Listening is a Vital Selling Skill

One of the biggest mistakes that sales people make is the fact that they don't listen properly to what their prospects are telling them. If I may be so bold as to say I think this is a pretty dumb thing to do. The reason I feel this way is that sales prospects are generally happy to give away lots of their needs when given a chance. Instead when you try and dictate to them what you think they need, the very opposite will often happen. The prospect will move into a defensive mode and will block you out until you move on to the next victim (Sorry did I say that, I meant customer).

Okay so how can we sales people make ourselves listen more? (No you don't go out and buy hearing aid so that you can hear everything 20 times louder than normal) First and foremost you need something that all successful people have in abundance, self-discipline. It's just so tempting to stop a person in their tracks when they start ranting on about themselves. It's much more exciting if we and our egos do all the ranting instead. The only downside to forcing ourselves to listen is that we mustn't show we are bored. That can be quite challenging when the prospect wants to tell you their life story and you haven't made a sale yet that day. However, self-discipline will win the day in the end and listening skills will put a bigger smile on your face and ultimately help you to put more money into your bank account.

Another way of increasing your listening time with the customer is to have an arsenal of suitable questions ready to stop you from babbling on about how great your company is. These questions will entice the prospect into revealing lots of juicy information that can be used to twist them around your little finger when the ideal moment comes. Everybody loves to talk about themselves and if you can satisfy their big ego by asking them how great they are, they'll probably even thank you for it.

Now one other big mistake sellers make when they are talking to a customer is to cut them short and interrupt the flow. I know this one well because I have to stop myself doing it when I want to put forward my opinion. You see a sales conversation is all about balancing control. Okay so if that's the case why don't we use a stopwatch and allow 50% of talk time to the sales person and the other 50% to the prospect or customer. Well unfortunately if you do this the customer will walk away feeling that you never let him get a word in edgeways. The solution to this is to give the customer more than 50% and only then will they feel that the conversation was totally balanced. Do you see where I'm coming from here? Our egos get in the way of rational thinking and we distort everything in our favour.

A simple way of increasing our listening time when selling is to basically let the customer know that we are indeed listening. You even notice this with written Ads where the copywriter will tell the customer that he hears them. It's a simple but very effective way of affirming that you are interested in the customer's needs. This can also be achieved by repeating the last few words of what the customer was saying before you join the conversation again.
On a final note, a really interesting booster for listening skills is to train yourself to "turn up the focus" to get better results. In order to do this you could be listening to anything you want but you must increase your focus, blocking out everything around you. I've tried this listening to radio ads. Maybe I've listened to this Ad 50 times but never really attentively. The results can be pretty amazing! You just hear things that you couldn't believe you hadn't noticed before. The simple reason for this is that you weren't really giving it all of you attention before. Our hearing senses can be so much more powerful if we put our minds to it.

David Lynch is a Sales Training Designer & Accomplished Author. He has more than 20 years experience in a variety of industries including software, insurance & hospitality. If you would like to learn more sales skills from David you can download a Free Copy of his E-book "25 Mistakes To Avoid When Selling" at http://www.saleswillgrow.com/freesalestraining2.html