Increase Sales By Listening In Key
In sales, it’s better to be interested than interesting. This is true for all conversation and relationships, but in this post I’m going to focus on sales.
The best method for being interested is listening. You listen by asking questions, and by NOT forcing unsolicited opinions. I first came to grips with this concept through Richard Himmer.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about this more deeply. There is a way of asking questions that can feel robotic to the other person. The happens when we forget the principle of being interested, and instead simply pound out a question asking method. And it’s impossible to be interested if we’re more focused on our method than we are on the other person.
I’ve had conversations with people who want to listen to me, too. They want the conversation to go back and forth. But they don’t know how to make that happen. Maybe it’s because they don’t feel confident as a conversationalist. My job is to help them gain that confidence.
If I start singing along to a song that I enjoy, it feels like I’m a good singer. It feels like I know all the words. And feels like I’m hitting everything on key. But I probably couldn’t reproduce that if you took away the song and I had to sing by myself.
Sometimes the best way to be interested in someone is to give them just enough (but not too much) about you. Make them feel like they are interesting. Make them feel like they ask good questions. Give them just enough structure so that they feel like they know the words and are hitting everything on key.
This is hard and requires a lot of practice. Because it’s applying the principle of being interested beyond spoken words. You need to also read their non-verbal communication and bring that into the conversation.
What do you think?
Joseph