Why do You Need to Start Listening if You Want to Succeed?

Start Listening if You Want to Succeed

Are you listening to your customers? Are you listening to your potential customers?

The type of small businesses that we know from the past slowly but surely disappear from the scene of today’s business world.

Some of them are transforming and start using new tools for doing business. Also, some of them simply expire because don’t want to accept the changes. Some of them will expire if they don’t start to change themselves.

You must start listening to your market.

Listen to Your Customers and Potential Customers

Today your current customers and potential customers are more powerful than ever before. They are armed with social media tools that enable them to spread the word with the speed of light. They can help your company with a good word about you, but also they can bring negative influence on you and bring bad publicity about your business.

Because of that, you must always be close to the people that are your customers or potential customers. You need to start listening to them everywhere where they are. Also, You need to answer their questions and communicate with them.

You need to help them if they try to find the solution for their problems, you need to communicate with them about subjects of your expertise. You need to apologize for some mistakes that your business makes when they talk about them. Also, you need to offer them the possibility to fix those mistakes.

Listen to Your Competitors

On the other side, there are also your competitors that you’ll need to listen to.

What they say, what they offer, what they use, how they communicate with their customers and potential customers…? All these questions are important for you and your company because they can be easily used in the process of learning and improving and preparing your business for the future.

For example, you can find a conversation between your competitors and their unsatisfied customer. Why not start the conversation with those customers and try to convert them into your future satisfied customers.

This is the new type of intelligence that can increase your business potential energy.

How to Implement This New Function in Your Company?

You need to listen to everything about:

  • your brand,
  • company name,
  • your company name plus adjectives,
  • industry,
  • your products and services,
  • your main competitors,
  • the competitor’s products and services,
  • your current customers and their names or company names,
  • the conversation of your current customers…

You can start with social media and set up your own listening engine. For example, you can use different tools like Google Alerts, IFTTT, Hootsuite, etc. For example, in the article related to purchase intent you can find how to use Google Alerts and IFTTT as listening tools. All of them can help you to create an efficient listening system that will help you to listen to all important stakeholders around your company.

As you can see listening has become one of the most important business activities today. It’s the new function that brings new and increases the current business potential energy of your small business.

Question: What do you think about listening as a business function? Did you use listening and what you listen to for your company?