Conference of a consultant, PhD. and member of TopTen Communication Spain, organized by the Asociación de Marketing de España (Spanish Marketing Association) at Fundación Pons
«Listening sells,» according to Enrique Sueiro
«Listening sells, especially in troubled times.» This is what Enrique Sueiro, consultant and PhD. in Communication, declared at the conference organized by the Asociación de Marketing de España at Fundación Pons. According to the expert, member of the TopTen Communication Spain platform, «remaining silent is necessary but not sufficient to listen. One can sell remaining silent, as long as one is smart and productive. Among the various advantages of listening, an important one is that it can shed light on what we can offer, i.e. sell.»
Enrique Sueiro explained the process he called From Listening to Marketing. He explained that «the intimately human and commercially sustainable act of listening is a calm, encouraging, coherent type of presence that never interrupts and that harmonizes senses and sensibilities.» In this sense, he encouraged the refinement of «personal and corporate abilities to listen with sight, talk with tact, decide with smell, watch with hearing and choose with taste.»
Surgical Marketing for Pathologies of Markets
Throughout the conference, the lecturer used many references related to health. He mentioned James L. Hallenbeck, who analyzed 74 tapes with conversations between doctors and their patients: only 23% of the patients were allowed to fully describe their concerns. The average time they could talk for before they were first interrupted was merely 18 seconds. Another paper showed that the average length of conversations was 16.5 minutes; patients used only 8 seconds of this time to make questions. In addition, doctors believed they had spent about 9 minutes providing information, but they had done this for only 40 seconds instead.
In line with the lessons of the movie Margin Call and the documentary Inside Job, Enrique Sueiro encouraged a turn to «a surgical marketing for pathologies in markets.» Among the diseases, he mentioned the «long-distance schizophrenia between what is said and what is done. To fight this illness, nothing is as effective as the nine-word test: say what you do and do what you say».
For the depression pathology, he suggested a game of words. «From the Latin word anima (soul) and from the English word listen, we may re-characterize the best executives as CLO (Chief Listening Officer) because they do not only listen, they also inject soul into companies. Since the soul is intangible, it cannot be seen, but executives with vision can feel that, as with trees, the vigor of their companies does not lie on the branches of glamorous seasons, but rather on the healthy, deep roots.»
