9/6/2023-Listening

Growing your ability to listen better in a customer pitch meeting is not based on how well you know your talk tracks, it’s based on the quality of the questions you ask.

Forget what the experts say…deep down, you know the key to selling is to talk and keep talking, right?

(Is your attention got?)

If listening is the key to selling, why aren’t most sellers better at it? (Talkin’ about the other sellers…not you, of course.)

Partly, listening inadequacies are because you get a lot of product training and not as much on what questions to ask your customers. The better the questions you ask, the higher your listening quality.

Otherwise, better listening comes from raising your awareness and deciding to be better at it.

Improve your listening by raising your question game: create three high-quality questions you must ask at your pitch meetings today.

Make them open-ended and strategic so you can learn insights and actionable info.

Once you have developed your questions, send them to your client with your meeting agenda proclaiming these questions will focus your meeting.

After you ask each question in the meeting, LISTEN. Listen to the point where you want to interrupt, but don’t. Whatever you do, don’t interrupt the buyer, even if they repeat themselves.

Most sellers have been taught a pitch and are then instructed to give the same pitch to each client…literally.

Do you think your prospects will notice that they’re getting a one-size-fits-all pitch?

In your customer meetings, there will always be a need for you to pitch an idea, a concept, a solution, or a feature of your offering, but be wary of spending too much time in performance mode versus conversation mode. The goal is to listen to the customer, and it’s hard to hear them when you’re pitching.

Some might call that consultative selling, and they’d be accurate. And yes, of course, it takes discipline to spend more time in asking and conversation mode, but you can do it. You’re smart, you’re successful. It takes acknowledgment of what a customer-centric sales call should look like. Mostly, that means THEY talk more than you!

You’ll know you’re successful when you start hearing better information and more insights that help you sculpt good solutions for the customer. And, of course, you’ll start to see trust grow, too…who knows, perhaps your phone will start ringing more.

Author, speaker, and thinker Simon Sinek offers an interesting line of thinking about listening in this 6-minute video.

Simon suggests the classic play-back method of repeating what someone says is a technique that might not get the job done these days; the key to active listening is making your audience feel heard.

Simon’s thoughts are compelling enough to re-think how you might try to get those two cartilage globs on the sides of your head focused and working to their total capacity.