The Giving of Good Listening Will Trump the Giving of Good Advice

The information economy has changed the profession of sales forever. In bygone years a salesperson could define their value through the unique quality and differentiation of their products and services. Today, with the abundance, ease and access to information, salespeople can no longer rely on their information to carry the day for them.

This seismic shift is forcing sales organizations to look at how they go to market and it is redefining their value proposition. Incidentally, most companies have made, at best, cosmetic changes and those who have are finding that their sales force is struggling with the implementation.

The only true differentiator that is sustainable for companies in defining their value is through their quality of engagement. Their value is now defined by getting information, instead of giving information. This puts all the focus on the prospect and totally deemphasizes the salesperson and their offering. And the tactic to implement the re-channeling of information is through the art of listening and asking thought-provoking questions.

Listening and questioning go hand-in-hand. In sales you can’t do one without the other. I believe salespeople aren’t necessarily bad listeners, but rather they are ineffective at asking questions that elicit important information that is worth listening to. So bad questioning is the real culprit in bad listening. If salespeople ask meaningful questions that elicit meaningful information they’d end up being great listeners overnight by default.

Salespeople too often are willing to only listen to themselves talk. Their intent isn’t to learn and understand, rather to quickly get to the point where they can make their salient sales points. The best way to persuade is through listening and not through selling. This flies in the face of the way most salespeople sell. When was the last time you heard someone complimenting a potential salesperson by saying, “You are a very good listener, you’d be great as a salesperson!”?

To promote good listening, it is very important to take on a non-selling posture. A non-selling posture is all about putting all the focus on the prospect and having your product and solution taking a backseat.

The following are basic principles that make up the non-selling posture that promote and enhance active listening. Improve your questioning skills and your listening skills will improve exponentially.

• Your need to have people like you, and your need for approval will impede your confidence to ask thought-provoking questions.
• The most underrated and underutilized selling skill is the ability to find the truth. Finding the truth is a far more valuable skill set than selling and persuading.
• Salespeople who believe that their product information and solution are the least important part of the sales equation position themselves well as very caring listeners.
• Once you get good, you ask questions and listen intently more for the benefit of the prospect than for yourself.
• The best salesperson at the selling event is always the prospect. Let them internally sell themselves and then listen intently to how effective they are in selling you on changing.
• Need based selling is counterproductive. Prospects put more weight and value on what they want rather than on what they need. Listen intently more for wants than needs.
• Behavioral research states that 93% of communication is nonverbal. So all the talking you’re doing instead of listening is having very little influence.
• Listen thoroughly for emotional reasons for change as opposed to intellectual and rational reasons for change. Prospects make decisions emotionally and justify the reasons intellectually to salespeople.
• Listen for personal and individual buying cues more so than corporate buying cues. Prospects buy individually and justify their buying decisions to salespeople corporately.
• Listen more for buying cues driven by pain, fear, dissatisfaction, loss and insecurity than for superficial reasons of gain, benefit, advantage, growth and opportunity.
• You are paid for your questions, not your answers.
• Listening is rewarded when you seek to understand before being understood, when you know that prospects love to buy and hate to be sold, when you understand that it is more important to be interested than it is to be interesting, and when you realize that prospects don’t care how much you know until you demonstrate first how much you care.
• Ironically, the more you tell the less you sell and the more you set yourself up for unfair comparison and objections. The less you tell the more you are forced to listen. Unlike selling, listening more effectively promotes trust.
• 5% of success in sales is based on closing. 95% of success is based on opening. Closing is a non-event. Opening is all about listening and questioning.
• Prospects, like patients in therapy, rarely bring the real problems to the sales table. So you have to accept nothing at face value.
• Salespeople who aren’t emotionally attached to the outcome tend to be very good listeners.

You’re not in the business you think you are. Once you realize that, selling becomes much more strategic. For example; a software salesperson believes they are in the technology business and they position their product accordingly. They sell all the bells and whistles. However, their product should be positioned solely as a business solution. Their focus should be on operations, efficiency, profit, cost reduction and an overall business solution. Technology and software should be the furthest thing from their dialogue with their prospect.

So without anything to push, tout and drum, they’re left with intense listening about the ins and outs of their prospect’s business.

The combination of active listening and thoughtful probing negates the traditional reliance salespeople have on enthusiastic, eager, upbeat and can-do selling. How is it possible to probe deeply and listen intently in a diagnostic way for problems and pains without taking a sensitive, caring, introspective and pensive posture? Enthusiastic selling is the antithesis of selling by listening.

If prospects were really proficient in thoroughly understanding what their problems were, then listening wouldn’t be as critical a skill set in selling. But in today’s hyper changing, fast-paced and time-constraint driven environment, prospects are juggling so many balls at once, they don’t have the luxury of focus that they did in the past. Hence, they rely on and value more than ever salespeople who can bring fresh insight and perspective to their business and their problems. Nothing accomplishes this strategy more effectively than a strategic thinker and listener.

To set yourself up to ask questions and really listen you are going to have to have enough rapport and trust from your prospect to feel comfortable enough sharing valuable and sensitive information. This is best accomplished with the initial shared agenda. Its purpose is to extend trust to get trust. It is an initial gesture of good faith and goodwill to demonstrate to your prospect that you are here to learn and understand and not sell. The following is an example of an initial shared agenda:

“(Name), thanks for inviting me in. By the way, how are you on time? I’m not sure if we can help you specifically or if what we have is right for you. Before we get started, did you have an agenda or any questions you wanted to ask me? If it would be alright, I’d like to ask you some questions to learn more about your business and your issues. You’ll probably have some questions to ask me to learn about our capabilities and about our company. And at the end of the meeting, let’s decide if we are a good fit or not, and if you decide we aren’t, please feel comfortable in telling me so and I’ll get out of your hair. In preparing for this meeting, I accessed your website and learned a little about your company and its market position. As you look to the future, what are your critical success factors in building your business and what if any are some of you concerns in getting there?”

Once you have your prospect comfortable answering questions, you’ll need to switch gears and go from broad-scope questions to specific questions that are geared to isolate, define and access the actionability of your prospect’s problems. These pain funnel questions are designed to build trust and rapport along with qualifying and disqualifying. The following are samples of the type of questions you can use to set yourself up to be in a significant listening position:

• “How long has it been a problem?”
• “Who else knows and cares about it?”
• “How long have you been thinking about this issue?”
• “What have you done to fix it?”
• “When you went to your existing supplier to share your frustrations, what kind of reassurance did they give you that it would be resolved?”
• “What is your vested interest in getting this issue resolved? How does it impact you personally?”
• “Is the problem important enough where you have determined how much it is costing you?”
• “In relation to other initiatives, how does your problem prioritize in importance?”

The bottom line to active listening and probing is to reject outright the notion the you sell your solutions, and adopt the posture that you mirror what they’ve shared.