How Well Do You Listen? No, Not Glisten, Listen!

An interesting thing happened to me yesterday. I set up a lunch with two friends of mine, let's call them Bill and Ted, that had never met before. The reason for the meeting was simply because it was beneficial for them to meet each other. During this lunch, I did something that I normally have a hard time doing, and that was simply sitting back, letting the two of them carry the conversation so they could get to know each other and do nothing but listen. To let you know how rare this is for me, both of my friends made comments about how quiet I was being during this lunch and they wondered if I was feeling alright. Now, neither of them will be in stand up comedy anytime soon, so I told them just to ignore me and continue their conversation. Sitting back in an observation role was amazing! (I should do this more often to practice my own active listening skills.) The things that you realize about yourself when observing others can be surprising.

What I found was that one friend, Bill, was a much better listener than Ted. When Ted would speak, Bill would be sure not to interrupt. He would sit forward and kept great eye contact with Ted. If he was talking and Ted began to speak over him, he would stop his sentence to listen to Ted. He would nod in agreement when Ted made a point to show that he understood what was being explained.

If Bill was speaking and Ted wanted to have input, he would have a tendency to speak over Bill and cut him off half-way through a sentence. Ted was easily distracted and he would change the topic quickly to something that he wanted to talk about if he wasn't interested in where the conversation was going. He also committed the communication sin of pulling out his cell phone (more than once) and looking at it while Bill was speaking and explaining a point.

Now, don't get me wrong, Ted is a great guy and a very nice person. Bill even called me later to thank me for arranging the lunch and told me how much he liked Ted. I don't think Ted was doing anything that most people meeting for the first time wouldn't do. But, I can tell you who got the most information out of the conversation and that was Bill. He knows much more about Ted than Ted knows about Bill. Bill came across as the more interested of the two. I also happen to know that Bill has had formal training in how to listen and I don't believe that Ted has had this same advantage. After all, only 2% of adults in the United States has had formal training on using listening skills.

So, what is my point? Well, if you want to be a Salutary Sales Pro, you have to know how to listen. Active listening skills, or what Mike Bosworth in  his book, "What Great Salespeople Do - The Science of Selling Through Emotional Connection and the Power of Story" calls empathetic listening, are extremely important in the world of sales. If you don't know how to listen to what is being said, and to k now how to look for what is not being said, you can't reach the level of a Salutary Sales Pro.
Since I had the advantage of sitting back and simply observing this conversation, I saw a lot of listening inhibitors exhibited by Ted. Let's take a look at just three listening inhibitors that could cause us to miss some sure sales signs from your clients.

Being Right - This is a sure listening inhibitor. We all like to be right and show that we know what we are talking about. But, when I catch myself in this listening inhibiting mode, I think of a statement my Dad made to me (unfortunately in more situations than I care to admit) as a young man. Whenever I was adamant about being right with regard to a certain situation or conversation, he would say to me, "Rob, you're right. You are dead right and let me repeat that for you, you are dead, right. In other words, he was telling me that my desire to be right was taking over my vision as to what each party in the conversation was trying to accomplish. Not the course of action a Salutary Sales Pro wants to take.

Mind Reading - This one is pretty self-explanatory. You believe you know exactly what the other person is going to say, what their point of view is and you allow your mind to wander off to what you are going to have for dinner that night or the fact that you have laundry to do when you get home. Fight this urge! You really don't know where your customer might be going and you will miss important information. The best case scenario is that you realize you have entered this phase and you request they repeat some of the information they have already covered. The worst case scenario is that you miss important information all together.

Expertise - You might be thinking, What? Has Stenberg lost what little mind he had to lose? How can my expertise be a listening inhibitor? When you have seen a great deal of the situations many of your client's experience, you can, and will, have a tendency to cut them off and tell them what they need to do. Mike Bosworth calls this "premature elaboration." In fact, when Neil Rackham conducted the research for the book "Spin Selling" he found that new salespeople for Xerox would hit a sales slump in their 18th month of employment. In fact, he said you could set your watch by it. The reason? After 18 months as a salesperson for Xerox, the salesperson had seen just about all the different situations their customers would experience. Early in their sales career, the salespeople would listen to their prospective client's entire story and even sometimes have to go back to the office to retrieve an answer. But, after 18 months, they had encountered just about every situation they would face in the field. So, they would reflect back to other clients who had similar issues and cut their client off and tell them exactly what they needed to do to fix their issue. Now, the salesperson would not be necessarily wrong with their solution but they would not make the sale. Why? Because their client would not feel they were "felt" and never got to finish their entire story before being interrupted. Also, they did not like to be told what to do. No one does.

So, these are just three examples of listening inhibitors and there are many more. In a Mike Bosworth Leadership Sales Seekers workshop, we spend almost an entire day on the importance of listening, or what we call tending, to the stories of your client. We teach you how to listen and what to listen for. How to listen not only with your ears but with your eyes and with your heart. After all, what good is being a great storyteller if you don't also become great at being a story listener. Getting your customers story is the reason you tell your story in the first place.

Good Selling!