The Best Marketing I Ever Did Was Listening

When I start working with a new client, they usually expect me to come in with ideas. A new campaign concept. A channel recommendation. A quick win.

Instead, I spend the first month mostly listening. And I can tell it makes some people uncomfortable. They’re paying for marketing expertise — shouldn’t I be marketing?

But after doing this for over twelve years, across companies like Navico Group, Vesper Marine, and Garmin, and now with my own fractional clients, I’ve learned something that I wish someone had told me earlier in my career: the fastest way to build effective marketing is to shut up first.

What the first month actually looks like

I ask to sit in on sales calls. Not to critique them — to hear what prospects ask, what language they use, what objections come up, what makes them say yes.

I read support tickets and customer service emails. Not the summaries — the actual exchanges. There’s a difference between what a business thinks its customers care about and what customers actually say when something goes wrong.

I talk to the sales team, if there is one. Not about leads or targets, but about which customers they love working with and which ones are painful. The answers are almost always revealing.

I interview a handful of existing customers. Short, informal conversations. What made you choose us? What almost stopped you? What would you tell a colleague about us?

And I read everything — the website, the old pitch decks, the competitor brochures, the random Google Doc someone started two years ago titled “Marketing Ideas” with seventeen bullet points and no follow-through.

Why this matters more than any campaign

Here’s what happens when you skip the listening phase. You build marketing based on assumptions. The founder says, “Our customers care about quality and reliability.” So you write messaging about quality and reliability. But when you actually talk to customers, you discover they chose you because your onboarding process was painless and your team responded to emails within an hour. Quality was table stakes — the real differentiator was the experience.

That’s not something you can guess from the outside. And it’s not something a brand workshop with sticky notes will reliably surface. It comes from hearing actual customers describe their experience in their own words.

I worked with a maritime technology company years ago where the internal assumption was that buyers cared most about technical specifications. The engineering team had built incredibly detailed spec sheets. The website was full of technical language.

When I actually spoke to their customers, the story was different. Yes, the specs mattered. But what closed deals was the fact that the product was easier to install than the competition. Installers — the people physically fitting the equipment on boats — were the real influencers. They recommended whatever product didn’t give them headaches. All that technical marketing was aimed at the wrong audience.

The discovery tax

I think of the listening phase as paying the discovery tax. It costs time upfront. It delays the visible output. It can feel like nothing is happening.

But every week you spend listening saves you months of building the wrong thing. I’ve seen businesses spend six figures on a website redesign that missed the mark because nobody talked to customers first. I’ve seen content strategies built around topics the company found interesting rather than questions their buyers were actually asking.

The discovery tax is always worth paying. The only question is whether you pay it upfront, when it’s cheap, or later, when you’ve already committed budget to the wrong direction.

What you learn that you can’t learn any other way

There’s a specific kind of insight that only comes from direct observation. It’s the language your customers use. Not the language you use internally, not the industry jargon, not the polished value proposition from your last brand exercise — the actual words real people say when they describe their problem and your solution.

That language is gold. When you use it in your marketing, it creates an instant connection. The reader thinks, “This company gets it.” Not because you’re clever, but because you’re reflecting their reality back to them.

I keep a running document for every client. Direct quotes from customers, phrases from sales calls, recurring themes from support tickets. When it comes time to write a homepage, or a case study, or a campaign — that document is where I start. Not with what we want to say, but with what they’ve already told us matters.

The uncomfortable part

There’s a reason most marketers skip this phase. It’s slow. It doesn’t produce visible deliverables. And sometimes what you learn is uncomfortable. You discover that the thing the company is most proud of isn’t what customers value. Or that the target market is different from who the founder imagined. Or that the biggest competitor isn’t who you thought.

Those uncomfortable discoveries are the most valuable ones. They redirect effort toward what actually works instead of what feels right internally.

The question I’d leave you with

When was the last time someone in your business had a genuine, open-ended conversation with a customer about why they chose you? Not a survey. Not a Net Promoter Score. An actual conversation where you asked and then just listened.

If you can’t remember, that’s where I’d start. Before the campaigns, before the website redesign, before the new CRM. Start by listening. Everything else gets easier from there.