Listen to me! Part 1

I had several great questions following last week's co-presentation with Larry Bodine at a Society for Marketing Professional Services webinar on our 2006 "Increasing Marketing Effectiveness" study results. 

Erin wrote:  “Could you comment further on the 'listen to your client' metric? What exactly do you mean by that?” 

There are really two issues to share with you, Erin (with some sub points!):

• Measuring Marketing is not the same as measuring Service Delivery. 
  • Many of our study respondents believed they were measuring their marketing effectiveness with their clients when they conducted post-project interviews or client satisfaction surveys. Instead, most of these initiatives are related to service delivery, and not the effectiveness of their firm's marketing strategies or tactics. For example, when a client satisfaction survey captures a client’s impressions about the company's ability to stay on budget, this kind of a measurement has nothing to do with whether the firm has capably targeted the right client, retained them properly, and grown business with them. Also, this kind of measurement doesn’t capture the clients’ perceptions of the company versus its competitors. 
  • Often a customer satisfaction survey is conducted with an orientation toward the past, when a real marketing-listening activity is aimed toward future competitive advantages. 
• Listening is too often considered a “noun,” and not a “verb.”
  • In our study, we saw numerous examples of professional firms using client satisfaction interviews, end-of-project surveys, and the like, as if they were static and unchanging vehicles. A true marketplace listening activity has to be revised, in order to capture cutting-edge information. Some of our survey respondents used client satisfaction surveys that have not changed in years. 
  • Also, in many cases, professional firms’ listening initiatives were not treated as measurement initiatives; they were treated as communication initiatives! Instead, an effective “listening” activity is built from an “improving effectiveness” orientation. This is what we mean when we included “listening to your client” as one of the Client Metrics that were associated with “extremely effective” respondents. “Extremely effective” professional firms employ “listening” activities to monitor and adapt their strategic assumptions, to track the evolving client perceptions of their firm as a means to maintain a differentiation advantage, to test the acceptance of a new service, etc. All of these listening activities are designed as long-term elements of the firm’s marketing program. The vehicles – surveys, focus groups, interviews, and more – may look the same, but they capture much more strategic marketing information, all designed to fine-tune the firm’s marketing strategies and tactical approaches going forward.