Back in 2012, I wrote the article – Are you really listening or just waiting to speak – which resonates with salespeople and leaders and gets them thinking about how well, or not, they really listen to others and how comfortable they are with silence and creating the space for others – in this case, their clients – to be heard and understood.
As we say in the Selling Better Manifesto, Selling is about creating a fair exchange of value between buyer and seller; it’s about mutual prosperity. For that to happen, we need to really listen.
Selling is about forging healthy viable relationships, recognising these relationships do not remain static and unchanged. They are designed to be stress-tested, to grow and change; they thrive on trust, openness and honesty, and result in new ideas and shared common ground on which to build better outcomes together.
To forge healthy viable relationships we must move beyond transacting, pushing our own agenda and waiting for our turn to speak, and instead create the conditions –the space- to really listen to our customers first, then collaborate on how to move forward in ways that benefit both the buyer and seller.
This means listening beyond the words, our automatic biases, and the second guessing of others. It means listening to other people’s intentions, situations, body language, demeanour, what’s not being said, and the context and meaning underpinning how they think, feel, and act.
Profitable and sustainable business is about creating a fair exchange of value between parties. In order for this to happen, we must create space for others to be heard and understood on every level so we can find ways to work together, or not. Both parties must feel safe that they can think and feel at a deeper level and not be worried about some game or tactic being used to manipulate the other.
This deep level of listening involves high levels of trust; however, ironically, to create the level of trustworthiness to have these types of deep conversations in the first place involves highly effective listening capabilities.
This is why we’re doing a lot of work with leaders, sales and service teams training and coaching them in how to develop their listening skills beyond the mere asking of questions or paraphrasing of responses, because, while over 55% of our day is spent listening, only 2% of us have been trained in how to listen – effectively and at the deeper levels required to build highly effective and trustworthy personal and business relationships.
Remember everybody lives by selling something.
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