Listening Is Key to Creating Wants | Listening Skills Training | Customer Service Skills

Almost every book on selling has a chapter on asking questions. Marketing and sales trainers encourage you to ask, “Open-ended questions.” In many cases, these books and trainers miss the main point: to encourage your client to tell you what’s on her mind. You do not benefit from the question, but from the answer.

The “R” Word

I believe listening is suspending one’s own judgments to really hear what someone else is saying. Listening is 10 times more important than talking.

Great Listening = Great Relationships

In his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Steven Covey writes, “If I were to summarize the single most important principle in the field of interpersonal relationships, listening is the key.” Listening is vital to building trusting relationships. Trusting relationships are fundamental to marketing your firm’s services. Of the four ways we communicate, listening skills are rarely taught in formal education. In colleges and CPE programs, you will find many courses on reading, writing, and speaking, but few on listening.

Good listening is the most powerful communication device to build trust with other people. When you listen and understand, your client responds by naming you his “most trusted business adviser.” Covey explains five levels of listening: ignoring, pretending, selective, attentive, and empathic. Ignoring and pretending will ruin relationships. Selective listeners miss key points. The highest form, empathic listening, is a way to understand emotions and words. I want to help you deal with attentive listening, a higher level of listening to which we can all aspire.

Conclusion

Even great sellers have had difficulty learning to listen. One of the top rainmakers in the country, Terry Orr, partner with Belew Averitt, LLP in Dallas, said, “I had been working with clients for years and suddenly it dawned on me, I needed to learn how to listen better. To help clients with their deepest problems requires my understanding first. When I understand completely, only then can I be a true adviser.”