What are you hearing?

Submitted by Mitch Seigel on Tue, 7/6/2011

As I’ve reminded many people before, we have two eyes and two ears and only one mouth. We should be taking in information and listening to others about 80% of the time.

Whether you are an outside salesperson or sell to those coming into your business, the onus is on you to listen to what the client has to say first, before passing judgment on what to sell them. How often do you find yourself thinking about the next question to ask a customer before they have finished answering the previous question? This is a common error and should be avoided to serve the customer in the best possible way.

Listening to the answer a customer gives to a question is also important because it may lead you to a secondary question. This secondary question can often give you actual direction to what to sell the customer. For example, what if you ask the customer, “why are you shopping in our furniture and appliance store?,” and they answer that they just bought a new house. If you move on to a completely different topic and don’t ask more about the rooms I the house, you may never discover that they are in your store to buy a new television monitor to fit on the huge wall in the new great room.

Discovery should be your main motive when questioning and listening to your customers. The more you discover, the more you can make sense of what you offer in a selling proposition matches what they need. And in fact, sometimes there is no match and a sale will not occur.

If you know your products and services, you should be quite confident in determining what questions to ask your customers. It is always a good idea to write them down ahead of time and practice answering them over and over and over again. Remember; be flexible to move off of your scripted questions to find out the real information needed to make the sale.

What are your challenges when it comes to listening? I look forward to hearing your comments.

Until next time …