 Listen
Up - from Selling
Power Magazine - August 2001
According to a UCLA study, people spend 9 percent
of their communication time on writing, 6 percent reading,
30 percent talking and 45 percent listening. “Every
study says listening is what we spend most of our time doing,” notes
Lyman K. Steil, president of St. Paul, Minnesota-based
Communication Development Inc. and author of Effective Listening:
Key to Your Success (McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 1983).
The importance of listening can hardly be exaggerated.
It's our single most important communication tool, says consultant
Andrea Nierenberg of The Nierenberg Group in New York. “If
you just listen, people will tell you everything,” she
says. And what does that mean for salespeople? “I always
tell my people to let the customers keep talking, because
they'll tell you more information than you need to know to
make the sale,” advises Mark Courtney, director of
sales and marketing at the Wyndham Palm Springs Hotel in
Palm Springs, CA.
Frank Ciraci, a marketing executive with The Snowball Effect
Company LLC in Los Angeles, which provides an Internet-based
relationship marketing service, recently saw the value of
listening firsthand. Some of his colleagues made a pitch
to casino executives in Las Vegas. “The first meeting
went horribly,” Ciraci admits. “We didn't know
the needs of the hotel. There's no substitute for knowing
the industry.
”
After that first sales presentation, the sales team regrouped
and considered what the casino executive had said. That's
when they began to understand the industry's needs. “At
the next meeting, we were able to say, ‘I understand
you need this and this,' and ‘Did you ever consider.‘ The
meeting went fantastically,” he says. And when they
pitched a third casino, the meeting went even better. Although
the first casino executive basically had the same needs as
the other two, he couldn't see the need for Ciraci's company's
service. The sales team hadn't listened and didn't know
enough to respond to his objections.
Why Don't We Listen?
If you're a sales manager, you may be the reason your salespeople
aren't listening. Surprised? According to Antoni Louw, president
of Louws Management, a communications training company in
Tucson, Arizona, listening must come from the top.
Louw recently consulted with the customer service group of
a large telecommunications company that sells wireless telephone
service. He found that the salespeople relied heavily on
scripts and asked callers very few questions. When they did,
the questions focused on the sale — how many minutes
a month customers would use the phone, or whether or not
they expected to use the phone for more than a year, for
example. They didn't ask anything about the customers' needs
or wants. When Louw mentioned this to the sales manager,
the reply was, “Customers don't know what they want,
which is why we don't ask them a lot of questions.” Louw
recalls, “One reason the reps weren't listening was
that the guy in charge of the whole thing wasn't listening.”
Contact Louws about this article.
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