Advanced Listening Services
The power of listening—really listening.
Metrics help you to gain insights and make data-driven decisions. They sit at the intersection of disrupter or disrupted. While metrics are success trackers, many IT companies don’t know which ones might or might not be important or apparent to your success through partners. Decisions about product development, partner investments (incentives and/or rewards), services offerings, and more must be driven by fact-based insights into current market trends. Thus knowing what to track can give you an edge over your competitors and keep you in or ahead of the game.
We collaborate with our clients to listen, hear, iterate, and execute advanced listening learning. Global Touch’s advanced listening services are foundational to our company’s DNA. Whether it is executed through interviews, boards, councils, or user groups, it is the intersection between what our clients’ key stakeholders want to learn or gain from participants and the customers and partners willingness or desire to share.
Like all skills, there are multiple levels of mastery. We have repeatedly found the best of class listening opportunities to create a baseline of how real issues are clarified, fresh ideas uncovered, competitive threats and opportunities assessed, and performance gains achieved. Think you're good at it? How do you know you're a pro at listening? This is more than stop, look, and listen.
“80% of IT technology companies believe they deliver a great experience with their Councils, but <18% of their council members believe this to be true.”
We help you push the boundaries of what’s possible to unleash the power of partners. We offer five key Advanced Listening services:
Council Services
Customer & Partner (qualitative Services
M&A aquisition market influences
Council Leadership Training
Customer (Member-focused) User Group Development
Our Expertise
Most people aren't born with the ability to ride a bike or to swim. Someone needs to show you how, and you then need to practice. Advanced Listening builds on the basic skills of stop, look, and listen. It includes:
Listening to what’s not being said
Bring out the best in an audience with introverts and extroverts, multi-lingual participants, and people from different cultures
Asking questions in a way that helps ground you at a strategic (not tactical) level
This is where we shine. We leverage the “7-38-55” rule that indicates only 7 percent of meaning is conveyed through spoken words and the remaining percent of meaning is informed by tone of voice (38 percent) and body language (55 percent).
Each meeting is different and there is no one formula that works. This is where we come in with our deep advanced learning capabilities of how to listen for what’s not being said and the ability to get to the heart of the issues that can turn a listening occasion into a golden opportunity.
Council Services
We provide turnkey council services from facilitation, agenda development, assessment of clients’ council priorities and needed outcomes, to customer and partner members’ goals, homework preparation, and active in-person participation. For the 600+ Councils we have facilitated across the world, our facilitation average performance score or rating (by customers and partners) is in the 98th percentile.
Council Leadership Training
For our clients looking to lead their own councils in-house or embrace Global Touch’s proprietary methodology, we offer workshops and training to establish new, or finetune existing, approaches for our clients’ leaders and support teams. This type of training helps our clients ensure they execute a listening event and not a “talk at” one.
Customer & Partner (qualitative) Interview Services
We provide clients with exploratory and generative user research that helps them align with thinking, roadmap alignment, and investment planning on key strategic directions, including what product to build next. We utilize a range of research methods to conduct customer and partner interviews around the world. From executives to sales leaders and customer services individuals, we have extensive experience with both customers and partners and extracting actionable feedback.
Customer (Member-focused) User Group Development
IT Technology leaders are always looking and thinking, “What can we do to create more profitable products or accelerate revenue for our customer base?” or “How can we provide a next generation customer experience and connect existing customers with prospective ones?” User groups can often be the right answer if supported by the right strategy and execution, including resources, expectations, and administration.
We help our clients to set up user groups that will quickly become one of their most powerful revenue tools. Whether these user groups are self-funded, member-focused associations or IT company led and funded, or partner supported or sponsored, user groups are invaluable and one of the most overlooked resources for IT companies, partners, and customers. The result? Strategic connections are formed between customers and IT companies and supported by partners.
M&A acquisition market influences
With M&A stakes accelerating and the deal size growing as larger companies are consolidating market position or extending capabilities in complementary or competitive brands, the impact to customers and partners may not be fully appreciated by the buyer and may change immediately or brand continuation rethought during renewals, refresh, or roadmap planning. We help our clients understand M&A nuances that might impact their post-deal closure.
By The Numbers
600+
facilitated customer and partner councils in 20+ country venues.
1000s
of hours of customer and partner interviews completed in 2023 in 30+ countries
completed in multiple languages.
18
Established 18 technology customer user groups created through company sponsorship or independent management organizations operating in 30+ countries.