Listen to This
“It is the province of knowledge to talk, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes
Persuading powerfully has many ingredients — being flexible, really understanding criteria and core values, and one of the most important persuasion activities is being a good listener. Some people are naturals at this, others need practice, and plenty of it. If your goal is to become the best persuader you can be, sharpening your listening skills is mandatory.
First, what listening is NOT: it isn’t formulating what you’re going to say to respond to someone as they’re talking. When you’re an active listener, verbal and non-verbal communication are essential — eye contact, nodding, smiling, small interjections. You are hearing, remembering, empathizing and opening yourself up to what the person is saying. Being an excellent listener also requires that you follow up what they stated with pertinent question.
An example of the wisdom to listen is when we elicit criteria from our prospects and clients. When we ask the magic question, ‘what will having X do for you?’ we’re preparing ourselves to listen. We need to know what having X will do for them because we want to give them X. If we’re daydreaming or off in our thoughts pondering what we want from this person then we’ll never truly comprehend how our product or service equals their X.
When we get their criteria, it’s mandatory we paraphrase what they’ve conveyed. ‘So what you’re saying is. . . ‘ ‘In other words, you’re looking to have . . .’ or ‘It sounds to me as if you’re looking for . . .’ These are all excellent ways to show our prospects and clients that we’re very interested in what they have just revealed and getting even more information from them for persuasion purposes.
When you take it to a higher level, you can respond to your prospect with the auditory, kinesthetic or visual representational system which they’re using. If they’re very visual, you can say to them, “I see that having a new home will brighten your future and give you a greater vision of the life you’ve already imaged for yourself”.
An often underutilized tool is silence. So many folks are incredibly uncomfortable with silence that they’ll do everything in their power to fill it up. Let them. Don’t be afraid to stay silent while they fill up the air with more of what they want and need as that’ll better enable you to marry their desires with your products and services.
Another very important aspect of listening is knowing how to respond with empathy. We all have wildly different experiences in life and sometimes it’s hard to know how to relate to other people, but keep in mind, that despite our differences, we’re all fundamentally driven by the same things. . . the core drives. We’ve all experienced loss, joy, frustration, enthusiasm. . . and on some level, we can connect with another’s experience.
Listening is something that you can learn through practice and persistence.
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