In Ogilvy on Advertising, David Ogilvy wrote about the opportunity to be curious when running his agency.
“One of the most agreeable things about running an agency is that all your accounts are in different industries. In the morning you discuss the problems and opportunities of a client who makes soap. In the afternoon it is a bank, or an airline or a manufacturer or medicine.”
Customer Success Managers have a similar opportunity to embrace curiosity with our clients.
Let’s review what we can be curious about:
- Learn about the people we work with: we can learn more about the individual customers we work with such as what they are responsible for, their priorities and their vision. We can also learn more about our customer personally as appropriate.
- Discover our customer’s company: we can take the opportunity to learn more about our customer’s company. What’s their strategy? What’s the state of their business? Where is the company headed in the future?
- Investigate our field: Customer Success Managers can provide more value to our clients in an advisory role. We can learn about the history of our field, current trends and predictions for the future and bring this knowledge to our customer conversations.
- Explore our product: The more we uncover about our product features the more solutions we have to share with customers. We can apply our product knowledge to our customer’s business challenges and opportunities.
- Be familiar with the world at large: As Robert Solomon says in The Art of Client Service “Always be open to and seek out new sources of information and insight. Think about the new ways your client can address a problem or address an opportunity.” We can find inspiration in the experiences around us we can share with our client.
The benefits of curiosity can be summed up through the following quote from The Trusted Advisor by David H. Maister, Charles H. Green, and Robert M. Galford:
“As curiosity does its work, problem definitions evolve. Patterns emerge, connections are made, and positions soften and re-form.
Prospectives migrate, and richness of insight is gained. The “right answer” is never as right at the outset as it is after is has evolved, informed by inquiry. Curiosity is the attitude that drives the opportunity to contribute.”