What Can Sellers Learn About Listening From A Detective?

I can’t remember the last time I asked for desired outcomes from a sales training class when “better listening skills” wasn’t near the top of their wish list.

Interestingly enough I also can’t remember the last time I asked a classroom full of sales trainees if they were already good listeners when at least 75% of the hands in the room didn’t go up.

Our self-assessment often exceeds our abilities when it comes to being a good listener. Few people I talk to have actually ever attended a formal class on listening. I was one of the fortunate few who did as I began my post college career as an undercover investigator.

Working undercover to infiltrate criminal enterprises and develop intelligence doesn’t lend itself well to taking notes! That is a sure fire recipe for failure where the price of failure can be rather extreme. You need to listen well and remember well to be effective.

 Here are a few things I learned and continue to teach:

1. The biggest barrier to effective listening is attention span: The most well known former record holder of the Guinness Book of Records for speaking speed was John Moschitta Jr. You can still watch his famous FedEx commercials on YouTube. John could talk at an amazing rate of 586 words for minute and you could actually understand what he was saying. The problem? Most people speak at an average of 125 to 150 words a minute. It is only human for our minds to wander when the capacity to listen vastly outpaces the rate at which most of us communicate. A great tactic I learned in listening class to help stay tuned in is to try and anticipate what the next word is going to be from person who is speaking. Another similar technique is to repeat back in your head exactly what the person is saying while they are speaking. The latter was my personal favorite as an undercover operative as it was somewhat similar to the intense focus you have translating what someone is saying in a language which is not your native tongue.
2. The second biggest barrier to effective listening is the tendency to think of what you are going to say next: I have seen considerable research that indicates that most of us spend approximately 40% of our listening time thinking of what we are going to say next. While this is a perfectly normal phenomenon it is pretty obvious how that can be a major disadvantage for either an undercover investigator OR a sales professional. One of the best exercises I learned to overcome that problem came from the world of Improv Acting. The exercise involves carrying on a conversation with another person where you are required to wait a minimum of 5 seconds after the person stops taking before you can speak. While incredibly uncomfortable at first this begins to train you to use the time AFTER the other person stops speaking to think up your response. Silence can also be an incredibly powerful tool when selling because often times the other person is not actually done talking, they were just pausing to think up what THEY were going to say next.
3. The single most important tool in listening better and connecting with other people is getting good at asking questions: As an undercover detective, as in selling, it is important to connect with other people and be interesting. If people don’t like and trust you it is unlikely they will share much information with you either. Here is an immutable law for undercover success OR sales success: The most effective and consistent way to be INTERESTING is to be INTERESTED in the other person. We all love to talk about what is important to us. Developing a sincere curiosity in what others have to say and asking them many questions about that interest is one of the most powerful tools in the arsenal of a professional seller.

Being a better listener is a skill that can be developed and improved upon. Practice makes perfect and listening techniques such as Active Listening (the act of restating what the other person is saying) can also be powerful tools for mastering the art of listening.