Are You Listening?

Enough about me.

Let’s talk about you.  

Your business. Your sales. Your supply chain problems and the challenges it poses for your business. Are your inventories low? How is the health of your organization?  

Advertisers and marketers exist to help your business reach consumers, so tell me about your business and your challenges because you sell something. You provide something. You employ people, and that helps communities.

What you do is important.  

We hear a lot about this theory, this idea, the marketing strategy of the week, and we hear very little about listening. Your advertising company needs to exhibit good listening skills. That doesn’t mean they should mindlessly parrot everything you say – they bring much to the table – but present solutions that directly address your concerns. 

Watch for these signs of active listening: 

1.     Paying attention. Do the agency people interrupt? Are they making eye contact? Do they seem distracted? These could be signs that they had formulated a response before you finished presenting the challenges your business has. 

2.     Withholding judgment. Do they shoot down your idea or other ideas presented in the room? Or are they listening to all ideas presented without criticism? The key is to ask challenging questions to ideas, not to shoot them down out of hand. If you have excess inventory, someone on your team pitches a clearance sale, and they shoot it down in favor of a content marketing strategy designed to bring in more customers. Do they do this without explanation, or they just casually poo-poo your team member’s suggestion; this is a red flag. All ideas are valid, but some ideas will work, and others won’t. The approach should be to find the ideas that work.

3.     Reflection. It goes hand-in-hand with judgment. Are they paraphrasing what you said? Are they asking questions? Do they reflect your emotions? Someone offering a proposed solution immediately after you stop talking or launching fully formed ideas is a flag that their concentration was on responding to you rather than listening. A big red flag is if you’re talking about clearing inventory and they’re talking about customer relations management or something else that’s way off base.

4.     Clarification. Open-ended questions like: “Can you explain?” “Can you elaborate on the source of the problem?” “What have you tried to date?” These indicate they are thoughtfully listening to your problem. 

5.     Summarizing. Can they clearly and concisely restate your concerns? I was in a meeting where the client, a car dealer, presented a problem with slow business at their service and parts departments. The agency focused on rebranding the entire dealership, which I had heard them discussing before the meeting. I’m not saying the dealership needed a rebranding, but the client’s immediate goal was boosting sales in the service and part departments. The agency could have used this as an opening to rebrand the dealership, but that wasn’t the pitch. They could not summarize the client’s needs.

6.     Solutions. And solutions in partnership. With the presentations of ideas, we go back to the top and rework the list. Critical in this stage is examining the ideas pitched with probing, challenging questions.  

Recently, I read, a company had supply chain issues making their lead product. So, their design team came up with a similar product that utilized the components the company could easily obtain. The product had fewer features than their lead product, but it would meet the needs of many of their customers, freeing up components for those who must have all the bells and whistles. Of course, after reading that article, the company served me ads on social media. From what I could see, the thrust of their advertising was still on the main product. The company didn’t mention the new product at all. They did not communicate it, didn’t want to emphasize the new product, or the ad agency missed the point.

The takeaway here is that if you’re the advertising agency, you need to listen to your customer’s needs, and if you are a business, watch for signs your agency is not listening or presenting real solutions.