to have high impact conversations had skyrocketed–primarily just through learning from the previous calls.

But did it have an impact on the selling results. Qualitatively, we saw higher performance in their sales competitions.  We are analyzing the data to get into the nitty gritty of it improved performance–stay tuned.

There were a number of qualitative observations accompanying this.

1. Students presented their experience to me. It was fascinating to listen to their discussions, not just about what they produced, but how this experience was helping shape their thinking and what they are learning at the business school. When I was in their shoes, I would have been looking for suggestions on bars. In talking to them, there was real curiosity, or comments, “Now I understand how why these other courses I’m taking are important.”
2. When provided a ground breaking AI Qualitative analysis tools, these students were able to exhibit business acumen far beyond most college students.
3. As with all groups, there was a normal distribution of student engagement. There were some that were hyper motivated, and some slackers. What was fascinating is customer acumen and knowledge increased across all of them. The slackers may have been getting 3s where the high performers were getting 4-5s, but all improved.
4. A year ago, one high performing student used this in her summer internship job. The results she was producing were so far above those of the regular sellers, they got her to teach them this approach.
5. I did interviews of some of the customer participants. Very positive feedback. Very often, I would hear, “No one has ever asked me these questions before…..” There were a small number of very reflective executives saying, “I’ve never really asked myself these things before….”

So here’s my point. If you don’t believe in the importance of customer, business, problem and financial acumen, you gave up at the title. But while many executives want to develop their people’s customer, business, and problem acumen, they worry:  How do we make this transition? How long does it take? How will we see real
results?

What’s so exciting is to see the time to results or the “time to customer acumen.” Imagine taking just one step. Assign each of your sales people to take 30 minutes a week. Call a customer that fits your ICP personas. Have a 30 minute conversation about them and their business. Ask them 15 questions. These conversations aren’t prospecting conversations, they aren’t to present your solutions. They are just to learn.

Every week, get a quick team meeting, share ideas, what they’ve learned, what works, what doesn’t work. Then have them do one more call the next week. Within a few weeks you will see massive improvements in their understanding of their customers, what they do, how they do it, what they care about and what makes them successful.

And with each of these conversations, they will be engaging their customers in higher impact selling conversations.

I am so excited by the work that Dr. Dover, his team, and the students have done. While I pontificate about this stuff constantly, they have demonstrated how to make it work! Thank you, team!

Afterword:  This is the AI generated discussion of this post.  The article is very deep and detailed.  As much as I tried to simplify it, I couldn’t get it to where I wanted to.  That’s where this discussion is brilliant.  They have managed to translate this post in a very nice, easy to understand way.  Enjoy!