22
Do You Listen to Me?
As soon as you start pitching your ears turn off and so does your buyer.
—Jeb Blount
Think about a time when you were trying to explain something to another person. Recall the moment, right in the middle of your story, that the other person held up a hand and said, “Stop! Could you just get to the point?” Consider how that made you feel—hurt, unappreciated, angry, enraged? Left with the feeling that the other person did not understand you?
How about the time you were trying to have a conversation with friends or family members and they kept looking down at their phones at incoming text messages or social media alerts. Remember how it made you want to rip the phones from their hands and smash them on the floor!
Have you ever been excited to tell your significant other about your day? You talked, but the person wasn't paying attention because he or she was watching TV, playing a video game, or typing away on a computer laptop?
“You're not even listening to me!” you complained in disgust. “I don't know why I even bother!” As your significant other replied with a “Huh?” while barely averting attention from the screen, did you feel more emotionally connected or in love with him or her in that moment?
You know the truth and so do I. When people don't listen to you, it makes you feel small, unappreciated, and unimportant. It damages emotional connections. Failure to listen is a direct route to a destroyed relationship.
Why People Don't Listen
Nothing builds emotional connections faster and more permanently than listening. You know this because every book on sales, in one form or another, admonishes that listening is the key to real success. You know this because a listening module is contained in every sales training.
You know this because you are human. You know this because people are not listening to you, and it hurts.
If there is any good news, it's that you are not alone. It turns out that feeling this way is the human condition. It seems nobody is listening to anybody. Everyone is frustrated. We all want to be heard. We all scream out, “Will somebody just listen to me?!”
The number-one complaint stakeholders have about sellers is that sellers don't listen. And the stakeholders are right. Salespeople don't listen. It's epidemic.
Despite all that we have been taught and all that we know, listening is still the weakest link in human interaction. The reason we don't listen is listening requires empathy, cognitive focus, and effort to manage our self-centered, disruptive emotions. It's a challenge to:
- Tune out the distracting noise from the world around you.
- Be patient and wait for your turn to talk.
- Avoid looking down at your phone screen.
- Turn off your thoughts and pay attention to another person.
- Remain interested when you find the other person boring.
- Bite your tongue when you feel the urge to interrupt so you can tell your story or prove how much you know.
The fact is, you spend 95 percent of your time thinking and talking about yourself—including your product or service. The other 5 percent of your time you're dealing with things, including mouthy stakeholders, who are keeping you from thinking about you.
Whether due to boredom or to the inability to remove distractions, it's just so much easier to turn your attention to your own selfish needs and wants.
Telling your story makes you feel important. Listening to another person's story does not. The disruptive emotional need for significance is the primary reason why salespeople talk and do not listen.
Four Principles of Effective Sales Conversations
Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote that “good communication is as stimulating as black coffee and just as hard to sleep after.” Great sales conversations should be engaging, thought provoking, and memorable.
There are four principles to effective and engaging sales conversations. This four-part framework allows you to control the conversation and move toward your outcome, while building deeper emotional connections with stakeholders.
- People respond in kind.
- People communicate in stories.
- Questions control the conversation flow.
- Listening builds deep emotional connections.
People Respond in Kind
Look around you. Do you notice how few people are smiling? Now try this experiment. When they look up at you, smile at them. I've found that, nine times out of 10, they'll smile right back. For a moment you have an instant connection.
As you've learned, when you are relaxed, confident, and patient, you'll transfer those emotions to your stakeholders, they'll respond in kind, and you'll gain control of the conversation.
People Communicate in Stories
In conversations, people don't spit out bullet-pointed facts. Instead, they use stories. You tell stories, I tell stories, and your stakeholders tell stories. It's human. It's how we communicate. We tell stories to be understood. We want to be understood. We crave to be understood. And, when we are onstage telling our story, we feel important.
When you listen attentively, you encourage stakeholders to expand on and tell more stories. The clues that lead to their real problems and emotions are buried inside these stories.
But consider your emotional state when another person is telling you their story. Your mind drifts. You feel the urge to jump in and add your two cents. You don't feel important.
Stakeholders communicate in stories to be understood, but the truth is that you prefer that they communicate in bullet points. You want to speed them up and get them to the point, so you can get back to telling your own story.
Resist this disruptive emotion. The stakeholder wants to talk, sometimes at you. Don't get in the way. Inside the stakeholder's story is the information you need to build the case for how you, and only you, can solve their unique problem.
Questions Control the Conversation Flow
Most salespeople believe that to be in control of a conversation they must be doing all the talking. I assure you it is the other way around. It is the person asking the questions who has control.
When you are asking questions, you control the shape of the conversation and move it in any direction you please. This helps you keep the conversation on track and focused on your call objective, while making your stakeholder feel listened to and important.
Remember this: stakeholders communicate in stories, but they don't care which story they are telling as long as they're getting to tell their story.
Listening Builds Deep Emotional Connections
The more you listen, the more connected your stakeholder feels to you. As this connection deepens, their trust in you grows and emotional walls crumble. As the walls come down, you'll get far below the surface and gain access to your stakeholder's real problems.
It is here that ultra-high performers (UHPs) derive their competitive edge and begin to build a wide separation from the pack. Stakeholders never complain about salespeople who listen.
The Fine Art of Listening
The discipline to control your disruptive emotions and listen requires you to have faith that when you are listening you are in control and by listening you connect and win others over. The secret to influence is not what you say; it's what you hear.
There is absolutely nothing more important in the sales process than listening. Nothing! Listening is the key to connecting, making stakeholders feel important, discovery, bridging, getting to next steps, and closing. Ultra-high performance depends on it, and most salespeople suck at it.
You've developed the habit of being self-absorbed over the course of a lifetime, and it is the hardest habit you will ever break. To turn everything in your head off, become genuinely interested in another person, give them your undivided attention, and hear them—learning to really listen—requires a fundamental mind-set shift.
Begin with empathy. Consider how you feel when people are not listening to you, and remember that pain. Step into your stakeholders' shoes and consider how they feel when you dominate the conversation or demonstrate through your actions that you're not listening.
Focus on what you really want. A closed deal, higher income, respect, deeper relationships, high performance, deeper information, a next step, an advocate or coach, a friend—focus on and leverage what you really want as motivation to regulate your disruptive emotions of boredom, attention control, and the need for significance. Believe and have faith that when you listen you build stronger emotional connections that lead to the outcomes you seek.
Practice attention control. Focusing completely on the person in front of you and being genuinely interested is an intentional behavior. Make a deliberate choice to remove all other distractions, including your own self-centered thoughts and impulse to interrupt, and give the stakeholder your complete attention.
Be intentional. Before each meeting, prepare yourself mentally to listen. During the meeting, tell yourself to shut up and listen—make it a conscious, intentional choice. Be aware of your urge to blurt out your idea when you feel the impulse to make a point, and stop yourself. After each conversation, evaluate how well you paid attention, acknowledge your shortcomings, and adjust.
Active Listening
Active listening is essentially a set of behaviors that provide tangible proof that you are listening. These behaviors include eye contact, acknowledging with verbal feedback and body language, summarizing and restating what you have heard, and utilizing pauses and silence before speaking.
Active listening rewards your stakeholder for talking and keeps them talking. This is important because the more they talk, the more they'll reveal about their situation.
Summarizing, restating, and asking relevant follow-up questions that build on the conversation validate that you are paying attention. Nodding your head, smiling in approval, and leaning forward when you find something they say particularly interesting demonstrate that you are engaged. Supporting phrases like “Yes, I see,” “That makes sense,” and “That's exciting” encourage them to open up and reveal more.
One sure way to kill a conversation is to blurt out your next question or statement or, worse, talk over a stakeholder before they have finished speaking. It becomes transparent that you are not listening with the intent to understand, but rather to formulate the next thing you plan to say.
When you feel that the other person has finished speaking, pause and count to three. This affords you time to fully digest what you have heard, before responding. More important, it leaves room for others to finish speaking and prevents you from cutting them off if they have not. You'll often find that this moment of silence triggers stakeholders to reveal important information they were holding back.
Active listening requires that you be present in the conversation. Turn the sound off on devices so that beeps, dings, and buzzes don't cause you to look away.
The moment you make the mistake of looking away, not only will you lose concentration, but you'll also offend the other person. This is especially acute on video calls because the stakeholder has no insight into your surrounding environment and will usually assume the worst—that you are not interested in them.
When meeting face-to-face, maintain eye contact. When on the phone, keep your eyes off papers and screens so as to avoid the burning desire to multitask. Controlling your eyes keeps you there physically, even when you are on the phone. As go your eyes, so goes your attention.
Listen Deeply
People communicate with far more than words. To truly hear another person, you must listen with all your senses—eyes, ears, and intuition. Opening your senses to become aware of the entire message affords you the opportunity to analyze the emotional nuances of the conversation.
As you listen, observe your stakeholder's body language and facial expression. You don't need to be an expert in body language to see obvious clues. You only need to be observant and tune in to the emotional nuances.
Pay attention to the tone, timbre, and pace of the stakeholder's voice. Focus on the meaning behind the words they are using. Be alert for emotional cues, verbal and nonverbal. Since people tend to communicate in stories, listen deeply to pick up unsaid feelings and emotions.
When the stakeholder expresses emotion through facial expressions, body language, tone, or words, you gain insight into what is important to them. As you perceive emotional importance, ask follow-up questions to test your hunch, like “That sounds pretty important. How are you dealing with it?”
This opens the door for relevant follow-up questions that encourage your stakeholder to expound on the issues that are most important to them—a key to triggering the self-disclosure loop and getting below their emotional surface.
Activating the Self-Disclosure Loop
Harvard researchers Jason Mitchell and Diana Tamir discovered that humans get a neurochemical buzz from self-disclosure.1
In this fascinating study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,2 subjects were given the opportunity to talk or brag about themselves while their brain activity was being observed on high-powered 3-D magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans.
As the subjects began talking about themselves, even about mundane information, the area of the brain associated with pleasurable feeling and reward like good food, sex, and cocaine became activated. Each time the subject would self-disclose, this area of the brain would light up like a Christmas tree.
The subjects were getting a shot of dopamine (brain crack) for revealing something about themselves. And thus a loop was formed. Each reveal of personal information, each brag, each opinion was rewarded with another shot of dopamine, thus perpetuating more self-disclosure. This is how conversations can quickly escalate from small talk to too much information (TMI).
You've witnessed this dopamine triggered self-disclosure loop at parties or family reunions or even when talking to a stranger at a bar. The other person tells you a little bit about themselves and you listen. Then they tell a little bit more and a little bit more, until suddenly they cross into the TMI zone and you're left wondering why in the world they told you something so personal or revealing.
To them, the self-reveal felt great. Even though they knew, at the conscious level, that they should not say the things they told you, they couldn't help it. It was the brain crack talking.
For sales professionals, understanding and leveraging this reward loop can prove a boon for discovery. Staying out of the way and allowing your stakeholders to talk triggers self-disclosure, flips the buyer script, and causes them to spill the beans.
Chris Keiley recently closed a big deal after a stakeholder hit him with a hard objection about his high prices.
“I gave no reaction to her pushback and instead asked her about her current vendor. She went on for a half hour about the problems she was having with them and their poor service. In the past, I would have tried to interject or overcome the objection, but after learning about brain crack, I just let her talk. When she finished revealing every reason why she should be doing business with me, she asked why she should pay more with my company. I simply responded that we don't treat our customers that way. She signed the contract without any more argument.”
This simple neurochemical reward system allows you to leave linear interrogative questioning behind. Instead of dozens of questions, you ask just a few questions and still get a huge amount of information. Kurt Long, CEO of FairWarning, says his goal is to “see how much information I can extract with the fewest questions.”
- Begin with an easy opening question that your stakeholder will enjoy answering.
- Reward the stakeholder for talking through active listening and sincere interest.
- Avoid interrupting, rushing, or talking over the stakeholder.
- Pause three to five seconds before speaking. Allow the stakeholder to fill in the silence. (If you start talking you'll break the loop.)
- Once the loop is running and the stakeholder begins to self-disclose, center your follow-up questions on those self-disclosures (deep listening), and you'll gain complete control of the conversation, move past the buyer script, and uncover the stakeholder's real pain, needs, issues, and problems.
Activating the self-disclosure loop relies on the dual process discovery methodology (we'll discuss this in the next chapter). Your questions must be in the moment, conversational, relevant, built upon the conversation, and centered on emotion.