Curiosity that converts: The art of better questioning

0:06Martin Couzins:Welcome back to the Mastering Sales and Negotiations podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Massey. And this week on the podcast, we were joined by Martin Couzins, founder and CEO of Insights Media, who specialise in customer listening and insight. In this conversation, we talk about how real customer success stories begin with understanding what customers truly value and how you can unlock these insights through great questions and really listening to what they have to say, a much underrated superpower. Today, I'm joined by Robin Hoyle to unpack the key takeaways from that discussion, from how organizations can build listening cultures to the communication behaviors we use and teach, as well as the great questions.

0:50Martin Couzins:And why Robin, you may ask? Well, he's a leading figure in the learning and development space, a regular speaker at global conferences, the author of two books on learning culture. In short, he knows his stuff. So let's dive in.

1:11Martin Couzins:i think that was a great conversation to sort of understand where you need to start to really build if you really as an organization wanted to build that kind of listening culture

1:20Robin Hoyle:absolutely i think i think there's a couple of things that immediately come to mind i mean one of the things that you'll be aware of from various conversations that you and i have been in and meetings we've been in is that I have an absolute loathing of the term best practice. I'm not dead yet, so I don't know if it was best.

1:35Martin Couzins:You know, it's an absolute, you know, good practice, maybe,

1:40Robin Hoyle:but that leaves space for improvement. So there's a humility about asking those questions, which says, we think this is what we're good at. And it's not that I want you to corroborate that. In actual fact, I don't want you to corroborate that because that's one of those things about, are you really satisfied with A, B, where you present the options that you want people to say. You want to hear. Whereas this is very definitely about saying, tell me what it is that we are doing. And sometimes we'll get really unusual, unexpected responses about what people value about our service and what people find actually could be a little bit better, which is a really useful thing to get.

2:22Robin Hoyle:And I think modeling that, The point that Martin made about modeling that behavior, this is modeling it on a global corporate scale. This is actually saying, as an organization, we think we're pretty damn good at some stuff, but we want to make sure that we're not missing any opportunities, that we've really got a handle on why people choose to work with us and where we could be better. Better, yeah. And that is really about, you know, people talk a lot about learning culture and they talk about continuous improvement. it matters not at all if we don't know where we are falling short where we are doing really well and differentiate between the two so that we can build on what we're doing so well and fix the stuff that we're not doing so well that process of being open to that feedback i think is vital for an organization particularly in the world where actually things are changing so fast what you were doing last week may no longer be relevant next week yeah so we've got to keep learning we We've got to keep improving and focusing on it.

3:24Robin Hoyle:And for me, what Martin was talking about was a real into that, but it was also one of those opportunities to model to the rest of the organization, to all of those customers that we've spoken to, that actually we don't think we've got it perfectly right, but we're really willing to learn, and that's important.

3:43Martin Couzins:I think as well from my perspective, and we did it, you've got to sell that as well into your organization. You've got to make sure that they're ready for that. Like this isn't just going to, this isn't, aren't we great, rah, rah, rah. Yeah. This is a real exercise in finding out what their people really think.

3:59Robin Hoyle:Yeah. Genuine interest in what people think of us, what our customers get from the relationship. And also you're absolutely right. Modeling that to the rest of the business in such a way that they recognize that that vulnerability is part of who we are.

4:13Martin Couzins:Yeah.

4:13Robin Hoyle:That humility is part of who we are. I think that's really important because there will be people who will be, what if they find out something bad about me? You know, where does this take my, you know, I think within Hotswite International, we're very clear about an organisation. We are very tight as an organisation. People don't leave. People, you know, grow together, work together very well across all sorts of disciplines. And so I think it's easier for us. I think for some other organisations, it might be a bigger risk. It might be hard.

4:48Martin Couzins:I think it does need to be sold in right.

4:50Robin Hoyle:Yeah, and you'd have to communicate very, very clearly to assuage people of any of those concerns.

4:56Martin Couzins:We're talking about questions, which is obviously our raison d 'etre to an extent.

5:01Robin Hoyle:It's kind of a significant part of it, yeah.

5:02Martin Couzins:But good questions do drive, can drive those really great outcomes. What do you think makes a powerful question in a customer conversation?

5:11Robin Hoyle:I think first and foremost, you know, it is about actually genuinely inquiring. So you're asking people, what do you think? And it's also about not being afraid to follow up.

5:21Martin Couzins:Yeah.

5:22Robin Hoyle:To say, tell me a little bit more about that. Explain that to me. Can I just clarify what you mean there? You know, being prepared to go that little bit deeper rather than take the first answer that people give you and then move on to the next thing. So that's part of that questioning discipline. And you cannot follow up properly. You cannot inquire further and probe further and delve for more information if you haven't listened very carefully. And sometimes, you know, we've got behaviors that we help people to uncover, and there's two behaviors that immediately come to mind, which is testing, understanding, and summarizing.

5:55Robin Hoyle:So that idea of saying, can I just check what you're saying is, have I got that right? Again, unless you've listened really, really carefully, you cannot do that in a way which is meaningful and interesting to people. So you're encouraging that. And then there's that second baby around summarizing. So what you said is, is that right? Martin made another point there, which is that the good questioning sometimes leads people down the path to think things that they've never had the space and the time and the opportunity to think about. To consider before, yeah. So suddenly they're getting something from the quality of the questions that you're asking, which says, I am now reflecting in a different way on what has gone on.

6:39Robin Hoyle:And that's really useful to people to say, oh, I didn't realize I found that quite so important. But now that I've talked about it, I realize that's a really important thing. And I hadn't realized that that might be capable of being improved and could be better. so that's an enlightenment for them as well as an insight for the people who are commissioning the the the customer insights work that martin and others do that whole listening piece as well what

7:08Martin Couzins:there are telltale signs when pete you can tell when people aren't really listening and it i would say it's the number one thing that just it just ruins any trust that you have that with with that

7:18Robin Hoyle:rapport the rapport is doesn't it yeah yeah and i think i think that idea of the point that i made within the conversation about waiting to speak you can really tell when people are doing that i mean it's just like they've got a big sign over their head going my turn now my turn now you know and and that thing going on is is that's fairly obvious i don't want to get into the whole body language thing because as you and i know you know it can be interpreted in so many different ways it's not as objective as some people would like to think but nonetheless there are signs that people are not really listening are not taking it on board but in actual fact the real skill is to be able to demonstrate that you are listening well and again testing understanding summarizing is one of the ways you can do that but also you can you can do that by the quality of the follow-up questions that you ask by the fact that this is a conversation not a script by the fact that you're not rigidly fixated on this list of things that you've got to get through and and you set some of that up with the the ways in which you you introduce the questioning that you're going to do i want to ask you these questions in order to what i am going to do with this information is all of that is valuable and then you follow through on that promise by making sure that you've understood and demonstrating to the person that you have listened very carefully and and to a certain extent people are not mind readers yes there will be some tells that some people may give that they're not really listening very well but you can't rely on that much better to actually demonstrate that you have listened really really carefully and then move on to the next thing because the response that you get then is deeper, more insightful, more useful, more valuable to both sides of the conversation.

9:12Martin Couzins:I think one of the behaviours that we teach people to do, and the one I really love, which leads into this, is that building on something, building on someone else's piece of information or conversation. You know then that you've been listened to.

9:30Robin Hoyle:Yeah, absolutely. And we talk about that very often when we're talking about proposals. So I make a proposal and somebody says, yes, and we could also do. which is that build on top of. We could adapt what you've just said. You can equally build on somebody's answer to a question with another question. And that ability to say, yeah, that's really interesting. That's led me to think about what about? How would that work? What if? And suddenly you're getting into a real genuine conversation where both of you are gaining benefit from it, gaining value from it, but you're also looking at the problem together or looking at the situation together rather than I'll ask you these questions and I'll take your notes and stroke my beard and go, well, that's very interesting.

10:15Robin Hoyle:Thank you for sharing that with me. You know, really demonstrate that, get into it because the response that you get then goes a lot further. Then probably you've got any right to expect, but that's the value of the human part of that conversation. So you can't do that via a survey. you can't do it via AI you have to be with someone and speak to them in a genuinely open and honest way and really show interest in who they are and what their opinion is absolutely oh great

10:48Martin Couzins:some great tips I think there some great stuff there thanks a lot Robin you're welcome thank you