Great People Works

How many times have you been in a networking or other meeting, listening to others speak when suddenly you realize you have no idea what was just said in the past minute or so. It's like when you drive somewhere and realize you cannot remember the actual drive there. In the meeting you went on autopilot, your mind was somewhere else, perhaps dreaming or thinking, perhaps looking at the attractive person down at the end of the table, but it was not listening. As a result, you have just missed something important that you would be expected to know by the speaker or others in the room at the same meeting. OOPS, you have just set yourself for a "Duh!" moment. The good news is that great listening skills can be learned and practiced with a little training and coaching.

In the art of sales, (and it is an art form for those who wish to become a professional in the field), your most important skill is not speaking or influencing as most people imagine, but it is listening. If you are not listening to your customer you will never sell anything. Likewise, if you have not developed your listening and probing skills you will miss important information and fail to uncover vital information that will enable you to complete the sale. A skilled listener is so attentive that he comfortably uses questioning skills to confirm his understanding, build his understanding with the details (thoughts, feelling, motives, pictures) of what he has heard and directs the sales process with probing techniques. A good listener is not thinking about his next question, he is watching the speaker, his body language, facial expressions, hands and he is listening to the tonal and pitch variations in the words he is hearing. All of these together provide hidden messages, or put differently, the meaning behind the message for the astute listener. By focusing so completely on the listener for the moment, the next question or step in the process becomes much easier and flows more naturally because by listening closely the next question depends on what has just been said not some prewritten script like you hear in most telemarketing calls. By maintaining this conversational flow and "connectedness" the speaker realizes you are giving them respect by listening closely, that you are processing and reacting to what they say and this invokes the law of reciprocity in human interaction. When you give me your attention, I'll give you mine and in fact feel a subtle obligation to reciprocate by listening to you.

Since most people like to talk about themselves or something they know about, this is ideal for the sales professional, because you can encourage them, probe them by asking both open and closed questions and steer the interview through a sales process to a logical closing where you get the business. It takes practice to build good listening skills, but practice and a little training is all it takes, assuming you have good hearing or can read lips and speak or sign.