Learn to Sell with Your Ears

One of the key roles of a business owner is to be the chief salesperson for the business itself, and in many instances this role also includes being the chief salesperson to the largest and most important customers.

Some business owners are very competent in one or both of these sales roles, but for many who do not have sales or marketing backgrounds, and even some who do, the necessity for them to perform these roles can often be quite challenging, and they often find that the efforts that they do put in, deliver less than optimal results.

Regardless of their backgrounds, all business owners can improve their sales performance if they remember the old adage “God gave you two ears and only one mouth, use them in that proportion, if you wish to be successful”.

When you are in front of a prospective customer or client for the first time, how much air time do you give to them? If the ration is not at least 70% of the time you spend with them, you are more than likely talking yourself out of a lot of new business.

How often do you interrupt your prospective customer or client during an average first interaction? Any interruption is a bad mistake. Apart from being seen as rude behaviour, the chances are high that you will not discover a key piece of information, which could help you win the business.

If a prospective customer or client says something you disagree with strongly, are you able to hold off countering with an argument before they have fully expressed their views? If you can't, you will establish the climate for multiple objections to your offering, as well as perhaps missing a hot button or two that you could later push to win the business.

Do you constantly intersperse your presentations with personal stories? Whilst personalising your presentation and building rapport in the initial phase of the first meeting is good form, constant story telling throughout a presentation wastes time, and can easily divert the dialogue away from the business at hand.

Are you a great finisher of other people's sentences? If you are, you will frustrate your prospective customer or client who will see you as a rude, unlikeable person with whom they will not want to do business on a long term basis. You will also be more often wrong than right in your assumptions, as to what they were about to say.

Do you clearly convey to your prospective customer or client your impatience for them to finish speaking so that you can make your point? This is a deadly habit as your prospect knows you are not listening to anything they are saying to you while you are rehearsing in your mind your response to what they said at an earlier point in their dialogue.

Whilst not regularly acknowledged, your eyes are also a tool to enhance communication and you need to be careful that yours don’t bore into your prospective customer or clients eyes like laser beams on full and continuous power. It is easy to overdo eye contact, and this will create tension in the person being subjected to such scrutiny, and this tension will usually block effective communication.

If you improve your listening skills in each of the above areas you will remove a significant barrier between yourself and your potential customers or clients thereby allowing you to more easily establish constructive relationships, which in turn will lead to far more successful business outcomes.

How many of these common listening mistakes are you currently making by force of habit?

When did you last do any training to improve your listening skills?

If you were to remove these listening mistakes completely from your sales presentations, what effect would that have on your closing ratios for new business, and what would this mean in terms of additional revenue for your business?

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