We have been given two ears and but a single mouth, in order that we may hear more and talk less.” —Zeno of Citium

The most important aspect of marketing, and communication in general, is the act of listening. Without the ability to listen, that is to receive, process, understand and act on information, we can’t create marketing that works, nor truly assist our clients with their needs.

Though listening is the most important and the largest component when creating marketing, the problem is that we as small business owners often lack good listening skills, so we don’t end-up listening well to our clients, nor presenting marketing materials that are truly understood by our clients and potential clients.

Marketing is not a one-way process of creating a message and simply delivering it. You can increase the effectiveness of your marketing by listening more closely to what your clients are asking for and presenting it to them so that they understand what you are offering.

Marketing means understanding your clients by listening to them fully and completely. Great listeners are made, not born – and great listening skills can be learned.

Active Listening

The following is a guide to Active Listening. Fully understanding and communicating with others involves a lot of effort. It’s about making connections. But it becomes second nature as you fully understand the goals and returns of Active Listening.

Supportive, effective, reciprocating communication—Active Listening—focuses not only on the verbal aspect of communication, but on the nonverbal as well. Non-verbal communication can make-up the bulk of what we take in while listening, but we need to learn to focus on these conscious, unconscious and even subconscious elements of communication.

Learning to quiet one’s own thoughts and to avoid prejudging others is a first step.

After we do that, Active Listening can be understood as not just listening but clarifying and understanding another’s thoughts and feelings. To listen actively involves several steps: you need to stop, look, listen, question, paraphrase content and paraphrase feelings:

Step 1—Stop…

Stop what you are doing; eliminate distractions; focus on the person speaking. Without fully committing to the communication at this preliminary step you cannot fully and actively listen to the speaker.

Step 2—Tune-in…

Tune-in to the nonverbal cues that the speaker is communicating. This will help you understand how the person is feeling. Most communication of emotion comes through these cues.

For instance, look at the speaker’s face; the face is a window to the speaker’s feelings. Tune-in to his voice: is it trembling? Is it confident? Don’t forget body language: body language and gestures can highlight a speaker’s feelings. Are her arms crossed? Is she leaning to support herself? Is she leaning forward to make an emphatic point?

Step 3—Listen…

Listen for what the speaker is telling you, and not only what is overtly stated. Though the speaker may not say exactly how he feels, look for clues. Match verbal with nonverbal cues to decipher both the content and the emotion of the speaker’s message. Try to interpret the message according to the sender’s code system, rather than yours.

Step 4—Ask questions back…

As you try to understand the speaker, you will need to ask questions. Your questions will fit one of four categories:

• to obtain additional information (“When will your part of the project be ready?”)
• to find out how someone feels (“What are your feelings around what the VP said?”) 
•  to ask for clarification (“When you say that this project is beyond you, do you mean that you haven’t received proper guidance?”) and
•  to verify your conclusion about your partner’s meaning or feeling (“Are you saying that you can’t complete the project without additional staff resources?”)

Step 5—Paraphrase content…

Paraphrasing is restating in your own words what you think another person is saying, and could be included in the Ask questions bullet above. Paraphrasing is not repeating back everything that the speaker has said—you can repeat something exactly without understanding what it means. Instead briefly summarize the speaker’s message to that point:

Step 6—Paraphrase feelings…

Follow-up your paraphrasing of the content of the message with a question such as “You’re probably feeling pretty frustrated right now aren’t you?”. Such a paraphrase will allow the speaker to either agree with the assessment or clarify how she’s feeling. The speaker may respond, “NO, I’m not frustrated. I’m just disappointed that the job’s not working out”.

When you have completed these steps you can say that you have a fully completed portrait of your speaker’s message. You can truly say that you have listened.

To add value for your clients, follow these four principles:

1. Clients always have hidden personal expectations that might be unrelated to business objectives…

This means that you should focus as much on the qualitative, personal aspects of your relationship with clients as you do on achieving stated goals. Recognize these aspects even when the client cannot or will not express them. Sometimes there are unknown client expectations. When this happens, take a broad focus on improving your client’s situation not only in ways they have requested, but also in ways they haven’t even expressed.

2. Consider the expectations of all ‘clients’…

Your ‘client,’ in the broadest sense, is far more than the person who hired you. It could include a more senior executive you’ve never even met, a young up-and-coming manager who is part of a team with whom you’re working. Or it could be other stakeholders such as the owner’s spouse or grown children.

3. Improve your clients’ condition, don’t just meet expectations…

Let’s assume that as a consultant, you have been asked to design and facilitate a quarterly strategy session with the senior management team. In between these sessions, however, you have added significant value, including: introducing your client to a potential strategic partner; coaching two senior executives on their managerial style; and helping the CEO prepare her year-end evaluation for her board of directors. These value-added activities were not part of the client’s stated—or even hidden—expectations for this assignment. Yet if you asked the CEO about the value of your work, she would cite these latter contributions as being just as important as the workshops formally contracted for.

4. Tell your client, tactfully, about how you’ve helped…

If you’ve been married or had a partner for some time, that individual probably does things for you that you take for granted. The same thing happens in professional-client relationships. Although in a personal relationship it’s not always appropriate to detail one party’s contribution, it is often necessary to do so in a business relationship. Some clients are great at recognizing your value, but others are so preoccupied with running their businesses that they don’t really add it all up. Don’t be shy about telling your clients what you’ve done for them. Not only must you satisfy your clients, you must help them understand how you have helped them.

There are two approaches to highlighting the value you have delivered: First, you can periodically sit down and review your performance with your client. Offer and solicit comments about your contributions as well as about what you could do better.

Second, you can ask for feedback about your contributions from people within your client’s organization. Remember, third-party endorsements are far more powerful than anything we say about ourselves. So when a manager in your client’s organization tells you how much she enjoys working with you or expresses gratitude for your contributions. encourage her to tell that directly to your client. When an executive hears this from one of his or her managers, it is very powerful.

Erosion is the natural process by which material is worn away from the earth’s surface. Regardless of size and nature, all businesses are subject to their own form of erosion. It’s attrition, the process whereby once active clients stop purchasing and become inactive clients. And like continuous erosion, continuous attrition reduces the overall size of the business. Three main factors contribute to why your clients stop buying from you:

1. They got out of the habit of buying from you…

Like you, your clients are busy people. They have many things happening in their lives. And in busy lives, events happen that interrupt regular or habitual behaviour. People die, businesses and other organizations cease operations, change management or move.

Lots of things happen that disrupt our normal practices. We’ve all experienced it. Perhaps you missed your usual Friday night dinners at the neighbourhood café because you were out of town and started doing other things on Friday nights when you returned. Or maybe because of a change in your work schedule, you stopped going to the gym at your regular time.

Think about a regular routine that you stopped doing because you got too busy or distracted. You probably didn’t stop because you were dissatisfied with the routine; the more likely explanation is that something else broke the link. Despite the best of intentions to return to the normal routine, you never quite get around to it. The same thing happens with clients: something happens that breaks the link and they stop buying from you. And despite the best of their intentions, they never quite get around to buying from you again. It’s attrition, it happens.

2. They had a bad experience buying from you…

Dissatisfied clients frequently vote with their feet. If they’ve had a bad experience in dealing with you, instead of telling you about the problem, they simply stop buying from you. Once again, think of yourself as someone’s client. As a purchaser of goods and services, you have no doubt had a bad experience with a business or supplier? How did you handle your dissatisfaction? Did you discuss the problem with a view to resolving it? Or did you arbitrarily decide not to deal with that business again? For whatever reason, your clients may have handled their dissatisfaction with you by choosing not to buy from you again.

3. You abandoned your clients…

When you fail to strategically nurture your prospects, new customers and existing clients, you are in effect abandoning them. When you abandon your clients, you allow others to reap the benefits of your work.

The negative effects of erosion can be reversed through erosion control tactics such as retaining walls and tree-planting. Similarly, the negative effects of attrition can be reversed.

Let’s assume that the owners of your neighbourhood café have noticed your absence. To encourage you to resume your Friday night dinners, they sent you a note telling you that they missed you and to welcome you back, offered free appetizers on your next visit. Or, on noting your prolonged absence, the manager of the gym phones to see how you are doing. How would you feel about these responses? Would they increase the likelihood of your resuming your previously normal routine?

Similarly, what do you think would have happened if you had the opportunity to discuss and resolve the issue that displeased you so much that you stopped buying from a specific business? Had you and the owner been able to resolve your unhappiness in a mutually satisfactory manner, would you have resumed buying from her?

If you are strategically nurturing your clients, how can any client possibly feel abandoned and even consider not continuing to buy from you?

strong>The best strategy to deal with client attrition is to prevent it from occurring.

The following three obstacles interfere with establishing and maintaining the client connection. Not only can these obstacles prevent the initial connection from being made, they can also unravel connections that have been established.

Obstacle 1—Conflicting Interests…

Business owners and customers have different goals. In addition to great service, customers want the best deal and practical advice. This simply means receiving good value at a reasonable price. What is relevant and helpful advice? Listen to what your clients are saying, watch what they are doing and respond accordingly. Draw on your knowledge and experience to offer relevant and helpful advice to your clients as a value-added service. You as a business owner want different things: loyal clients, more profit, positive image in the marketplace, and reduced selling cost.

Obstacle 2—Misalignment of What Business and Customers Want…

As a business owner, you are responsible for making the first move. The obvious starting point is to identify what individual customers want. Then do whatever it takes to satisfy them. Once you have connected with customers, you provide them with everything they want: useful advice, great service, fair price and the best deal. This will encourage them to come back to you and continue to buy from you.

Obstacle 3—The Reality-Perception Conflict…

Inside Reality:

As the name suggests, the inside reality describes what your business is really all about. It is everything that you are and that you do to deliver value to your clients. It is also everything that makes your business competitive. This includes all of your resources, whether tangible or intangible, or recorded as assets on your balance sheet or not.

Assessing our own businesses accurately can be very difficult. This is especially true if we have conceived and built them from scratch. Just as it is not easy to be objective about our offspring, it is difficult to be unbiased about our businesses. Owners face two major risks in assessing their businesses.

1. They may think their businesses are better than they really are. This happens when owners fall in love with their products. So focused on what they sell, they sometimes forget to pay attention to clients. To succeed over the long term, businesses must constantly focus on satisfying clients.

2. Their businesses may be better than they think they are. False modesty leads many people to underestimate the true value of what they do for clients. If you have satisfied clients, you must be doing something right. Don’t hide your light under a bushel. Recognize what you do really well and use it to grow your business. Make sure that each element of your Inside Reality is properly supported by objective evidence.

Outside Perception: The outside perception is how prospects and clients perceive your business. It’s based on what your clients say about your business, which in turn is based on their experiences in dealing with you. Assuming that these experiences have been positive, it is also what keeps satisfied clients coming back and encourages them to recommend your business to others.

Unfortunately, most owners can only guess at what outsiders think of their businesses. The only way to find out what outsiders think is to ask them.

Another good approach to learning what your market thinks about businesses like yours is to do some Internet research. Search the Amazon.com or Chapters.ca sites for entries related to aspects of your products. The titles and contents of recently published books will give you an insight into the current topics of interest in your market. Also check out readers’ reviews and comments. They will tell you what is important to people in your market. Or check out the postings in user groups that focus on your products. If you have an email address that does not identify what your business does, post your own questions. Users may think of you as another user and offer useful insights into important issues in your marketplace.

Marketing may be the most important business task of all. Simply put, marketing is whatever you say or do to get customers and prospects to listen to you and to buy from you. It includes everything from advertising to after-sale service. Everyone knows it is important: without it, no customers are brought into the business. However, in most businesses, it does not receive the attention it deserves. There are three reasons for this: lack of know-how, competing priorities, and pressure for day-to-day sales.

1. Lack of Know How…

All entrepreneurs have developed some marketing skill, even if only the ability to conduct person-to-person sales. Unfortunately, most of us never learn how to effectively attract customers, let alone nurture prospects until they are ready to buy. By default, we rely on making cold calls or sporadically undertaking marketing initiatives. Neither technique produces sufficient results. Because of these disappointing results many owners are reluctant to risk more time and money on non-productive activities.

2. Competing Priorities… As we run our businesses, we typically face a wide range of issues and responsibilities, most of which receive limited attention as we charge from one challenge to the next. Inevitably, this means focusing on our primary skills such as personal selling, accounting or particular technical competence. Other important areas, such as marketing, are increasingly neglected. Marketing, as we shall see is the ultimate leverage in business.

This means you have to set aside time to work on this, the most important business activity.

3. Pressure For Day-to-Day Sales…

For their businesses to survive, most entrepreneurs learn to sell. Frequently, this is the only intentional marketing activity. Because we know it works, even though inefficiently, we do it whenever we need sales. In practice, this means that most of us attack our marketing tactically. We decide we need to do something to bring in customers, so we implement some kind of marketing activity, without having developed an overall strategy.

Marketing should be an ongoing activity. It need not cost money, but you must invest time in marketing your business.

4. Provide Memorable Customer Service

(Focusing selflessly on the needs of your clients so they only think about buying from you.)

Memorable customer service is perhaps the hardest to achieve, but the one with the greatest effect, particularly in the long term. It is also a subject which could be the content of many articles.
That said the key is to focus selflessly on the needs of your customers. Most businesses expect customers to shoulder the risk when selling products and services. Their view seems to be: “We have great products; you should buy them without fear.”
However, customers may not know enough about you or your products and services to buy fearlessly. As a result, a number of sales will be lost, simply because some customers will not want to take the risk.
Most marketers will refund any dissatisfied customer’s money, so why not make it an explicit benefit of doing business with you? Stand by your product, let the customer know you believe in it and you gain many more sales.
Many business people worry about customers taking advantage of the guarantee. Certainly some will; that’s a cost of doing business.
More importantly, most won’t ask for their money back, unless what you are selling does not meet their needs. In which case you deserve to get your product back. Purchases with specific risk-free offers will definitely drive up responses and sales.
Most of us think of marketing as being concerned with communicating the value of our products and service to our customers and prospects. We tend to forget that unless we have a great product, it doesn’t matter what we communicate. Customers will soon discover that and stop buying.
The key is to truly value your relationships with your customers, so you would never sell them anything you wouldn’t buy yourself. The acid test is, if you were not the seller, would you recommend your mother buy the service, or would you suggest that your best friend buy your product? If the answer is no, then you first have to fixthe product or service so it provides true value.
It is important to think about product in broader terms than what it is you sell. The product experience covers the whole ownership experience, from learning about the product, through using it, to disposal of the product.
It encompasses the tangible aspects of your offering, the value you build into your offer, the whole experience of dealing with your company and using your product. The goal should be such a high level of customer satisfaction that your customers automatically place you at the top of their list for their next purchase.

3. Increase Frequency of Purchases

(Helping clients buy more often.)

If customers can be persuaded to purchase more frequently, the impact on your bottom line is immediate. Again the tactics are seldom complex and can be borrowed from personal selling.
One of the most effective tactics is to find other products and services that your customers need once they have your product. For example, one company selling bottled water to offices, now offers other beverages and snacks. Instead of buying monthly, many of its customers now buy weekly.

If you can program customers to buy regularly, you create an annuity. Some music companies do exactly this with their affinity programs. They offer a fantastic deal up front on condition you buy at least one CD a month from them. This way a $20 occasional buyer turns into a $240 customer.
If your products or services are ordered or consumed several times a year, another option is to program the purchases your customers make. For example, if you are a florist, you could offer your customers a special deal where you supply flowers to a specified list of people with birthdays and anniversaries for a fixed price covering a certain number of deliveries each year.

This gives you cash up front so you can afford to offer a generous discount for advance payment. As well, it saves the customer from having to remember the dates and making the necessary arrangements each time flowers are sent.

The easiest time to sell something to customers occurs when they are already buying. You just have to bring it to their attention, make the offer attractive and make it really easy to do business with you.
Customers will come back more often to buy the additional products and services you now offer. Try it next time a customer is buying from your Web site or calls in response to an advertisement.
All businesses have additional services that can be offered. Sometimes it requires a little imagination, but usually there are items which can be added even if they are not items you normally offer. If these items are what customers need, they are appreciative of your help.
If you don’t want to go to the trouble of handling these additional products and services, it is very effective to leverage your customer base by writing to your customers andrecommending someone else’s product you think they will appreciate. You can negotiate a cut of the profits and your partner gets access to your customer base without your having to give up the database.
This kind of tactic has a high level of success because in most cases, your customers have your trust and will be happy to try something you suggest. The key here is selecting a reputable and trustworthy partner.
One of the most overlooked opportunities is staying in regular contact with existing customers. This can be by phone, letter or e-mail.
It is a simple matter to write to them and tell them how much you value their business, educate them about your value and offer them some special offer available only to your best customers. This kind of communication is very inexpensive, pays for itself quickly and is one of the easiest tactics to implement.

2. Generate New Revenues(Helping clients purchase more and different products than they normally do and/or helping clients pay more for their purchases.)Persuading customers to buy more from you each time they purchase is a very common strategy and usually requires only very simple tactics.
How often do we go into the local fast food outlet to get asked: “Would you like fries with that?” or “Can we super-size your order?” If you’ve encountered this, you have just experienced being up-sold.
Another common tactic occurs when you buy common items such as a TV or a refrigerator. The sales person offers some complementary service or offering, such as an extended warranty.
For most businesses finding complementary offerings is not difficult. Ask your customers or your sales people what else your customers are buying from someone else that would be complementary to your products or services.
Once you have found them, you can either form an alliance to do co-marketing to your customers or you can buy the products and services for resale. The bottom line is you don’t have to build the delivery capability in house. You can leverage other people’s investments to bring these offerings to your customers.
Another tactic is to offer larger pack sizes.  People like bargains and often the larger pack looks more economical. Costco and Price Club have built their whole business on this strategy.

ersuading customers to buy more from you each time they purchase is a very common strategy and usually requires only very simple tactics.How often do we go into the local fast food outlet to get asked: “Would you like fries with that?” or “Can we super-size your order?” If you’ve encountered this, you have just experienced being up-sold.Another common tactic occurs when you buy common items such as a TV or a refrigerator. The sales person offers some complementary service or offering, such as an extended warranty.For most businesses finding complementary offerings is not difficult. Ask your customers or your sales people what else your customers are buying from someone else that would be complementary to your products or services.Once you have found them, you can either form an alliance to do co-marketing to your customers or you can buy the products and services for resale. The bottom line is you don’t have to build the delivery capability in house. You can leverage other people’s investments to bring these offerings to your customers.Another tactic is to offer larger pack sizes.  People like bargains and often the larger pack looks more economical. Costco and Price Club have built their whole business on this strategy.Another option is bundling. One sales training company nearly doubled its sales in only eight months through bundling.The company originally sold a collection of four different training kits which were sold at various stages of the sales person’s life. This required a new sell almost every time these kits were needed.The company repackaged its offerings as a manager’s kit and a sales person’s kit. Each kit included all the relevant material to take a sales person through the development program.This bundling increased the value of each sale considerably.The customer got increased value. The company benefited not only from the increased revenue, but also a reduction in the time consumed by its employees in reselling at each stage of the sales person’s development.
Although most of these examples relate to personal selling, they can very easily be modified to achieve the same effect in the direct response medium. One of my beliefs is that direct response is nothing more than salesmanship in a different medium. You first have to be able to sell before you can be truly effective at developing direct response.

Four Ways To Grow Your Business

1. Acquire New Customers

(Attracting new customers who will buy what you are already selling to your current clients.) 

Bringing in more customers is obviously an important part of any business, but it is important to remember that it is the most expensive and highest risk of the four strategies for growing your business. New customers and prospects most likely don’t know you well unless you are a big brand or a known supplier.
So you have to find a way to get noticed. Then you have to develop both sufficient interest and trust that a prospect will be prepared to try your services or products. Once new customers have tried you out, you have to find ways to ensure they are keen to come back.

As every business owner knows, this kind of marketing is expensive and sometimes yields disappointing results. This is not to say you shouldn’t do it.
New customers are vital to the life of any business. However, you have to ensure you maximize the immediate opportunities inherent in the other three strategies as well. When you do this, you discover there are other low hanging fruits you can go after with minimal cost, low risk and often little effort.