Are your listening skills costing you or making you money?

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Are your listening skills costing you or making you money?

September 29, 2010 in Communication, Sales Skills

Who is really listening? … Genuinely, sincerely and honestly listening? I’m noticing a lot more telling and a lot less listening lately. You only have to watch the ABC program ‘Q&A’ to see the number of politicians who have great trouble listening – to anything except themselves. They interrupt others giving answers to questions that were never asked. No wonder we are a bit jaded and cynical.

If we reflect on our own approach to communication I suspect many of us would shudder if others described us in a similar fashion to those politicians. I am sure it is not how we would like to be remembered.

So this then begs the following questions: How many of us are effective at listening? How long does it take us before we start interrupting another person? How quickly are we formulating our thoughts, thinking about what to say, before the other person has finished speaking? How often do we interrupt the person to give our own opinions thinking what we have to say it more important? Why is practicing effective listening so tiring yet so profitable (beneficial and critical in developing and sustaining good relationships, personal and professional)?

Poor listening creates numerous problems everyday – interpreting messages or instructions incorrectly, missing details in orders, wrong solutions being offered, misunderstandings, etc. Poor listening creates unnecessary hostilities, resentment, mistrust, bad impressions and poor relationships.

For instance, one research study examined different parameters of emergency medicinal residents taking a medical history of patients. The study concluded that only 20% of patients completed their presenting complaint without interruption. In other words, 80% of the patients were interrupted during their initial presenting complaint. The average time to interruption was only 12 seconds!

In sales, listening is one of our most critical skills and without it we are simply ineffective. It has been shown that engaging in effective listening habits can improve workplace performance significantly.

Here are a few important facts about listening (reference Jan Hargrave, Listening Skills in Business):

The average person speaks at a rate of 100 to 200 words per minute. An average listener, however, can adequately process 400 words per minute.
Studies of communication have routinely found that nearly everyone listens more than they talk, reads more than they write, and spends a lot more time receiving messages than sending them.
Most employees spend at least 60% of their work time involved in listening.
Reports from the USA show that senior managers in major corporations are likely to spend up to 80% of their working time in meetings, discussions, face-to-face conversations or telephone conversations.
While listening consumes about half of all communication time, research indicates that most people only listen with 25% of their attention thus creating many listening mistakes with significant effects on productivity, profitability and overall performance.
Hearing is a physical perception; listening is a mental activity. It requires concentration, cooperation and an open mind.
It is estimated that 75% of all communication is non-verbal so we need not just listen with our ears we can listen with our eyes and feelings, and hear beyond the words i.e. posture, facial expressions, tone of voice, eye contact, etc.

We cannot underestimate the importance of listening as a vital skill to enhance relationships of all kinds, enhance our careers and grow the top and bottom lines of our businesses. Listening enables us to gain important information and be more effective in interpreting others’ messages, feelings, needs, fears, priorities, goals and desires. Listening allows us to gather data to make sound decisions so we can respond appropriately for the benefit of all.

So are you a teller or a listener?

How many of us are really effective at listening? Could working on improving our listening skills actually make us more sales, and have more productive relationships with our staff, customers, suppliers, etc.? I suggest that yes it can.

I therefore challenge us to take a 28 Day Listening Challenge and focus on our active listening skills for the next 28 days and see what happens when we pay real attention to what is being said and act wisely in accord. I look forward to hearing how you go.

If you are not convinced, remember these words by Epictetus, an ancient Greek philosopher, and you are guaranteed to improve your listening skills: “Nature gave us one tongue and two ears so we could hear twice as much as we speak.”

Remember everybody lives by selling something.

Author: Sue Barrett, www.barrett.com.au

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What’s the difference between a member, a client and a customer?

July 22, 2010 in Attitudes & Behaviours, Communication, Customer Service, Ethics & Values, Sales Culture, Sales Relationships, Sales Skills, Strategy

What’s in a name? Well, there seems to be some confusion in the market place around the terminology used to describe those people who pay us money for goods, services, experiences, donations, etc.

Different industries can have different terms for the consumers of their products and/or services. We see terms such as customer, client, patient, guest, patron, member, subscriber, donor, etc. used to describe a person who buys our products or services and intends to use them directly. In short, these terms are referring to the same person – the ‘end user’. However, not everyone ‘consumes’ our products or services or is the intended ‘end user’. Some people or businesses buy our products or services to ‘on sell’ them to another party, often the final end user, but not always.

Many industries might a have a chain of buyers and only one will be the end user. For instance, if we follow the chain from the manufacturer who sells via a wholesaler (partner or client) who then sells to a retailer (client or customer) who then sells to the end user (customer or consumer), we can have several terms to distinguish who’s who.

If this is your situation, it does help to define who is who by having specific terms such as ‘client’, ‘member’, ‘customer’ or ‘consumer’ so we can keep track of our actions and key messages as each of them may want something different from you, and as sales people we need to know who we are working with. For instance, you may use ‘client’ for the retailer and ‘consumer’ for the end user to keep roles and communication clear. Marketing and advertising agencies use the term ’client’ for their direct customers since marketers also have to refer to the consumers of the client’s products.

So where does ‘member’ feature?

Some businesses, often retailers, use ‘member’ to distinguish between those who buy regularly from them compared to those who do not. They want to set up memberships so as to attract and retain regular users of their products/services and reward them with greater benefits or discounts so they keep coming back. It’s a way of building up your database to build a tribe of followers or a community of users or supporters which, if done correctly, can make future sales that much easier to attain. Retailers often have membership cards and reward programs for regular purchasers of their products or services. There are usually benefits and special privileges to being a ‘member’ but essentially a member is a ‘customer’, ‘end user’ or ‘consumer’ of your business. This means you can have customers and members in the same business.

When having ‘members’ can be a problem for sales growth

To avoid any challenges, you need to make sure that before you embark on a ‘membership’ program there are very clear definitions and actions in place that distinguish membership from customers. However, do not make the mistake of thinking once a person is a ‘member’ that you do not have to sell.

We are seeing a trend in some businesses who claim to be there for their ‘members’ or ‘member associations’ dissociating themselves from the function of ‘selling’ when their members are customers.

Because these people choose to be ‘members’ of these businesses there is an expectation of being kept informed of the latest trends, best buys or ‘right’ options for them, or why would you bother being a member. You expect the membership team to keep in touch with you and to help you make good ‘buying’ choices and decisions. You trust them to offer products and services that meet your needs. After all, they should know your current preferences and buying patterns. Members expect to deal with people who are skilful in client centric consultative sales practices even if they do not know to call it that.

However, when speaking to some of these membership businesses we find a deep reluctance to acknowledge and admit that the skills they want their membership teams to be competent in, such as prospecting and client centric consultative sales communication practices, are indeed selling skills.

By denying this practical reality, member organisations can end up developing teams who are reactive, passive and reluctant to engage in proactive, problem solving, solution based interactions with members. The number of membership based businesses that swear that being a member and a customer are mutually exclusive, are fooling themselves and are doing a disservice to themselves and their members. By telling their people “we are not sales people, we do not use the word selling, we have members” creates cultural and competency issues.

I am happy for people to call their ‘end users’ members, patients, guests, donors, patrons, subscribers, customers or clients as long as they recognise that serving the end user of buyers of your products and services properly means employing ethical, consultative selling skills and processes if you mean to exchange something of value i.e. money for your products or services.

Remember everybody lives by selling something.

Author: Sue Barrett, www.barrett.com.au

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We want more than a script

July 13, 2010 in Attitudes & Behaviours, Communication, Customer Service, Prospecting, Sales Relationships, Sales Skills, Sales Tips, Sales Training

Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of sales people around the world use sales scripts. Used properly, sales scripts act as scaffolding or bridgework to earn us the right to have a meaningful discussion with our prospecting customers, members, donors or subscribers. The sales script is a well constructed set of guidelines that support us when we prospect.

Good sales scripts:

are purposeful – have a clear reason why you are calling someone;
use language the customer understands;
are designed for the benefit of the listener with it always being “the prospects choice” to accept or reject what they hear;
are brief and allow for questions and conversations;
aim to achieve a result – an appointment, donation, purchase, feedback, etc;
are planned not canned –they are flexible, allowing the sales person to adapt to the different needs or queries of the prospect whilst maintaining the integrity of the call’s purpose;
leave the prospect feeling valued and informed, even if they choose not to proceed with you in this instance; and,
are pleasant, respectful and engaging.

However, too many organisations push sales scripting too far creating word-for-word scripts that end up being stilted and clumsy at best and one-sided and ineffectual at worst. We had an experience recently with a telecommunications firm whose telephone sales and service people seemed unable to deviate from a scripted response as the responses they gave us had nothing to do with our issue. The impression this gave us was that our issue wasn’t even heard let alone acted upon – it didn’t fit their script. The number of times we had to request information to check that our matter would be dealt with made the whole experience cumbersome, time consuming and very frustrating. We ended up doing all the work, while the telephone sales and service person simply read from a script, which, as it turns out, could not account for our matter in its design.

Sales scripts are not meant to be regurgitated word for word with no deviation, nor are they meant to be a one-sided affair. This type of approach is called ‘canned’ scripting. You would think that in this day and age we would have ditched these ‘canned scripts’ but they still happen.

The Cluetrain Manifesto (a resulting force that rose out of the discontentment people experience with businesses and how they fail to communicate with people) really nails it when it says:

“Learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about ‘listening to customers’. They will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on their behalf. While many such people already work for companies today, most companies ignore their ability to deliver genuine knowledge, opting instead to crank out sterile happy talk that insults the intelligence of markets literally too smart to buy it.”

Building on this and taking the canned script one step further, some companies and political parties have even ditched the live person on the other end of the phone and opted for a recording instead. And this is supposed to engage us? This is free-to-air television advertising or junk mail in disguise. At least with television we can choose what we watch and we can put a ‘no junk mail’ sign on our letter box but getting ‘canned’ advertising over the phone takes the biscuit in my opinion. Yes there is the ‘do not call’ register which you can sign up to, however resorting to ‘recorded messages’ is lazy and only serves to create more angst in the already heated area of telemarketing.

If done properly, telephone sales is a very effective way of getting in contact with legitimate prospects. But when scripting removes the ability to genuinely listen and respond to a customer, we all suffer.

If you want to create positive and memorable experiences for your customers, members, donors or subscribers then seek to engage with them in a meaningful way. Don’t force your sales people to be rooted to the spot and limited by a one-size-fits all script. Trust your team to engage with people in meaningful ways by giving them the guidelines and tools they need to communicate effectively with the wide variety of people they encounter on a daily basis. The autonomy this gives your people puts back interest and challenge in the task of making effective prospecting calls and in the process might make the customers, members, donors or subscribers’ experience that much better.

Remember everybody lives by selling something.

Author: Sue Barrett, www.barrett.com.au

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Collaboration – The New Competition

July 8, 2010 in Communication, Customer Service, Performance Management, Sales Leadership, Sales Management, Sales Relationships, Sales Skills, Success, Teamwork

The New Competition was voted by you as the number 7 Sales Trend for 2010. Over the coming years, we will see collaboration become the new competition. Markets around the world are crying out for collaboration as innovation and differentiation become scarce in a sea of commoditised products and services.

Sales people who see themselves as collaborators, both internally (colleagues, departments) and externally (customers, competitors), will prosper more than ever during 2010 and beyond.

A large 5 year long research study conducted by B. Rosenbaum, Business Horizons, entitled Seven Emerging Sales Competencies and published in Jan/Feb 2001 revealed what makes highly successful sales people. His research, among other key findings, showed that the most highly successful sales people are indeed collaborators. In his research of over 1,000 B2B sales people across 5 years he found that top performers:

collaborated with colleagues and did not allow competitiveness to get in the way of good business, and often assisted their colleagues in achieving their best by sharing ideas, information and resources;
orchestrated internal resources so as to benefit the company, its people, and the customers and their people;
invested time building collaborative, customer focused relationships inside their organisation;
created an alignment between the customers’ and suppliers’ strategic objectives;
looked to further the interests of their customers’ firms as well as their own;
expanded the customer’s understanding of what a business relationship can be;
built a flexible relationship that is responsive to marketplace changes;
creatively drew on the full resources of the firm or business;
introduced customers to other suppliers and potentially valuable support resources; and,
invested time building collaborative, customer focused relationships inside their organisation.

These findings are not new as you can see. However these qualities are still seen, if they are seen at all, as a novelty by most senior managers which is a major risk moving forward in such changing times. Rosenbaum’s research revealed that, sadly, the vast majority of sales managers were completely unaware that these and other distinguishing qualities were what made their high performing sales people highly effective and successful. What he observed is that these sales superstars where acting and performing this way despite management. They knew what they needed to do to get the results. It’s such a pity that their managers did not.

As I wrote recently, many sales teams are still held hostage by old school sales management practices and outdated mindsets that encourage internal competition, league tables and the like. Too many sales leaders are still stuck in the 1980’s with ‘greed is good’ and ‘carrot and stick’ philosophies which do not work in the long term and only serve to hold us back in a 21st century world. Most sales rewards are still self serving, endorsing selfishness which is completely at odds with the new world of collaboration and our natural state of being.

Daniel Pink’s new book Drive focuses a big spotlight on this very issue – what motivates us. He reports that what business thinks works by way of motivation is not what the science shows or the vast majority of people want.

Besides the commoditisation of products and services, Rosenbaum’s research, Daniel Pink’s findings, and other corroborating research, the advent of social media and the multiple levels of engagement we can now have with our clients, suppliers and key stakeholders means that we need to work collaboratively with each other. And this collaboration needs to take place across marketing, sales, service, supply, production and finance if we are going to create the ideas and solutions needed for our success in the 21st century.

Those 21st century enlightened salespeople will be the conductors or connectors of viable and valuable relationships across many levels. They will be open-minded, humble and astute, and they will see patterns of connection and synergy in many places. They will recognise that we are all interconnected and without kindness and cooperation we cannot exist. They will identify competency and harness talent to achieve effective solutions. They will know that they are working towards something larger than themselves. And they will know that their success is a shared success they will celebrate collectively.

So we need to get with the program and rethink our approach to sales motivation, sales mindset, sales skills, sales rewards and teamwork if we are to remain viable in this world. Collaboration calls for a team effort. Sales teams where everyone is pitted against each other to achieve ‘top dog’ status will be replaced by a ‘lead team’ approach. Companies that want to bring in new business and grow and develop existing customers will rely on the united hands of many – rather than just one. Successful sales people of 2010 and beyond will leverage the power of collaboration over competition because they understand that relationships never work if they are forced and manipulated, and that the sum is greater than its individual parts. Synergy and collaboration will prevail.

Remember everybody lives by selling something.

Author: Sue Barrett, www.barrett.com.au

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Noise Reduction part 1

May 5, 2010 in Communication, Sales Research, Social Media, Social Sales

Noise Reduction was voted by you as the number 5 Sales Trend for 2010. About 20 years ago I was told that information was doubling every 5 years; 5 years ago it was every 18 months; 1 year ago it was every 9 minutes, so who knows how fast information is doubling now?

Many business leaders, sales people and many more are reporting information overload. Selecting what to take on board and what to leave behind will be critical for sales and business success in 2010 and beyond. It will also be critical for our own wellbeing.

There is so much to read and process, and so little time to do it well. Many people report feeling that their brains are ‘bursting’ as a result of so much information and wonder how they can process, log, link and manage the information they are exposed to and then use it wisely and purposefully. According to Alvaro Fernandez from SharpBrains over 1,000,000 new books are published every year and more than 100,000,000 scientific papers are released, this coupled with the billions of websites at our googletips.

With all this good information on tap, I am increasingly finding myself feeling incredibly frustrated with the amount of rubbish information I have to wade through every day as well. There seems to be so much ‘noise’ out there competing with the good data.

Not only do businesses have to keep on top of what is the latest market trend, product, or competitor strategy, we are also dealing with the merging of personal information with business information. It appears email remains a major source of information overload, as people struggle to keep up with the rate of incoming messages especially, the filtering out of unsolicited messages such as spam, and ever growing tsunami of personal information keeping us distracted and often disturbed. There is even a syndrome to describe people who give out too much information about themselves. It’s called TMI syndrome (too much information) and it’s coming at us with unprecedented speed via Facebook, Twitter, and especially email.

With this increase in noise we need to assess our Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). SNR is a measure used in science and engineering to quantify how much a signal has been corrupted by noise. In less technical terms, signal-to-noise ratio compares the level of a desired signal (such as music) to the level of background noise. The higher the ratio, the less obtrusive the background noise is. “Signal-to-noise ratio” is sometimes used informally to refer to the ratio of useful information to false or irrelevant data in a conversation or exchange. For example, in online discussion forums and other online communities, off-topic and spam are regarded as “noise” that interferes with the “signal” of appropriate discussion. For instance, a recent Microsoft security report has said that 97% of all email sent over the Internet is spam and MessageLabs said 81% of all emails sent are unwanted, either way that’s a lot of noise.

The general causes of information overload include:

A rapidly increasing rate of new information being produced
The ease of duplication and transmission of data across the Internet
An increase in the available channels of incoming information (e.g. telephone, email, instant messaging, RSS, etc.)
Large amounts of historical information to dig through
Contradictions and inaccuracies in available information
A low signal-to-noise ratio
Lack of a method for comparing and processing different kinds of information
The pieces of information are unrelated or do not have any overall structure to reveal their relationships

At no other time in history have we had access to so much information however, it poses some interesting questions:

How do we verify what is fact and what is not?
What should we be paying attention to?
What is useful to us, our customers, our businesses and our communities?
How should we process, log, link and manage information to make it work for us?

To cope with this increase in noise some are trying to shut it out while many others are distracted by simply trying to keep on top of it, which is keeping them from doing other important activities. Either way, many are reporting feelings of anxiety at being overwhelmed by and unable to process so much information.

In Noise Reduction part 2, I will explore some strategies we can adopt to help us reduce the ‘noise’. The key will be finding reputable online sites, blogs, references and publications that provide access to information that is backed by evidence and research and is free from sensationalism. 2010 will be about filtering information through your core vision, intention and strategy.

So be prepared to question assumptions. This will help you to make decisions about what to take on board and what to leave behind. Remember, too much information and indecision will paralyse.

Remember everybody lives by selling something.

Author: Sue Barrett, www.barrett.com.au

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