Listening must come first

Aug 30th 2009
Tags: Just my thoughts

Listening must come first

Businesses want social media. They want Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. They want blogs.

But why? Too often they don’t stop to think about that. Here’s a conversation from just last week:

Client: It would be very helpful if you could email decks for meetings more than an hour before we are to speak.

Sounds simple, right?

Business: We typically email decks for conference calls 30 minutes to an hour before we are to meet.

Well, duh. Client obviously knows that.

Client: Yes, but with many meetings per day, we don’t always have time to print those out in between [our meetings with other people].

So, the client has meetings back to back. Doesn’t always allow time for review. While I don’t know why they can’t just look at them on their computers, that’s my problem, not theirs.

Business: Yes, well, that’s what we do.

WTF just happened there? This business can’t even DIRECTLY respond to a client issue. How in the heck will these people be able to listen on a larger scale? This way of doing business is far too common. While I understand that most projects are handled by teams, clients don’t care. They just want the information to be presented in a way they can consume easily.

Without your clients, businesses wouldn’t make money. Try listening to them.

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