Listening is the Key to Selling

How well do you listen?
Nobody thinks that they are bad listeners. In fact, most people think that they are great listeners. But most people would be wrong, because in most cases, people tend to over-rate themselves on their listening abilities.
We have six senses (that right, six) and if you aren’t using three of them to listen with, then you aren’t really trying.
“Listen first with your eyes, then with your ears.” If you have wandering eyes, you aren’t really listening. Many people (I included) have the habit of looking beyond the speaker. Have you ever found yourself engaged in conversation with someone, when you are distracted by another person behind them? That’s what I mean by looking beyond the speaker. You should always be making eye contact with the person speaking to you Try not to be distracted by movement or noise. If you want to become a better listener, you need to work on your eye contact. If you break eye contact with your conversational partner, you aren’t really listening.
Hearing isn’t listening. Just because you are hearing the words, that doesn’t mean that you are listening.
Listening is the act of allowing the other person to express their feelings completely, without interuption and without any preconceived notions on your part, with the intent to fully absorb and process what they are saying so that you can appreciate their meaning and understand how they are feeling. As we break down the definition, piece by piece, you’ll see that there is a lot of things going on here.
First is the act of allowing the other person to express their feelings completely. You are NOT listening if you do not allow the other person to express their feelings completely. Depending on the person, sometimes this might take a while and we can get impatient and our attention may wander. Try to be “mindful” and “stay in the moment”. This means, that no matter how much they talk, and no matter how bored you may be, you have to train yourself to be patient and train your mind not to wander off to some other place.
The next part of listening is “without interuption”. This should be a “no-brainer”, but some salespeople still do it. Interupting people in the middle of sentences is about the rudest thing that you can do. Interuption is saying to the other person, “what I have to say is much more important that what you have to say”. Not a good way to gain a customer.
The third part of listening is to listen ”without preconceived notions”. If you think that you already know what the other party is trying to say, then you aren’t really going to listen very well. After all, you already know what they are going to say, right? Wrong. Dead wrong. Sales people are the worst at this. They think that they already know how to sell you, so they don’t listen to what your needs are. This mistake alone can cost you thousands of dollars in lost commisions over the life of a sales career. Learn to listen without preconceived notions because everybodies motiviations are different.
The fourth part of the definition is to listen ”with the intent to fully absorb”… It’s hard to “fully absorb” everything. But at least have the INTENT to “fully absorb” everything. By trying to fully absorb everything, you might absord the most imporatant parts, at least. But if you don’t even have the intention of fully absorbing what someone is saying, you’ll surely miss some of the most important parts.
The fifth part is to “process what they are saying”. This means you have to THINK about it! Assimilate what they told you and run it through your cereberal cortex and try to decipher what they are trying to say. That is the sixth part; “trying to understand their meaning”. Processing what they are saying and trying to understand their meaning are two different steps. One is the process and the other is the output.
The seventh part is to try to understand how they are feeling. Notice I said to try to understand how they are feeling. I didn’t say try to understand what they said. This is where your sixth sense comes in and this is where the rubber meets the road. Some customers might not want to tell you exactly how they feel and others might not be ABLE to tell you how they feel. In selling, there are two kinds of needs, expressed and implied. Although that is a lesson for another time, an example of an expressed need is some one that tells you their car is old and keeps breaking down, so they need to buy a new one. An example of an implied need is if they are looking at a Mercedes Benz, they could have an implied need of buying a car for a status symbol. If you can understand how your customer “feels”, you will make a sale.
In business, motivations for buying can come in many forms. The more you understand how your customer feels, the more sales you will make and the longer you will keep them as a satisfied customer.
There’s one more thing that I want to point out. Nowhere in that definition does it say anything about a response. If you want to respond, that is OK, but just remember, that is not part of the listening process, that is responding.