Salesopedia’s topic this week is listening. Is there a more important ability in sales? The article – Active Listening and Active Rainmaking – discusses techniques for being an active listener. The tips are excellent, but I particularly enjoyed this insight:
Often times the technical training and development of service providers hinders their ability to be good listeners. Due to the nature of their work, engineers, lawyers, accountants, and consultants of all types are extremely knowledgeable in their particular area of expertise. In order to get their jobs done and done well, they often need to be directive and tell people what to do to complete the tasks on which they are working. However, when it comes to active listening they are required to sit back and resist the urge to chime in with presumed solutions to problems that have not yet been fully explained. Balancing this can be a difficult task for many professionals faced with the challenge of both selling and delivering services.
That is right down the center of the plate. I have firsthand experience selling with an engineer on the call. Many sales calls ended with the engineer offering solutions to partially qualified prospects. Listening is difficult. Listening, and not solving, when you believe you have a good solution is more difficult.
So on to the author’s suggestions – the most effective one I have encountered is this one:
• Rephrase: “Just so I understand” are four very powerful words. When someone else is describing something to you, they often take a long time to make relatively few points. They may go on for 10 minutes without a breath. When they’re done, you can say, “Just so I understand, it seems that A and B are happening, and that’s creating the problems of X, Y, and Z. Is that correct?”
When you rephrase a 10 minute soliloquy into 30 seconds of summary, clients are impressed…partly by how smart you are (and you didn’t even say much), but mostly by how well you listen.
This approach is the most effective because it can only be done when you actively listen.