4/3/2025-Simple listening hacks

Listening is an acquired skill, and you can start to get better at it by remembering one of the golden rules in sales: buyers want to be heard.

Your customer meetings present the biggest listening challenge: your juices flow wildly, and you’re constantly calculating the best time to remind them of your value prop.

Unfortunately, the data coming through those funky-looking bulbs on your head gets stonewalled by those clogged five-lane highways in your brain. (Competition for your attention is fierce!)

One solution is antithetical to what you’ve been taught for years…stop pitching.

Converse, instead.

Because good listening is the gateway to good selling, you must keep working at it.

Try any of these tips…and commit to them once you’ve found the right ones that work for you:

1. Record keywords and bullets as notes. No longhand.

2. Bring a peer to every meeting and assign them the note-taking and listening job.

3. Use the 75%/25% framework during your customer interactions: listen 75% of the time and talk 25% of the time.

And the best is last…

4. Ask better questions. Prepare them ahead of time.

The noise of the day competes with our ability to listen. Those five-lane highways from our ears to our brains create the same congestion you’ll find in mid-town Manhattan on a Friday afternoon.

What goes into your ears competes with many other inputs, and we’re just not built to shift gears quickly. Negotiations expert Chris Voss says, “We can process only about seven pieces of information in our conscious mind at any moment. In other words, we are easily overwhelmed.”

The TOP 10% are those who understand how to avoid performance mode and get into listening mode when meeting with customers. Performance mode is delivering a 34-slide deck from beginning to end. Maybe breathing along the way, maybe not. Just because your marketing team built the presentation for you and your peers doesn’t mean you must deliver it linearly. Unless you’re presenting to scores of buyers in a formal, assembly-hall-type setting, ignore the pull toward performance mode and get yourself into conversation mode. Only when you’re in conversation mode can you start to show off your impressive listening skills.

Conversation mode, a.k.a. consultative selling, requires listening, not pitching. (Not performing.) The main path towards a successful shift from performance mode to conversation mode is to do your homework and develop strategic questions that can open the mouths and thoughts of your customers. Listening is an acquired skill, and you can start to get better at it by remembering one of the golden rules in sales: buyers want to be heard.

Nobody…nowhere…at any time said it was easy to improve listening skills. So go easy on yourself!

There’s nothing better than humor to help deal with the hard stuff. So let those zany kids from Big Bang Theory help you laugh a bit about yourself in this scene.