Tuned In: How customer listening creates actionable insights

0:07Welcome to Mastering Sales Negotiations, the podcast for ambitious professionals who want to sharpen their skills, transform their conversations and deliver lasting commercial impact. In today's episode, we're joined by Martin Cousins, founder and CEO of Insights Media and a leading voice in learning in HR. Martin has spent over 25 years helping organizations turn research and customer insights into actionable strategies that drive growth, retention and innovation. We'll explore the art of listening as a strategic advantage, why creating time and space for meaningful conversations with customers and stakeholders can unlock opportunities far beyond the transactional, and where to start if you want to build a listening culture in your own organisation.

0:57So whether you're in sales, marketing or customer success, this conversation offers practical strategies and a fresh perspective on how listening and insight can become your most powerful tools for growth. Let's get started.

1:19Martin, welcome to the Mastering Sales and Negotiation podcast. Thank you. You're welcome. You've spent, I think, 17 years in B2B publishing and then you built Insights Media. so just tell us a bit about your journey and and what led you to specialize in customer listening and insight um well thanks for having me both it's lovely to be here um and talking about you know what i think is probably is my favorite thing but also it's really important thing so um it's not just a work thing either um so the journey was if you were to give someone advice about you know your your ideal career you know of course mine wouldn't be following any rules at all because um i just came out of university and and there was a job in the job center that said um publishing local publishing company so i went there and i just looked around and i was like oh this is interesting what's that job and what's that you know and basically it was a large publishing company so it had a couple of thousand employees in the building loads of media brands and I really started at the bottom and just actually got a real taste for publishing journalism and and everything that represented actually which for me was you know kind of finding stories you know it's all about facts it's about stories it was about understanding your audience and what they needed from you and you know that has always been kind of something that I'm kind of feel quite passionate about really um and within that it's the listening bit to which we will come on to so I did that for I basically went from the bottom to reasonably um high up in that organization managed quite big teams it was always on the editorial side so I'd done pretty much every job that you could do on the editorial side up to editor role uh sort of managing editor type stuff and then um basically i ended up leaving and went freelance and then basically built a business that's you know basically i was doing a lot of stuff in the publishing space in and around hr and learning and i think there's a tenuous link here but i always wanted to be a teacher and and my my my mum was a teacher a lot of my um extended family were teachers um and i think actually i really just think it's a great thing to be able to want to help people develop themselves actually and and and achieve whatever they want to achieve so that was a thread in all of this which meant that I quite enjoyed the learning stuff actually and when I was in the corporate I did a lot of peer learning activity I just did it off my own back and it was quite successful so actually there is a sort of strand of learning in all of this which is quite important so that took me into more into the HR learning sphere and we carried on our kind of journalism and communications work but that has morphed into research and customer listening because we've kind of always been looking at what's the most valuable thing is in the work that we do and also now we're thinking about what is the most valuable in terms of people paying us when AI can do it for you and I've I mean you may or may not agree but for me there's still something in being able to ask questions directly to someone face to face and pick pick up on everything that they're talking about and be able to sort of progress a conversation that has a lot of value in it so we kind that's how we've managed to get to where we've got to the business because we've kind of distilled some of the stuff out along the way i mean we still do a lot of comms work and um you know this is all wrapped up actually but um what comes out of customer listening is all the stuff that can help you with your brand and your service and your product and so i think it's the heart of this all and that's what we that's why we've ended up focusing on that if that makes sense and as as a kind of an external i mean you you talk about and have talked about this idea of intentional customer listening this idea of having a real purpose behind it what is it about organizations relationship with their customers that that you think is enhanced by having somebody from outside coming in and and and really helping them frame that and and have that i guess a more objective viewpoint what how does that add value to the to the interactions that we all have with our customers every day we think we know our customers pretty well and we hope they know us pretty well but but you add something extra what Where do you think that comes from?

6:30That's a great question. And I think it comes from the fact that from a journalistic perspective, I've always marveled at what people will tell you when you ask them some questions, right? And what happens in organizations is that everyone has a defined role and defined targets and tasks. and they tend to have a defined version of what a relationship looks like with their customer so they and they build functions and functional silos around what that looks like right so you know if you're a sas company you'll have customer success was very much built out of being able to you know upgrade your the value of your customer contracts so you know and and there's there are There's method around that.

7:24So it's all very well defined. And actually, within that, you then build relationships based on the dynamic and the questioning that you might have and the process that you might have, which might involve fairly regular check-ins, asking certain questions. And a lot of that will be focused on the value of the contract. Yeah. Because you just want that person to be really happy with what you're providing. and that's completely legitimate good and valuable however what about other questions you might like to ask that might either be more challenging or take you somewhere else where it takes you out of that dynamic and understanding of what a kind of normal everyday conversation would be with that client how do you how do you pitch that and when do you when when do you have those conversations and what's the value there um and and i think that's where you can as an independent you can come in and you can you can do that more easily for your clients so it and also i think there's another thing about this which is this idea of independence so i absolutely i had a client who actually did do the customer listening that we were doing with them but they took the questions and they went and did it with five or six of their clients for themselves so the actual answer to your question based on what he found out was that those people basic that those conversations ended up being about the the relationship the day-to-day relationship it would fall into work conversation and it wouldn't it wouldn't be as easy for him to talk to his clients about the questions that we were asking, which I thought was quite interesting.

9:23Because actually, you've got a history, you know each other, you're comfortable with each other potentially, or you might not be comfortable with each other. But you've definitely got a relationship. And I don't have that when I come in. I'm there in service of the questions to get the answers, whereas most people are in service of the relationship asking questions and getting answers but it's all about maintaining the relationship and i think that's nuanced but i think it's quite an important nuance it means that i can probably get different i do get different types of answers yeah because and it's outside of all all of those kind of norms in the relationship sure and i think i think there's a there's a thing which strikes me about that which is around the asking the questions yourself which is first of all if if i get you right there's there's that idea that essentially it is subsumed beneath the the value of the the transaction to a certain extent soon gets into a kind of back and forth which is about protecting the relationship but it's also about working out where the next commercially valuable move might be whereas this is this is more disinterested in in that side of things to a certain extent i wonder also martin what what role something like confirmation bias plays within this because i i see people ask a lot of questions where what they listen to is the answers which confirm what they already think rather than perhaps more uncomfortable truths or things which people are more open-minded about do you believe that there's a there's the independent objective role that you play for those clients also kind of overcome some of that issue and and and why do why is that important i suppose yeah i think i think you're absolutely right you know we're all human yeah i mean and it's all relational this work so it really matters how you relate to other people, how you relate to your customers.

11:34Yeah. So I think, you know, you're not going, it's quite a big ask to start dropping in really challenging questions, potentially out of context, because it might upset the relationship and the expectations on both sides. So I think you're right. I think it's a lot easier, for example, and I'm not saying it's done because it's easy, but it's a lot easier to frame questions that will give you just what you just said. yeah it will give you what you want it'll make you feel great um and the other person might feel that they've helped make you feel great and they the answer might make them feel great too and they're all very happy but actually we didn't find out a lot at that point and actually next week i'm going to end this contract but you don't know that yet that can be that is real you know We can carry on and things come to an end.

12:28You might have some signals suggest that it's going to happen, but sometimes people can be genuinely quite surprised and shocked that what they thought was a good relationship wasn't quite as good as it was. Yeah, or wasn't unassailable anyway. There were other things going on. Can I just say also, I think everyone is really busy a lot of the time, right? And I think this is a factor in all of this. It's not just things like confirmation bias. It's actually trying to carve out the time to have a different type of conversation is actually really important. And if you can do that, then you really need to make it valuable.

13:09yeah and you need and that feeds into things like asking really good questions and listening properly because if you're going to invite people to spend more time with you um in this kind of context having these kind of conversations then you're going to have to make it worth their while and they really do need to be heard and feel like something's going to change so i think that's important what one of the points i was going to make as well that happened when i I mean, we've done this exercise with you guys and we got some great feedback from it. But one of the things I found really interesting was that some of the interviews that you did, some of the questions that you asked, they revealed almost a bit of sort of the emotional journey behind some of the decisions that people had made rather than just the rational ones, which I think if we'd gone in and asked those questions, we would have just got the rational answers.

13:59Whereas you, there was obviously some space for them to answer a little bit differently with you. And we think we really benefited from that. There's a lot riding on these kind of relationships, yeah? I mean, if you're holding big contracts and actually what determines the success or otherwise of that contract isn't just the service provision or the product. it you know a lot of our work is that has established the fact that the relationship really really matters you know it's so important so i think that's you know that comes back to that point i think it's you know it's the how do you have a space where you can let someone be a bit more honest about that relationship you know in a constructive way and i think and it's interesting because that sort of thing does start to happen you do get a much uh richer picture of you know what that relationship looks like from a third from my perspective you know absolutely what i'm doing is encouraging someone to say what they think in a safe environment it's all teed up properly they know that you know you're going to hear the answers you know so it's not like we're we're pretending that you're not going to hear them it's only for my ears or it's only for them it's actually all very transparent but within that people will open up more it's interesting i don't know the answer but i think there was a there was a level of honesty with the responses that you got from the people you spoke to on our part, which we thought was a very interesting, but also very valuable, more to the point.

15:47And I think the idea of being honest, even though there is clarity about where this information is going and that it will be fed back to us as the supplier in that case, and we've got to still have a conversation with them the following week or whatever. And so there was no artifice about that. It was not as if any confidences had been broken. But I guess in the way that that questioning technique, and you talked about your journalistic background and uncovering the stories, and I want to dive into that a little bit really to say to what extent does that training, your experience, your background of not just listening carefully and constructing the story that you hear, but also getting people to open up, to tell you those stories.

16:36how does that work from a developing a conversation with someone where yeah you could just go in and say here's 10 questions i'm going to ask these 10 questions but but you don't you go in and you adapt and you develop where does that come from and how how is that sculpted so that you get the best from it i guess which is a very difficult and complex conversation to have i guess but how does it happen i think you're you know if if your experience is one of people not necessarily wanting to talk to you or be slightly skeptical about as a journalist you know you know they were always the least trusted people on earth aren't they along with you know state agents it used to be something like that you know so just to remember that it's like actually you know trust is a massive part of this um but so how do you i what i think is quite interesting there is there are different elements to this and one of those elements is the fact that you're teeing this all up right that is really important we're not we're not doorstepping your customer even just out of the blue saying here we here we come um i need five minutes of your time i'm going to ask you some really awkward questions it's not that right it is the context matters so you know you have asked them there is a reason why you're asking them there are we have agreed the questions right we've spent a lot of time trying to get those that was a very big point of the whole exercise wasn't it we spent a long time trying to get those questions right and to be really honest so we could be really honest with those questions it's a key it's a key factor isn't it of the whole project Yeah.

18:18And I think, you know, so I think so there is this element of, you know, knowing what you're being asked to do from from the interviewee perspective. Right. So, you know, the context, you've seen some questions, which I think is useful because, you know, it does really help people think about what's coming. So, you know, because people do, I think there's a couple of things here, which is, which are also, it's also important about how good the answers are, is that if you know the limitations or the guardrails, if you like, around the interview and how the information is going to be used, then that can really help people open up or not.

19:01so if you're talking to large corporate organizations then the cold hand of corporate communications is on that person always right and so and so they might not feel that they can be open but actually if you do set these up correctly then they probably will be far more open than they would to to adjourn this for example obviously because that might information come public so you've got this kind of guardrails around it you've got the questions but then you've got the interview right so and i think that's what is really important about that is that a i think it's important that you feel credible somehow right so one thing we offer is we if we do we do this across kind of you know learning and talent hr and it's a field that we know right it's so if someone starts using jargon or what i can do is i can start a conversation you know which is you know you kind of go in easy you know just a bit about you know the hellos and but also a bit about you're wrong and you know the organizing you talk a bit about the challenges that they're facing you know because i know what sort of challenges they're facing and these are small signals that are trying to just say i've got a good sense of you know what's going on for you because if i just and i'm looking at people as well i am not staring at a list of questions going right here we go you know what about this and i just look at the socks you know it's not that it's like open you know all the questions that we ask are open right and also there has to be some scope for someone saying i don't understand that question or you know we've got to be really clear i've had a lot of clarity around the questions i think um and then a re so you you you're asking but then you're then you have to know how to stop yourself as the interviewer you know i think you know it's this idea of it's not about me i'm just a tool here not in that sense in in the sense of i'm trying yeah i'm here to get good answers right that's my job right and it's and and that whole idea around the cult of the interviewer you know from a journalism perspective or an influencer perspective it's like it's not that right it's absolutely about the person you're talking to because that's what everyone cares about the most so and i think you can feel that i really i think it's like and you do that in a number of ways and one of those ways is to know when to stop asking the question and when to listen and then how far you're going to go listening because i think and now we're going a bit granular but you asked so i'm gonna go yeah it's things like pauses for example yeah i was going to ask you about that do not you know everyone it's everyone does this because it's because there's a discomfort around a pause and you know we've got to jump into that space because there's no sound and it's like oh awkward well it's not awkward because if you wait a little bit longer what tends to happen is that people are thinking you know people think in waves so it's like they will something is coming right and you don't have to fill that space and what's really interesting is what comes next and i think you know as an interviewer you've got to hold your nerve a bit and just ask a question and see what happens but then you might not get very far with the question so you have to ask the question in a different way because you still because you're asking me to get an answer for a question yeah and then you realize well i'm not getting very far here how could i get an answer to that question so you might have to reframe it a couple of times to get back to you know to try and get an answer clearly you're never going to have closed questions because you'll get a closed answer yes or no that's not what this process is about at all um but i think as you kind of step into it and go start to get the conversation going um even when you have challenging conversations you know when someone might feel a bit like they want to get something off their chest yeah about the client even in those situations you can And that's not a problem for me because I'm not the client.

24:08I'm not in that relationship that we were talking about earlier. So if I was to say, if they said to me, oh, Martin, I'm so cracked off with X, Y, and Z. Now, if I owned that account, I'd probably be like, I'm really sorry. I'd have an emotional response to that. Because you would. because you care about it. For me, it's like, okay, so why is that exactly? I don't have an emotional response because my job at this moment in time is not to have an emotional response. My job is to understand why you might feel that way. And I think that's, so those are the kinds of things in the questioning that become really important because otherwise I could get, I could lead that conversation in the wrong direction because i'm like yeah that's terrible they really do that i'll pass it on you say that's not we don't need to go there and that's a distraction and especially like i said earlier if people start to feel like being heard properly then actually that really does build some trust as you go and and and then then you start to pick up on what you hear and then they it really compounds that feeling of i really am being heard you know he's he's picking up on these things also if you ask questions people say well we'll also say that's a great question that's really made me think and and sometimes it helps people think a lot more clearly about the things you're asking them which can be beneficial for themselves And I think that is really underestimated in this process because actually it's not about you necessarily, but it can have another value to the person, which is, A, it's helped share their stuff about the relationship with the client or whatever you're asking them.

26:08be it can also make them think a bit more clearly about the stuff that but that is in their head because um you're going a bit deeper and you're having pause for thoughts and they're able to just keep going with stuff and actually you realize that a lot of the time people are really busy and they don't have these kind of conversations enough so it you know the time bit matters and So I think the, and the other thing is, you need to keep going. I think you can't, you know, I'm there to do a job and it can be quite easy to say, oh, that's a bit of a difficult question. We won't, let's just park that one.

26:52But actually, if it is a difficult question, I think it's worth asking, why is that a difficult question? Yeah, absolutely. What is it about that exactly is difficult for you to answer? and that's a completely legitimate line of questioning because i would like to be able to go i'd find the answer in the interview or or at least be able to go back and say that's quite interesting that that was really some that's an area that we couldn't get into you could hear why that was and maybe that's something we need to come back to but you know it's it's really important to not let things go and be listening and picking up.

27:30And also, I find that sometimes people want a lot of questions asked in not a lot of time, right? Now, I'm not going to give you some kind of bit of algebra that gives you the ultimate number of questions for a half-hour interview, but what I would say is it can be you don't need many questions. written down you know you can write down let's say 10 questions but i might ask 15 questions because one question leads to another which is not on the list naturally yeah a lot of it's about clarification it's like because people say things and you say what exactly does that mean or they might mention a name of this you know the client really needs to be aware of this happening and so So who's that then?

28:21And what's their relationship? You know, sometimes that granular information is the gold dust that is needed from the clock for our clients. It's like, oh, actually jobs are changing. Someone's moved. They hold their relationship with that person. It seems a prudent time to ask then after that. And this is what I really wanted to ask you was what common mistakes do you see that organizations make? I mean, we obviously know what ours were, tiny tiny little mistakes but what what um what general ones do you do you see i think the first thing is there's a there's a lack of clarity about who the audience is it's like who would you talk to and why that would be that sounds like a fundamental but if you've got a lot of customers then you know you could talk to them to any of them about for any reason but what happened are you looking at um ones that are about to renew contracts are you looking at your biggest ones because you need to really depth um deepen the relationship um you know what what is it exactly you know you could even talk to people that um those that contracts that have just been lost if you wanted to you know it's just like all you know i think you've got to think really carefully about who you would talk to um and why because that determines um quite a lot of things actually it determines uh what the value of the whole process is internally and therefore that helps with stakeholder engagement from the outset which is really important because if it's super clear that we're going to be talking to these people and we want to you know what questions would we ask because we our outcome is i don't know to establish to validate our product roadmap for example with our biggest customers because right now gen ai is blowing it all up and we just need to really talk to them for example that would be a probably a sensible thing to do right now um so who would need to be involved internally with that because you know you might want to do that but if you didn't talk to the product manager and yet you're talking about roadmap with the biggest customers that you've got the product manager might come back and say oh these are great answers but why don't we ask them this and these you know so it's easy yeah i mean it is quite easy i'm saying this it sounds so obvious but it's so easy to sort of get going um quite quickly but actually there's it's what's the most valuable use of using someone like us or going through this process that's the first thing the other thing about all of this is um in terms of the you know if you have a very limited sample you've got to be quite careful about how you use that data um and you know how you analyze what's in front of you because you know it takes time you know you you have different methods of getting um data and evidence from people and some of it can be you know so we've done for example one client we did customer satisfaction survey and then we did the deeper insights based on some of the people a sample of the the satisfaction survey for example so but what you you do need to be slightly careful if you're going to interview three customers and and then ratchet that up and say that is a trend across all our customers you know that's going to be slightly um a suspect very subjecting to do so how you use the insights is really important um and i think the context is really important as well just it comes back to how you use them if you can't just a lot of this is qualitative data so it's all about the context it's not about the numbers it's it's actually about like you said earlier so why you know what makes this a great relationship what do people what would they like to see from us you you know you might get some idea of value and impact as well that you can quantify but ultimately this is you know verbatim qualitative feedback that we're talking about it's rich in information but it is not a quantitative you know data collection exercise and that's a very different thing you said that you've done you've done surveys and these conversations when do when do you think one works better than the other when well are there different you know different types of information that people have asked for and then you think well that's probably a survey for that one okay so it comes back again it comes back to the purpose you know what why why what do you need to know as a business what's your concern or your excitement or opportunity that you think you need some validation of or evidence to support i mean i think that is has to be the driving force basically people in organizations are surveyed out a lot of them you don't want to waste anyone's time with something i mean this is another this is another previous point i didn't mention is that if you can't demonstrate what's happened as a result of the conversation then i think that's tricky too because you've you've spent the time getting all these great insights out of a customer and then you you need to be able to demonstrate what you're doing with that and we have had clients where we go back the year later to see what if anything has happened as a result of that conversation you know who does that normally people just employee surveys and we just do you know do that every year what happens no it's just yeah what was the outcome anything so really so the the quant stuff is you know if you are you know it's about the purpose so you know it's the right tool for the right job if you need something at scale to give you a sense you know to also kind of build a picture that you can then explore at depth with qualitative means then i think it can be useful for that and it can actually help as i said identify areas where you might then ask deeper questions so it can be used in various ways it can but i think a lot of the time you still have to have a purpose for it yeah otherwise it becomes a set of questions that people are answering and they don't really know why they're doing that and that's the worst type of approach i think because it's all about you're asking people to engage with you and if you want them to engage with you it needs to be quite compelling and you need to be able to say what will happen as a result of engaging with you and if that can't be explained then i think you know you need to rethink why you're doing it and and what customer success actually doesn't mean to you as an organization i think yeah and i think i think there's a there's a piece that's run throughout this which is about listening to the answers and you've talked already about this idea that listening is a superpower i guess broadening it out beyond the kind of customer insights work that you do i think organizations are by my this is my observation and i own this entirely this is not the view of my organization at all my person i think people are pretty rubbish at listening i think actually i think a lot of people are waiting to speak rather than listening to the answers that somebody's giving and and where i suppose what i'm what i'm leading to is how do we get better at listening i guess is is the you've talked already about pausing about giving people space to think and all that so but are there other ways in which we just all of us could get better at listening and and how that that adds value to both the relationship and also the the level of information that you gather yes now that's interesting that you're asking you're asking me that question because you are and i'm talking to you both now it's like you know it's an interesting one isn't it because you know you're expert hathaway is expert at this you know and actually it's a kind of persistent issue yeah you know it's quite hard and i think a lot of the time um there are so many factors in especially in the workplace that kind of hinder our our ability to to do that and a lot of the time i think it's just you know people always complain about time um i don't know about that because people make time for the things they want to make time for um so to just to be able to say we'd not type we don't have time to listen to people is quite i'm not sure about that um but I think role modeling it is really important.

37:57OK, so I'll give you one example in businesses, meetings, right, in businesses. That would be a crucial forum that should be for people to listen to each other about whatever the reason for that meeting is. and you know i would i reckon that 95 of people would say that most meetings just you don't get your voice heard let alone know what happened as a result of your input it's just not it's not modeled by managers and it's not um i don't think it's visible enough as being a thing that you do and because actually there's a lot of discomfort around it sometimes because it's like you're you know i'm just sitting quietly listening to you whereas it's almost like everyone needs to you know that that's kind of a slightly more challenging way to be or something and i'm not sure um the other thing i would say about it's interesting because i do quite a lot of um um it's slightly different slightly tangential but sort of linked is the so um i do some coaching with um the thinking environment like nancy klein's stuff right and and what's interesting about that is you you literally ask a couple of questions and then you just stop and then you just um all you do is focus on that other person and what they have to say and think about um and then you appreciate them for what's just happened you know some element of it now these are really basic things but i think a lot of the time these these really simple things around the dynamics of questioning and and then listening are lost and i think we have to demonstrate them and i don't think i think it fits into that thing you know the question you asked earlier about just people just being asked questions all in surveys and things or feedback and nothing ever happens I think people are a bit run ragged from all of that.

40:07You just don't, you know, if you don't feel like you're being heard, then you're not going to speak. So I think you have to model it. You can't, how else? You know, if I'm managing you and I'm asking you what you think about something, I need to hear it. And I need to acknowledge that I've heard it. and i think that's another thing actually is to actually acknowledge the fact that you're hearing what is being said yeah yeah it's not not enough just to listen to also show that you have listened very clearly yes echo it back sell tell people what you heard etc well we have some very well researched behaviors around that we do indeed and i think i think one of the things just to pick up on on one of the things you're talking there about people in meetings not getting good role models i I think one of the issues that we have there is there is a difference between performance and performativity.

41:03And sometimes the performative bit of our role is that we are holding court. We are dominating the conversation. We are sharing our pearls of wisdom with everybody. And goodness knows enough people have said that's what I do. But, you know, so, I mean, I take this criticism seriously and I have heard you people. You know, there's that idea of sometimes the performance is more important if you're not being performative or the performativity gets in the way of the performance. Sometimes just being quiet, just letting people speak, giving people that space and the time and making the space for them to speak is an essential lesson that people can learn.

41:44not just when they're speaking to their clients but also when they're speaking to their colleagues and their team members and even sometimes when they're speaking to their managers to give them the space to actually talk and talk about what it is that's bothering them rather than defend what they're saying or be be defensive in some way it's really interesting yeah i think you know maybe it's it is a skill that we're just not as good at as we should be i mean that's basically i do it is you know the idea of being heard and having a voice and you know it's just an amazing thing you know it really is and we really do downplay that and i think you're right about the performative stuff i mean because you know our our kind of digital world is all about performative yeah it's it's everyone's got an opinion it's all about how you express it it's about getting it out there all the time yeah but that's it's all one way you know it's not it's not listening that's just telling like endlessly and i think the other thing is you know why would you do that because basically there's a massive impact to doing it because i i went i'll give you an example you know i was talking about this like shadow learning in organizations right the fact that it's slightly this is slightly different but similar is that people are you know doing innovative things every day they're learning things every day day in day out but the thing is some some of the functional uh you know like hr learning talent that what's going on and also the the senior leadership team in the world session would like to know some of what's going on because actually if it was really good and you could manifest it across the organization you might have a really innovative more successful organization yeah the only problem is that this stuff goes on and no one really knows about it and and why don't they know about it because there's probably more of a dynamic of um learning and hr rolling in and telling people about what's going on rather than just going and saying, what is going on?

44:05And how does that work? Asking the questions and just listening and building trust with people because you're the person that comes and just is totally interested in how I'm doing something. That is really powerful. And I think that's the other stuff. It does build a depth of relationship, of credibility. It builds trust in you. Then you become more of a go-to person because you listen. You don't walk in with solutions. You are listening. And I think that's a part of the skill. And that's why it's so important for an organization to do that with their customers, I think, is because actually it's about inquiry.

44:51It's about understanding. and these people have the answers to your problems right they will tell you what the innovation should look like and they'll probably pay for it so why wouldn't you go there you know it's that sort of thing it's like or what's the most valuable thing in a relationship with your customer would you like to know that because if you knew it and you did more of it probably be more valuable to you all you have to do is listen but you have to do that to find out and i think people don't tend to do it as well as they should do because the answers generally are in front of people and in the people around them and that's why you need to do more of it absolutely i mean we could get we could talk all day about sort of behaviors and communication behaviors and all of that but we'll maybe leave that to another podcast martin thanks very much i think so yeah thanks very much for that it's been great conversation thank you and if you've enjoyed that podcast don't forget there's a whole series within the Mastering Sales and Negotiation podcast group and you can see all of them wherever you get your podcasts and if you particularly enjoyed it do share it with others and remember if you have the opportunity to subscribe turn on your push notifications you'll never miss another one of our podcasts from this series so thank you very much for listening and please tell someone else thank you

46:19Thank you.