The importance of listening before planning

As marketers, it’s easy to begin the year buried in planning documents, channel strategies and content calendars. The pressure to keep campaigns moving means we often slip into delivery mode before we’ve truly grounded our priorities in what our audience actually wants.

First-hand insight

While many of us spend most of our time behind a screen, our sales (and often technical) colleagues are out there every day: on site, visiting architecture practices or designers’ studios, hosting CPD sessions, answering calls and so on. They hear the frustrations, the changing project drivers, the wish lists and the technical misunderstandings. A 30-minute conversation with your colleagues can give you more usable insight than hours spent trawling through reports.

Ask them what themes are coming up again and again. What questions are specifiers asking them? What problems need clearer explanations?

Where insight meets content

This is where things get exciting from a marketing perspective. Snippets from sales and technical conversations can easily become the backbone of your campaigns: a recurring specifier question becomes a blog; a common misconception becomes a simple explainer; a project challenge becomes a case study; a trend spotted on site becomes a LinkedIn post. Suddenly, your content plan is informed by real situations rather than assumptions, and your audience will appreciate that.

Turning insight into priorities

Talking to sales and technical teams is also a great way to test any assumptions. The ideas that feel important from a desk may not be the ones driving decisions on site. Salespeople can quickly tell you whether your new sustainability angle resonates or whether specifiers will genuinely care about a particular product feature.

Most importantly, this approach keeps marketing connected to reality. It ensures your content is practical, relevant and a true reflection of the conversations already happening in the market.

So before you finalise your plan for the year, block out some time in your diary, grab a coffee and sit down with your colleagues.