Modern Selling: 6 Ways to be a Better Listener

Have you looked around at the other people in your conference room lately? Are they engaged? Are they listening? Are they checking their phones? Worse yet, are their laptops open?

In today’s world of reactive urgency, it is rare to find participants of business meetings fully engaged and listening. Check out these eye-opening results from a recent survey of 3,600 professionals in 30 different countries conducted by Accenture:

• 66 percent of conference call participants check and write emails during the call.
• 35 percent of people check their instant messages or texts during live meetings.
• 38 percent of surveyed companies claim to have training on soft skills like listening.

The conclusion: Very few people are listening, and few companies are training them to listen.

Listening Skills Matter

As a salesperson, if you can focus and truly listen, then you will hear pains and clues that others miss – completely differentiating yourself from the rest of the market. Even before reading the stats above, it is obvious that listening today is difficult. Here are six helpful ways for sales professionals to listen better in the modern world of selling.

1. Anticipate the mood of your call or meeting. Before rushing to your next sales call, ask yourself: What has my contact experienced so far in their day? Was traffic terrible this morning? If your appointment is at 8 a.m., then they are probably full of caffeine and ready to talk. If it is mid-morning, then they may have just left a staff meeting and ready to take a nap.

2. Don’t do anything for five minutes before your appointment. A little more than 20 years ago, I had a sales call for which I was completely unprepared. On my commute, instead of listening to the radio, I turned off everything and let my mind settle. I then visualized how the meeting would unfold – from being greeted in the lobby to leaving their office. The result was the best sales call I had conducted to that point in my young career. I was in the moment – which helped me listen but also caused my customer to relax and engage.

3. Use a cue to bring you fully into the present moment. No matter how engaged you are at the beginning of a sales call, your mind will tend to drift. Use a simple mental cue to bring you back to the present moment. I use the word “focus” – when I find myself daydreaming about my vacation plans or the email that I have to send later, I simply say to myself “focus” and I return to the moment.

4. Turn off your phone…and let them see you do it. When you let customers see you turning off your phone and stashing it somewhere, you are sending them a message that you are expecting full engagement. Even more important, you are relieving yourself from any temptations to glance at the latest text or email.

5. Play the pronoun game. When a customer uses “I,” “me” and “my” – they are probably not as important as they are positioning themselves to be. If they use “we,” “us” and “our” – they are probably more important than they are pretending to be. Although the objective of this game is to help you understand the real level of authority your contact has, a bonus outcome is that it helps you stay in the moment and listen.

6. Don’t be “Checklist Charlie.” In modern selling, the primary objective of probing questions is to spark a transparent conversation with a customer. The information you gather is secondary – after all, most of it can be found online. Most importantly, when interviewing potential customers, do not run down a set of questions like a checklist – you will appear to be the artificial facilitator of a survey. Use questions to stimulate discussion, but do not worry about getting to every question or going off the script.