BMC blog: Why listening is our most important skill

28 Oct BMC blog: Why listening is our most important skill

It wasn’t just Marvin Gaye who thought that he’d ‘heard it through the grapevine’ – in crooner Marvin’s case ‘that you’re no longer going to be mine’.

And well, that’s true for many businesses and organisations too.

Your customers or other stakeholders – be they staff, partners (family and business), suppliers, networkers and so on – may not get your message if you fail to listen to them properly.

Listening to people – and I mean really hearing what they’re saying – is crucial to growing a business, developing customer focused products and services and effective PR, communications and marketing.

To some, feedback forms and customer follow ups are merely a tick box exercise – often intricately designed to cajole people into responses that can only confirm the thoughts of the people have devised them.

This is pointless if you really want to change things for the better.

Not that you have to bend to each and every individual customer or stakeholder’s will – but you do need to evaluate how they feel and indeed, to paraphrase Marvin Gaye again, hear what others may be saying and thinking along the grapevine.

Customer focused marketing is a balance of function and feeling.

Functionally, things need to marry up. It should be easy to buy and order from you, contact you and make enquiries, be able to understand your products and services and the customer care you offer.

But feeling is more intuitive. Do you take people on a journey around your business and shape a customer relationship model that offers a genuinely positive and engaging experience – indeed an entire approach that is not only welcoming and friendly but informative and credible?

What if not everyone fits neatly into a pre-prescribed category? Can they contact you easily and, if there are problems, are they easy to resolve – and do you make that a seamless process?

It’s easy to poke a stick at major companies when things go awry – which inevitably happens at one point or another – and people chuckle at the haemorrhaging of customers as a consequence.

But what about your own business? Is it geared up to listening and then shaping your own customer focused approach?

Learning to listen – and then tweaking and changing your communications and marketing to shape the best possible customer relationship model – is the theme of our next Business Media Club meeting in November.

So far at the first two club meetings in our 2019-2020 programme we’ve focused on defining our vision, mission and purpose and then shaping that into messaging to promote what we do – and, more importantly, why and how.

By moving onto listening we’re throwing the focus onto the people who matter most – the audience we need to reach. 

The next CGM Business Media Club meeting is on Friday, November 29 (9.30am-12.30pm) at the CGM Media Centre in Worcester – where thinking aloud is always allowed.

To book your seat visit Eventbrite.

For further information see our Business Media Club page.

Call us on 01905 754336 or email info@chrisgreenmedia.co.uk

Chris Green Media – inspiring people to communicate with confidence, clarity and purpose.