It’s what goes on in between that counts
One of the most common sayings in sales is that God gave you two ears and one mouth, so you should use them in that proportion. That’s true, but it does not go far enough.
We hear with our ears, but we listen with our brains. There is a big difference between hearing and listening. It’s like the difference between seeing and reading. One is passive, and goes on without having to think; the other is active.
Your ears can only pick up the sounds of language, not its physical expressions. Your brain simultaneously processes and synthesizes signals from the eyes and the ears, picking up “micro-expressions” and other cues, often much faster than conscious thought.
Your ears can only hear what is being said; they faithfully pass on the signal to the brain. Hearing what is not said only takes place in the brain itself.
It may seem strange that something we’ve done naturally for our entire lives could stand improvement, but when you analyze what’s actually happening as your brain is listening, you realize that there is a lot of complicated processing going on. Let’s take a look at what happens when someone is listening. There is a model called SIESR[1], which stands for:
Sensing: We receive the incoming signals, including expressions, body language and tone of voice.
Interpreting: We figure out the sender’s intent.
Evaluating: We evaluate what it means to us, in this particular context.
Storing: We keep incoming information in working memory so that we can respond properly.
Responding: We do or say something in response.
Out of the five steps above, the first involves the ears, and the last involves the mouth. But the real meat of the sandwich is the three steps in the middle. That’s where the quality and effectiveness of the dialogue takes place.
Interpreting: Have you accurately interpreted what the other person said? Is their meaning clear? Have they told you the entire truth and nothing but? Do their other signals match the words that are coming out of their mouths? What have they left out? Why did they say this and not that? Are we so focused on getting what we want to hear that we miss something important but unexpected?
Evaluating: Is this what we expected them to say? Does it fit with what we already know? If not, how does it change what we thought we knew? What’s the quality of their evidence? How do we know it’s true? If we don’t think it’s true, what are they missing or hiding? How does it fit with our intentions for the conversation?
Storing: Some variations of the model leave out this step, maybe because they take it for granted. But as we become more scatterbrained and attention-deficient, it becomes more and more important to reinforce this step. Are we getting everything they are saying? If they are going on for a while, have our minds wandered in the middle of their soliloquy? Are we taking effective notes?
Keep in mind that these mental operations are going on while the other person is speaking, which is only possible because our minds can process words about four times as fast as the other person can speak them. This means that we have plenty of bandwidth to run these operations while the other person is speaking. Unfortunately that can also be a big disadvantage, because or attention can flit in and out; what often happens is that we either let our minds wander to something else, or we think we know how they’re going to finish the sentence so we either sneak a quick peek at our email or we begin formulating our response. Anytime these things happen, it’s easy to lose the thread of the conversation, and can be difficult to get it back.
How to improve listening with your brain?
Prepare for the conversation. If it’s a sales call, of course you want to have a call plan. But even for personal conversations, you can review your notes or refresh your memory for previous conversations, and have an intent for the dialogue. Put away whatever was on your mind up to that point and remind yourself to listen actively.
Get physically involved. Sometimes the mind takes cues from what the body is doing. Face the other person squarely if you’re face to face. If it’s on the phone, make sure you’re not positioned with a screen in front of your face. Use following skills. While this is not “thinking”, it will keep your focus locked onto the conversation.
Use your faster thinking time to your advantage. If the person is talking at length, use the extra processing bandwidth to summarize and repeat the message. Use that time to monitor your own listening behavior. Focus fully on what they’re saying, not what your response is going to be—you will have plenty of time for that when they’re done.
[1] Lyman Steil, Larry L. Barker, and Kittie W. Watson, Effective Listening: Key to Your Success. In their book they call it the SIER model, but I believe the Storing component is just as important.
[1] Lyman Steil, Larry L. Barker, and Kittie W. Watson, Effective Listening: Key to Your Success. In their book they call it the SIER model, but I believe the Storing component is just as important.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to sell for a company that was widely recognized as having the best-quality products and the lowest prices?
A common lament among participants in my sales training classes is that their competitors are buying the business by offering lower prices. So when I ask them the question above, most immediately raise their hands.
That’s when I ask my follow-up question:
Why would they need you?
I love working with companies that have higher prices than their competition, for two reasons. The first is the simple fact that they would not need me if they sold on the basis of the lowest price.
If you’re a sales professional, they would not need you either.
I’m not against companies competing on low prices. It’s a perfectly valid business model that has lifted Walmart and Amazon to the top of their respective industries, so it must make sense. But how many true salespeople do either of those companies have?
What makes you valuable as a sales professional is the knowledge of what customers need and the skill to help them discover it. That’s hard work, and that’s where you earn your keep.
Comparing prices is easy; anyone can do it. Price is highly visible; costs are hard to see, and effects are almost invisible at the time the decision is made. Thinking ahead to the consequences of a purchasing decision is hard.
You justify your position as a sales professional by getting the customer to think deeper than price to total costs, and then even deeper to consequences. Your challenge is to help customers discover for themselves why the higher priced decision will result in better outcomes—in fact, often it will mean lower costs in the long run. It’s a challenge because the differences are not immediately obvious, nor is the value of those differences apparent without a lot of joint discovery and insight.
Saving money is easy; making money is hard. You justify your position as a sales professional by working together with the customer to show them how more money invested now will pay off in better outcomes and greater profits down the road.
Add in the fact that thinking is hard work, especially for busy people who have a lot of matters waiting for their decision, and it’s no wonder that buying on price is the default mode for so many buyers. You justify your position as a sales professional by doing the hard thinking to make it easier to make the right decision.
There is a lot of thinking that has to go on by both sides to discover the best long term solution, and if your customers don’t have the time or desire to do the hard stuff, two things may happen. One is that the thinking does not happen, and the easiest decision is made. Both sides leave money on the table. That leaves the only other option: you have to take responsibility for the hard stuff if you want the deal—you have to work hard to make it easy for the customer to make the right decision.
Selling is an honorable profession when practiced right, and professionalism is mainly about two things: client focus and specialized knowledge. As a professional, you have a dual client focus to the needs of your customers and your employers. When the customer insists on a lower price, the threat to your employer is obvious—but the threat to the customer’s interests is sometimes even greater but not obvious at all. You earn your true value as a professional when you do the hard stuff that meets the needs of both parties.
Here’s one final easy-hard comparison to think about: Win-lose outcomes are easy; win-win outcomes are hard. But the good news is that if you do the hard stuff to create win-win outcomes, you will continue to raise your value as a sales professional and that’s a win-win-win outcome!
We began this series with a description of what an ideal sales conversation looks and sounds like. Part 2 listed the 7 Barriers to the Ideal Sales Conversation. Today we focus on the prerequisites to reaching that ideal.
First, let’s recap: According to my definition, the ideal sales conversation is a:
genuine and productive dialogue between individuals who share a common purpose
In effect, it’s one in which two (or more) minds think together. That can only happen when both sides trust each other enough to open up, and are willing and able to learn from and to teach the other.
It’s primarily the job of the salesperson to ensure that the conditions are in place for trust to exist. For the first, here’s a quote that anyone in sales will recognize:
They don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
But caring is not enough to establish trust; good intentions are useless unless you can deliver. They also have to have confidence in your competence. So, the corollary to this is:
They don’t care how much you care until they know how much you know.
You need both—concern and competence—to achieve an ideal sales conversation. To put both those words into even plainer English, you have to care and to know.
Caring
I can’t say too much about this aspect without climbing up on my soap box and preaching, so let me just put it this way. Sales is a great career for making money, but the paradox is that the real money comes to those who don’t make it their number one concern. The best way to get what you want is to help clients and customers get what they want—and much more importantly—what they need.
You don’t get caring from reading a blog post; you either have it or you don’t, and customers can tell.
The practical reason for caring during the sales conversation is that it will put you in the outside-in frame of mind; it will make you curious and genuinely interested in what they have to say, and customers can tell that, too.
Knowing
Until trust is firmly established, information is like currency; you have to spend some to get some back. That’s how your initial knowledge will make the difference between an interrogation and a willing exchange of information and ideas. Knowledge of that customers want and need comes from business acumen and preparation.
Business acumen is a prerequisite because it’s the best way to open up a productive dialogue. It’s the best way to translate your product knowledge into insights about how to improve your customer’s business operations and then express those improvements in the language of increased revenues, lower costs, greater cash flow, and reduced risks.
Remember, you get sent to who you sound like, and without business acumen, you will be stuck at the influencer level. You can still have great sales dialogues at this level, but they will not be as productive as those with high-level decision makers.
Business acumen has to be supplemented with preparation, because the perception of value is highly personal, and every company and every situation is unique. It’s one thing to know in general that your solution may lower costs and improve cash flow; it’s on a different level entirely to know the specifics about your counterpart’s costs and cash flow.
Your depth of preparation will send a loud and clear message that you take it seriously; it is a clear signal about both your caring and your knowledge.
The best thing about caring and knowing is that they can be mutually reinforcing. The more you know about a customer, the more you care; the more you care, the more you want to know.
Probably not what you’re aiming for
The last post defined an ideal sales conversation as:
Genuine and productive dialogue between individuals who share a common purpose.
It’s probably embarrassingly clear that most sales conversations don’t quite reach that ideal. What are the barriers that prevent it?
Lack of preparation: You don’t know enough about the customer and their situation to open the conversation to a subject that they care about. Or you demonstrate that you haven’t done the work to earn the credibility to establish trust and intimacy.
History and preconceptions: The customer may have had a bad experience with you or your company, or may have preconceptions about you (planted by competitors, perhaps). You may be afraid to bring up potential negatives, but elephants in the room will make their presence felt if they’re not acknowledged and addressed early.
Excessive goal focus: This can manifest itself in two ways. If you focus too much on what success or failure will mean to you in this sales call, your eagerness or fear will leak through and taint the conversation. The second risk is being so focused on what you’re trying to achieve that you don’t pay enough attention to the person in front of you. One of the reasons for excessive goal focus is this next barrier:
Falling in love with your plan: Planning is a good thing, but don’t fall in love with your plan. No matter how logical it is, the customer always has a vote, and you need to use your judgment to know when to stick with the plan and when to follow the flow of the conversation. Along the same lines, you may have crafted some exquisite questions, and then be so focused on asking the questions that you miss signals—either they have already answered the question, or they’re telling you that they want to talk about something else.
Conscious competence: You know the techniques you’re supposed to use to ask the right questions, listen actively, and manage objections, but you still have to think about them. You haven’t used them so much that they become unconscious habits, a part of who you are. Sports psychologists tell us that athletes choke when they think too much. When they trust the techniques they’ve practiced, hard-wiring and habits carry them to success.
Impatience: Two vital ingredients of ideal sales conversations are trust and willingness to change, and both take time to develop. Pushing either one too fast can backfire on you. For example, we love to sell solutions, so we often try to cram them into the smallest opening that sounds like a problem. In doing so we may solve the wrong problem or scare off the customer who is not yet ready.
Pride, Enthusiasm and Passion: Wait—aren’t these all supposed to be good things? Why would they be barriers to an ideal sales conversation? They are good, but if they’re not held in check they can keep you from seeing things from the customer’s point of view. I’m reminded of Churchill’s observation that “A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.” Just remember, they’re not that into you or your product. If they ask what time it is don’t tell them the fascinating history of watchmaking.
If you remove these seven barriers, you’re well on your way to the ideal sales conversation. In the next post, we’ll examine the positive steps you can take to get the rest of the way.
