What Do Your Clients Want?

I spent last week in Guerneville, CA, assisting at a leadership retreat.

The group spent most of the week practicing what is called Level 3 listening, which is defined as “…a global range of listening: hearing that picks up emotion, body language, the environment itself.” (See the book Co-Active Coaching by Whitworth, et. al. for a longer explanation.) Sometimes Level 3 listening is described as “feeling the energy,” or “environmental listening.”

I came back from the retreat realizing that the most successful businesses, whether they are cognizant of it or not,  skillfully listen to the Level 3. In other words, they’re good at listening to what their customers want, and good at providing it. Beyond this, they’re good at listening to what customers want that they don’t even have the words to articulate yet, and providing that, too.

If this all seems too abstract, let me give you an example of  a business that is great at listening to the Level 3: Apple.

Apple is actually so good at it that they somehow realized people would want to have a device that allowed them to carry their music around in their pockets, and download additional music, song by song, whenever they wanted, before anyone had actually invented such a thing. Thus something we’d not seen before; i-Tunes and the i-Pod, were born.

And not to bash them any more than everyone else already has, but General Motors is a great example of a company that hasn’t been tuned into the Level 3 at all.

I don’t think it takes a psychic guru to listen to the Level 3. I think there are some concrete ways for us regular folk to do it; and the way to start is to go out and talk to your customers.

I’m doing that right now. I’m asking people about the problems they’re having in their businesses; what they need help with that I’m not currently providing; and I’m getting lots of information. I’ve also noticed that the Level 3 is speaking to me; I’m frustrated by the fact that I’m not providing some services that I want to do, but was unsure if people wanted them. Turns out they do.

What do your clients want? What is the Level 3 trying to tell you?

Tags: Customers, Innovation, Marketing, Relationships

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 27th, 2009 at 5:14 pm and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.