Why Listening Is The New Marketing Leadership

So you’ve gone into business, and you’ve got it up and running and everything is going well. You’ve started to employ staff, or like us, you have started to franchise your company units off. Here’s where it starts to get interesting…! Up until now, you’ve been solely in charge of your own marketing destiny. What you did in marketing terms affected you alone – so if you messed up a little, so what? You moved on, but no one was screaming at you. Now it’s changed a little…you’ve got staff, or franchisees and they are all looking at you to be the expert. You can feel the pressure, it’s palpable. You clearly should have all the answers, and we mean all the answers.

You’ll be expected to be the oracle on all things marketing. What works for this business, what doesn’t, who to contact how to do it and when? A myriad of questions…but realistically you can’t be expected to know all the answers, so how do you lead your company, making its marketing efforts work without looking like you are blagging it every day? How do you take that pressure off yourself and make your marketing efforts work without them becoming too much like hard work?

Simple…you listen.

No really. It is that simple! Remember for every one marketing trick you have employed there will be another 3 you haven’t yet tried – one of which is bound to the newest trick in the stable. So you need to keep your ear to the ground and find out what’s new and what’s working for others that you haven’t yet tried yourself and to do that you need to listen to what’s happening out there in the big old world of marketing.

This is where the value of team work comes in, and believe me it’s quite an adjustment to make from being a sole trader to being a team of people all moving a company in the same direction…sometimes it feels like you are tied together like a mass, 3 legged race which is then all lassoed together for good measure…you know where you all are heading but boy oh boy is it a job getting everyone there in an efficient manner!

So now your role is switching from “doing” to “testing” and “cajoling” and “listening and learning”…and yes it’s a hard transition to make, but rewarding if you can do it.

So where to start on the metamorphosis? Well think of it this way – one honey bee can happily make honey on it’s own, but loads of bees together are going to make a tonne more honey together and that’s the attitude you have to start taking…working together, listening, gathering all the great ideas together that are out there and implementing them to make the team work together.

Now hands up – who hates this word…synergy.

Yup that’s right that dirty old word synergy – sounds so eighties doesn’t it? You know – “Yah, right well we must pull the synergy together on this project Tarquin, Yah Yah!”

Yup, are you getting that image of the yuppie talking into the brick sized phone? Hmm me too, but in fairness that horrible word still has value today in that you need to pull the threads of your team together and get some form of synergy going between them…it’s your role to make your team listen to each other. They need to start feeding off each others energy.

Make it an “energy synergy”!

Once that feeling starts to flow with your team then, and only then will the ideas start to flow. It’s your role to make your marketing efforts “flow and grow” (it’s a day for sound bites isn’t it?) but you must not stifle any marketing efforts by anyone in your company…don’t just leave marketing ideas and suggestions down to the marketing department. Sure it’s their role to be the only guys implementing those ideas, but ideas should be flowing from all corners of the company – from the mail room to the boardroom. Make your team marketing champions and make it part of the company culture as you grow.

As the big old boss of the company it will be your place to work with your marketing team to choose which ideas to implement, but you do need to allow for the listening to take place…encourage ideas…run a competition for the best marketing idea each month to win a bottle of champagne. Have an open forum where marketing ideas can be shared – have a marketing brainstorming week one week a month where emails fly round your company – brimming with ideas to try out…but it’s all down to the listening at the end of the day – it’s no good letting your staff or franchisees present good ideas if you are going to sit there like the bratty little child with their fingers in their ears going “la la la la – I can’t hear you!” Who’s going to want to put forward any new ideas if you are going to rip them up and trample on them?

Find a way that you can test out new ideas. Fancy doing something on YouTube? – go on give it a whirl. Want to see if local newspaper advertising works? Do it locally for a head office owned franchise unit, if it works great – roll it out across the network – share the design formula. If it doesn’t then state why it doesn’t work and move on from there to the next idea. But all the time listen and make it easy for all your team to share their ideas – you never know, that geeky IT guy may know a thing or two about a “hot new marketing tool called blogging?” Or did the mailroom boy see a great marketing strategy come through the mail room the other day from an external company? What about the franchisee who spoke to another franchisee of a non-competing company who told them about a successful campaign their company had recently run? Only by listening will you learn what’s new and out there.

So go on – give it a try and see what happens when you actually listen to your staff and franchisees…if nothing else it lightens the load on you to be the all-seeing all-being oracle on everything marketing, and surely that’s one pressure all company leaders would love to be able to offload without undermining their leadership position within the company?