When I first started selling radio I remember my managers talking about hiring people who could talk. Today, when I assist in hiring, I look for people who can listen. Good listening is a skill. It can be learned, and it needs to be practiced.

Instead of spending our time with prospects and clients talking about our stations, we need to spend the time asking questions and LISTENING to our clients as they teach us about their businesses. This may sound easy, but it isn't.

Good listening takes effort. In today's over-saturated world, we spend a lot of time engaging in selective listening: we filter out the noise around us. But in so doing, we can fall victim to hearing only what we want to hear. Social media's algorithms help us with that by feeding us information that matches our predetermined "interests" or "ideas". This does not train us to be good listeners or to listen with open minds.

As we become better listeners, one of the steps is responsive listening. This means showing the other person that we are listening by maintaining good eye contact, nodding, using such phrases as "Tell me more" or "That's interesting."

The key skill used in fact finding and pain finding meetings is empathetic listening. In this form of listening, you feed back the words and ideas of the other person. You use phrases such as "Let me see if I understand what you just said" or "In other words, you mean....". You are expressing interest in their ideas and seeking to clarify what they are really telling you.

Make sure that you are REALLY listening and not thinking about what YOU will say next. A few moments of silence before responding is not a bad thing.

Here are ten keys to developing effective listening:

1. Find areas of interest
2. Judge content, not delivery
3. Listen for ideas and the main points
4. Keep your own opinions to yourself
5. Be flexible
6. Resist distractions
7. Work at listening
8. Exercise your mind
9. Keep your mind open to other ideas
10. Understand that thought is faster than speech.

Add this to your listening vocabulary:

"So you feel (how you interpret their feelings) because...(and you attempt to determine their reason for feeling that way.)

Powerful listening skills will increase your sales. After all, we have ONE mouth and TWO ears for a reason!

Happy Selling!

"Pat has written a sales book that is not only for all times, it is especially good for THESE times-times of disruption, times of change. The final chapters of her book are no less grounded in practicality and real-world experience, but they offer invaluable insights into, as one of her chapters would have it, 'doing business in an AI world.' Buy the book. Make the commitment. Thank me later."

            Jay Mitchell

Editor

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