Are You Being Heard?

Credibility expert Mitchell Levy, who interviewed me recently for his videocast, has a stock question that he asks all the guests on his show: “What’s your CPoP?”

CPoP stands for “Customer Point of Pain”. Mitchell asks that question because he’s less interested in what a person does, than in what a person does for others. A question like that is a scalpel that cuts through layers of marketing and sales-talk fat to get to the real meat inside—especially because Mitchell insists that any answer must comprise ten words or less.

I confess that I knew the question was coming before the interview started, but that doesn’t mean that I found it easy to answer—not without a lot of thought. I’ve been in this business for a long time, and I’ve had thousands of opportunities to describe what I do, but still I had to think carefully to distill it down to its essence.

In the end, I’m rather proud that I was able to boil down my customers’ point of pain to just two words:

Being heard.

Being heard: what does that mean? It means that every person that I work with wants to matter in this world somehow. They want to matter by making a real contribution—and be recognized as making a real contribution—to the people whose work and life they affect, whether they be customers, coworkers, their leadership, or even friends and family.

The scope and value of their contribution begins with the quality of their thinking, but it doesn’t end there. It doesn’t matter how smart you are if others don’t listen to you with the attention and credibility you deserve. I work with a lot of very smart people who don’t show their full brilliance to others because what comes out of their mouths does not always do justice to what goes on in their minds. Perhaps they take too long to get to the point, or they lack confidence (especially in larger groups), or they don’t put their ideas in terms that their listeners understand or care about, so they are not heard to the extent they deserve.

What does it take to be heard? Contribution and credibility. Both are necessary, but ultimately the second rests on the first. As long as you have something to say that contributes value to the other party, you are almost guaranteed an attentive listener. You won’t often go wrong if you go into every conversation or presentation with a clear idea of how the other person will be better off for having listened to you.

Contribution is a necessary first step to getting that initial hearing, but you need credibility to sustain attention long enough for your message to take root and turn into decisive action. How many shiny new mousetraps have gone unsold because the inventor did not put as much thought and care into selling them as they did in creating them? As Aristotle says, “…It is not sufficient to know what to say, it is also necessary to know how to say it.”[1]

There’s bad news and good news: The bad news is that it’s harder to be heard in a world that’s flooded with a nonstop flow of information. The hard fact is that your natural brilliance won’t sell itself. You need to communicate in such a way that others believe you, and that takes skill and practice. The good news is that quality can stand out because people will gravitate to those who provide the most value in return for their attention, and who communicate that value clearly and compellingly.

If your point of pain is “being heard”, ask yourself these two questions:

What am I doing to maximize my contribution when I speak?

What am I doing to maximize my credibility?

[1] Thomas Habinek, Ancient Rhetoric from Aristotle to Philostratus, p. 50.