You Help Your Clients Get Noticed. But Are They Hearing You?

You Help Your Clients Get Noticed. But Are They Hearing You?

By Michael G. Strawser, M.B.A., Ph.D.

People in OOH advertising spend a lot of time thinking about messages.

You help clients determine what to say, where to say it, and how to make sure the right people notice it. You think about audiences for a living.

But I want to suggest something slightly different: the message your customer puts on a billboard isn’t the only message that matters.

Your own communication is sending a message, too.

Every email, sales call, proposal, meeting, follow-up, and delayed response tells a client something about you and your company. We tend to think of these as things surrounding the sale. I would argue they are part of the sale.

That matters because OOH is a relationship business. Clients may initially choose you because of inventory, location, reach, or price. But the experience of working with you helps determine whether they trust you, listen to your recommendations, and ultimately want to work with you again.

Research backs this up. Studies of customer relationships have consistently connected communication behaviors (like responsiveness, clarity, timeliness) with trust.

At Apparatix Unleashed 2026, I introduced a simple framework for thinking about that experience: Signal. Interpret. Adjust. Reinforce.

Signal: What are you communicating beyond your words?

We tend to think communication begins when we start talking.

It doesn’t.

Your responsiveness, tone, preparation, body language, and attention are already communicating. So is the email that gets answered quickly. And the one that doesn’t.

The important question isn’t simply, What did I say? It is, What did the client experience?

There can be a surprisingly large gap between the two.

Interpret: What is this client actually telling you they need?

One of the easiest mistakes in sales is communicating with customers the way we prefer to be communicated with.

Some clients want data. Others want reassurance. Some want you to get to the point. Others need time to think. Your job is to notice the difference.

Customers don’t experience listening simply as staying quiet while they talk. They notice attentiveness, whether we accurately perceive what they mean, and how we respond.

Remember, people often reveal what they need if we’re willing to listen beyond their words.

Adjust: Make your expertise easier to receive

Adaptation sometimes gets a bad reputation. We worry that changing our approach somehow makes us less authentic.

It doesn’t.

Adapting your communication means recognizing that the burden of clarity belongs, at least in part, to the communicator.

If a customer wants the numbers first, give them the numbers. If they need the big picture before the details, start there. If industry terminology is creating confusion, translate it.

This is particularly important for experts.

The longer we work in an industry, the easier it becomes to forget what it was like not to know what we know. We skip steps. We use familiar language. We assume the client understands why one option is clearly better than another. That expertise can become a communication blind spot.

To us, it may be obvious.

To them, it isn’t.

In that moment, your job isn’t simply to sell OOH. Your job is to translate it.

Reinforce: Prove it after the conversation

Then comes the part of communication we often underestimate: what happens next.

Trust rarely comes from one grand gesture. It grows through smaller interactions repeated over time.

You send the information you promised. You remember something from the last conversation. You follow up when you said you would. You close the loop rather than leaving the client wondering.

None of these things sounds revolutionary.

That’s the point.

Relationships are built through ordinary moments handled well. Reliability compounds through visible micro-actions. Every message becomes an opportunity to provide clarity, reassurance, or insight.

Every interaction is part of what you’re selling

In my work with organizations and sales teams through Legacy Communication Training & Consulting, this is often where the conversation lands. We can spend a lot of time trying to perfect the pitch when the larger opportunity may be improving the entire communication experience around it.

Your clients probably won’t remember every word you say. They will remember whether you understood them. They will remember whether you made something complicated easier to understand. And they will remember whether you did what you said you would do.

For an industry built around helping messages get noticed, perhaps that’s the communication challenge worth noticing ourselves.

Every interaction is part of what you’re selling.

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Michael G. Strawser, Ph.D. is a communication professor at the University of Central Florida, author, speaker, and founder of Legacy Communication Training & Consulting. He works with organizations and sales teams to improve customer communication, workplace communication, and team effectiveness. He recently presented Why Great Messages Get Lost—and Business Goes With Them at Apparatix Unleashed 2026.