Getting Un-Stuck
Your employees, customers, and prospects are in the market every day, talking to one another, meeting with your competition, and measuring the market players. They know what companies are doing and who’s doing it best. They are great sources of information about industry trends as well as your own firm’s strengths and weaknesses.
Industry Spotlight: More Strategic Conversations with Customers
It all started with one good question.
Listening and Following Up
Whether doing research, negotiating, or collaborating, good questions and strong listening skills can reveal motives and uncover knowledge. It will cast you in a better light as a curious, intelligent person. Finally, it will help you think more strategically.
Asking Good Questions
Thinking about what you need to know and how to get there is important. So plan your questions in advance. It will help you get to the answer faster. Asking good questions will also help you establish credibility.
Listening to the Voice of Your Customer
If you ask closed questions, you are limiting your client to the set of answers that you design—and a lot of what you should be looking for are the answers that you can’t design or foresee. That’s why there is often no substitute for high quality, and hopefully, face-to-face conversation based on open questions.
Tapping into the Strategic Voice of Your Customer
Customers can talk to you about where their business is going, how their market is changing, and even how your competitors are developing—but you have to ask them. That’s what’s really interesting—your business lies at the intersection between the customer’s needs and your organization’s abilities.
The Power of Competitive Intelligence
It is ultimately market movements, technological changes, evolving customer needs, and competitive environments that are critical in determining the fate of most companies. External information is the best way to ride, rather than be drowned by the waves of change in your environment.
Industry Snapshot: Learning New Perspectives
Many managers are realizing the power of conversations. Here are three diverse examples of how companies are using conversations to increase learning and results.
Having Powerful Conversations
Despite all the technological alternatives we have today, the best communication still comes from face-to-face conversations, where you can see facial expressions, observe body language, and feed off the other person’s energy. If in-person meetings are simply not possible because of time or location, the next best alternative is a phone conversation, where you can still here the inflection in someone’s voice.
The Need to Connect
The irony of this technological revolution is that while the quantity of communications has increased dramatically, the quality of our communication may have suffered. We are forced to keep up with the huge number of messages we receive from a plethora of sources.
