There is a huge difference between truly listening to and digesting what your prospect is telling you and just waiting for your turn to speak!
I truly believe that we as professional sales execs make this mistake more times than we care to admit. And quite frankly, it’s very easy to fall into this trap in light of how we are trained to deal with our prospects’ objections as they relate to our competition.
For example, if we are in the closing stages of a long sales campaign to an existing client that we have done business with for several years, we have a preconceived notion of how things will play out. So in advance of the sales call we role-play in our mind how we will respond to various questions or objections that our client might bring up. And since we have a significant history with the client, we are quite confident that we are totally prepared to respond effectively. If the client objects to our price, we have a prepared response. If the client has a concern about our support, we have a response prepared, and if he pushes back because we don’t offer a particular feature that our competitor has, we are also prepared with a logical retort to handle the objection.
As we drive to the client’s office for this important closing meeting, we review our responses to these potential objections in our mind over and over. Since we have done business with this client and have a solid relationship, it is natural to be confident that we will win the deal, especially since we are totally prepared to handle any potential objections that might come up.
During the meeting, your prospect mentions that the monthly lease is higher than your primary competitor’s. He continues to elaborate on other details associated with the higher monthly payment, but your brain locks in on the price objection and immediately begins working on your eloquent response.
Essentially you have stopped listening at this point. It may not be intentional, but our brains are challenged to multi-process — at least mine is. We are now in the mode of what I refer to as waiting to speak. We are mentally reviewing our perfect response that we have diligently prepared. Immediately after our client stops talking we launch into our prepared response. In fact, if we are rude, we interrupt our client in mid-sentence. Since we stopped listening, we missed a significant portion of the client’s concern. In this example, perhaps the monthly lease was a bit higher, but it was due to the lease term and not the payment. Or maybe they had more term left on the current lease than they were aware of. The point is, once you stopped listening and went into waiting to speak mode you potentially missed a large amount of information. And as we all know, the more valuable information we gather, the better chance we have of winning the deal.
By the way, this waiting to speak mode, in my opinion, is something we all struggle with in social situations as well. Many times we are so focused on getting our point across that we fail to listen to the details the other person is telling us.
Typically our sales training prepares us to articulate the value of our product or service. It also educates us on how we stack up against the competition as well as how to handle objections and address prospects’ concerns. From this training, in conjunction with our own background and experience, we formulate our own sales strategies and presentations. However, if we find ourselves in the mode of waiting to speak we should do our best to LISTEN ( see previous article) to precisely what our prospects are telling us before we launch into one of our typical responses.
The only thing worse is a sales person delivering a PowerPoint presentation and asking the audience to hold all questions until the end. The sales rep is convinced that if he gets through his entire slide deck without any questions, the prospect will jump up and ask where the contract is so he can sign it immediately.
Believe it or not, this stuff still happens!
Universal Sales Truth #3
Do more listening than talking Proverbs 18:13
Answering before listening Is both stupid and rude
