Sales Tip of the Week - Two Ears & One Mouth - Get The Picture?

Provided by ContractorSelling.com

The average sales person or tech spends about 60% of their call doing all the talking, 30% of the call being silent and only 10% actually listening to want customers want. See if you can improve your listening skills by following some of the strategies below:

Maintain eye contact with the customer. Stop fiddling with tools, notebooks and work orders and by all means shut up and listen. Eye contact is one of the secrets that keep you focused on the job at hand and keeps the customer involved in the importance of solving problems and in generating solutions.

Focus on content, not delivery. Stop looking around the house for something nice to say about their belongings. Focus on the content of what the customer is saying not the way they look or act. Did you leave the house when the customer said they want to think it over? If so, you weren’t focusing on content. After all, they didn’t say they wanted to think about it without you right?

Avoid emotional involvement. When you are too emotionally involved in listening, you tend to hear what you want to hear–not what is actually being said. Leave your problems at home and at work behind and focus on the situation instead. Also leave your mother in the truck and your beliefs about money and how much someone will spend as well. Don’t profile people or “mind read” them. Try to remain objective and open-minded.

Avoid distractions. Don’t let your “monkey mind” wander by what is playing on TV in the background or be distracted by the customer’s demeanor. Also don’t allow people like your wife, kids or others to interrupt you in the middle of your call. A new phenomenon is the text message and the interruption that this brings. Leave the phone in the truck.

Treat listening as a challenging mental task. Listening to a customer is not a passive act–at least it shouldn’t be. You need to concentrate on what is said so that you can process the information to arrive and the best diagnosis, solution and options that will be a fit for your customer.

Stay active by asking mental questions. Active listening keeps you on your toes. Here are some questions you can ask yourself as you listen. What key point is the customer making? How does this fit with what I know from previous calls I have done? Why is the customer saying this right now? Who else has been to this call and failed? How can I stop from repeating the same mistake?

Use the gap between the rate of speech and your rate of thought. You can think faster than the customer can talk. That’s one reason your mind may tend to wander. All the above suggestions will help you keep your mind occupied and focused on what being said. You can actually begin to anticipate what the customer is going to say. Be careful at that point to keep listening completely as opposed to prejudging what point they are trying to make. Your mind has the capacity to listen, think, write and reflect at the same time, but it does take practice.