Crisis counseling skills aren’t just for crises! I’ve been volunteering on a crisis line the last 8 months and I’ve found many of the skills lend themselves well to any business setting, including conducting win/loss interviews.

Daniel Oxenburgh (my business partner & brother) and I have been running Ox for over a year. We’ve found our focus on (re)designing revenue engines to fuel growth at B2B companies. In order for us to construct the levers of predictable demand, we wade through a lot of historical data. And, within mature businesses, we lean on qualitative win/loss interviews to layer deeper insight into the quantitative.

Speaking directly to our clients’ prospects/customers is one of my favorite aspects of this work—I enjoy uncovering the complex decision-making process that goes into the B2B buying cycle. And I’ve noticed that I now approach win-loss interviews with a honed skill set—thanks to the training I’ve received as a crisis counselor.

In both situations, active listening and empathy are critical to understanding where the other person is coming from and what their experience has been like. In both, I’m jumping on calls with strangers to help understand and focus their story.

One of the most important frameworks used in crisis counseling is the OARS model.

The OARS model is also used in motivational interviews and stands for:

Open-ended questions

Affirming statements

Reflective listening

Summarizing the dialogue

We unconsciously use elements of this model in everyday personal and professional interactions—but practicing OARS has helped me become much more effective and in tune with the person with whom I’m speaking. Here are some examples in the context of a win/loss analysis…

Open-ended questions — this is the heart of gathering meaningful, qualitative feedback! I try to leave close-ended questions for digital surveys.

• “How would you describe your overall experience with [vendor name]?”

• “What advice would you give [vendor name] for working with you in the future?”

• “Tell me about your decision-making process.”

Affirming statements — show the interviewee that you’re listening and their feedback is important. The buyer has invested a lot of time and effort, perhaps even through an RFP process, to solve this problem. Furthermore, even though I’m a third party, I’m still reinforcing my client’s brand and investment in a positive feedback process.

• “I know this is a large investment to make and it seems like your team took it very seriously and thoroughly evaluated all the vendors.”

• “It sounds like you had some key processes to automate that would help you and your teams focus on the work they actually wanted/needed to do.”

Reflective listening — helps me bridge the gap between what I think the person might mean and what they actually mean. If the interviewee corrects my reflective statement, that’s ok—ultimately, I’m getting a better insight on behalf of my client.

“What I’m hearing is that [vendor] made you feel like a VIP and that you got the sense of a real partnership during the sales cycle.”

• “Yes, exactly. And the product capabilities around [X] impressed us as well.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m hearing that the team wasn’t answering your technical questions.”

• “Well, they did answer our technical questions, but it took so long to get the proof of concept back, that my team got nervous about their ability to deliver.”

An extra tip here: acknowledging and reflecting any negative feedback received often opens up the conversation to the positive aspects of their experience.

“It sounds like you had a pretty frustrating experience with the sales team.”

• “Yes, that said, the solutions engineer did a fantastic job tailoring the solution to work for our specific needs.”

Summarizing the dialogue is about tying together the themes and reasons they went with one vendor and not the other.

• “I’m hearing that pricing was important, but not the deciding factor. You had a good rapport with the sales team at both shortlisted vendors, but you perceived better support/service and documentation from [vendor] and that was really what pushed them over the finish line for you.”

In a future post, I will share another specific skillset from crisis counseling, the Structure of the Call. Given my past experience with sales and CS, I thought I was an expert in structuring calls, but my crisis counseling training has been invaluable in this area as well.