NBOP National Board of Operations Professionals

Part one. The Message

The Listen

Ten recorded conversations with recent buyers, transcribed, read in their words rather than yours.

0:53. Captions on by default. Everything said here is also written above, so nothing is only in the video.

Read the transcript

Take ten recent buyers, ten recent losses, and ten people who considered you and did nothing. Speak to them. Record it with permission. Read the transcripts rather than the summaries. What you are looking for is not satisfaction and not preference. It is vocabulary. The words a buyer uses for the problem, for the alternatives, and for the moment they decided something had to change. Organisations develop internal language for what they sell with remarkable speed, and it stops matching the buyer within about a year. Everyone inside keeps understanding each other perfectly, which is exactly why nobody notices. Extract three things. The trigger. The alternative they were actually weighing. And the sentence they would use to describe you to a colleague, which is the only version of your positioning that ever travels.

Take ten recent buyers, ten recent losses, and ten people who considered and did nothing. Speak to them. Record it with permission. Read the transcripts rather than the summaries.

What you are looking for is not satisfaction and not preference. It is vocabulary. The words a buyer uses for the problem, for the alternatives, and for the moment they decided something had to change.

Organisations develop internal language for what they sell with remarkable speed, and that language stops matching the buyer's within about a year. Everyone inside keeps understanding each other perfectly, which is exactly why nobody notices.

Three specific things to extract. The trigger, meaning what changed in their world immediately before they started looking. The alternative they were actually weighing, which is usually not who you think. And the sentence they would use to describe you to a colleague, which is the only version of your positioning that ever travels.

Do this once a quarter, and do it yourself at least sometimes. Delegating all of it to research produces accurate summaries that have had the useful strangeness smoothed out of them.

Two things worth doing, neither of which costs anything

One Help decide what a competent operator is expected to know The eight domains carry equal provisional weighting until practising operators say what the work actually is. Takes about eight minutes. Two Check whether you are eligible About a minute. No account, no email field, and nothing you enter is kept.

Read the standard in full, free and in the open, before you pay anything or give anyone an address.