CHAPTER 8
Empathic Listening

People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.

—Theodore Roosevelt

Are You a Good Listener?

Calvin Coolidge once said, “No one ever listened themselves out of a job.” No one ever listened themselves out of a sale, either. But there’s a lot more to listening than most people think, and it’s a lot harder to do than most people realize. This chapter is about getting people to really open up. Real emotional connections—the kind that can lead to change— are forged when people truly feel listened to. It’s something that doesn’t happen much in our society in general, much less in sales.

The biggest part of story tending is listening. In order to understand our buyers’ stories, in order to validate our buyers, in order to figure out what stories we should be sharing in return to move up the ladder together, we must first listen. But if we want to get our buyers’ whole stories, we have to do better than what generally passes for listening in our culture. Turn on the Sunday morning news programs and you’ll see pundits so eager to spout their views that they hardly seem to hear the other guests, much less listen to them. You can see the same thing, albeit on a less dramatic scale, every day, all around you—on the street, in meetings, at your dinner table, on sales calls, and so on.

Everyone wants the chance to tell his or her story, but it’s hard to find someone who will really listen. You probably know the feeling. You’re having a conversation, and the minute you say something interesting, the other person jumps in, or starts talking over you. Or worse, the other person isn’t paying attention to what you’re saying or obviously doesn’t care. Isn’t it great to talk to that rare person who seems sincerely curious about what you have to say? Who actually lets you talk?

Real listening (what we call “empathic listening”) involves support, encouragement, sincere curiosity, patience, and caring. It doesn’t come naturally, and it’s difficult to do, as it goes against many of our impulses as salespeople—to jump enthusiastically into a conversation on a call, to put our expertise on display, to get to the point, to “rescue” a buyer, and so on. But here’s the good news about listening. Even if you think you’re a terrible storyteller—okay, even if you are—you’ll still be better than 95 percent of the salespeople out there if you teach yourself to become a good listener. As an added bonus, you’ll likely improve your storytelling in the process. It’s a reciprocal relationship: the better listeners we become, the better storytellers we become, and vice versa.

Our goal in this chapter is to give you a new appreciation of the importance of listening and a model of how to do it well. But first, let’s look at some of the behaviors that prevent us—especially, in some cases, salespeople—from being good listeners. In order to overcome them, we must first be aware of them.

Listening Blocks

A listening block is a behavior that hinders effective communication by preventing one person from truly listening to another person. Such behaviors include rehearsing what you’re going to say next, judging the speaker or her statements, placating the speaker, sparring with the speaker, mind reading, daydreaming, advising the speaker, derailing the conversation, insisting on being right, and so on. Salespeople, by virtue of prevailing sales-training methods, are inclined to fall prey to a particular combination of these blocks, such as the following.

Relying Too Much on Our Ears

Which of your senses do you most closely associate with listening? Not surprisingly, when we ask this question in the workshop, almost everyone says “hearing.”

With our ears, we perceive tone of voice, inflection, and, of course, words. But what about the other 55 percent of human communication that comprises facial expressions, gestures, and body language? To “listen” to those forms of communication, we need our eyes. When it comes to listening, our eyes are at least as important as our ears, if not more so. When we rely too much on our ears, we’re getting less than half the story.

Dr. Mark Goulston, author of the bestselling book Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone, learned this lesson the hard way.^*

Mark Goulston’s Story: Listening into People’s Eyes

“You listen into people’s eyes,” Doc Barham told me.

I said: “What?”

“When you sit down with people, what you first notice is people’s eyes, and then you look and listen into them for their hurt, pain, fear, anger, and terror, and when you do, they share whatever it is with you. And then they exhale, feel relieved, and open themselves up to you. That is your secret sauce,” he explained.

Doc Barham is CEO of Xtraordinary Outcomes, a company that identifies what makes individuals, companies, and organizations extraordinary and, in doing so, helps them to come from that special “tipping point” place to become even better. He had been interviewing me about how I work with patients and seem to be able to get through to some of the toughest ones.

Like many “talents” or skills that people have, it was spawned out of a terrible experience that taught me it. I hadn’t made the connection until Doc identified the way that I listen.

Nearly 30 years ago, I had one of the most awful experiences in my career as a psychiatrist. I had been paged to go up to a patient’s room at UCLA Medical Center to “okay” the soft restraints the surgeons had placed on him plus the major tranquilizer they had then put into his IV. The patient, who I will call Mr. Jones, was a fifty-something patient with AIDS (just after it was identified as an illness), with a terrible infection, who had been placed on a respirator. He had been pulling out his IVs and then pulling at his respirator and was in a state of what the surgeons called psychotic agitation.

When I entered Mr. Jones’s room, he was lying with his arms and legs restrained. His eyes were as big as saucers and seemed to be screaming out to me. His eyes in fact grabbed hold of mine and I kept repeating, “What are you trying to tell me?” Because of the respirator, he couldn’t speak. All he could do was groan in agony. I put a pen in his right hand close to the restraint on that wrist and put a piece of paper near it so he could write. All he could do was scribble something that didn’t make any sense. I again repeated, “What is it?” And again he couldn’t communicate what it was.

I concluded that what the surgeons had said was true and that Mr. Jones was psychotic and needing the restraints and the tranquilizer. I told him: “Mr. Jones, you have been pulling your IVs out and pulling at your respirator tubing, and we needed to restrain you and have also given you a tranquilizer to help you calm down. When you calm down, we will take you off the restraints. I will keep checking in to see how you are doing. Do you have any questions?” All Mr. Jones could do was stare at me with his eyes wide open in terror, which were now beginning to show the slightest signs of being tranquilized.

I checked in with him and with his surgeons over the next couple of days, but he was mostly sleeping.

Two days later I received a page from his attending chief surgical resident who in a rather curt manner said to me: “Hey, Mr. Jones is up, alert, off the respirator, and commanded us to call you. So I think you should come and see him as soon as you are able.”

With trepidation, I went up to Mr. Jones’s room. When I arrived, he was seated up in his bed and, in a nonpsychotic but very determined way, grabbed onto my eyes with his, said, “Please sit down,” and with those eyes placed me in a chair.

His eyes never left mine, and I could not move mine away. Then in no uncertain terms and with an emphatic voice he said: “What I was trying to tell you was that a piece of the respirator tubing had broken off and was stuck in my throat. You do need to know that I will kill myself before I ever get into that situation again. Do you understand?”

My eyes winced and teared up as he revealed the answer to the mystery from my original visit. I wanted to look away but couldn’t. Instead I said, “I’m so sorry that I didn’t know that. And yes, I do understand that you will kill yourself before you have to go through something like that again.”

And that is when I began to “listen into people’s eyes.” I just didn’t know what to call it.

Our Mental Filters

The human brain filters information and quickly assigns labels for good reason: it’s a basic and highly evolved survival function. Our mental filters help us assess threats and avoid danger.

Imagine you’re in an unfamiliar city. It’s late at night and you’re walking back to your hotel when you consider taking a shortcut through a dark, empty, overgrown lot. But just as you start across the lot, you notice a couple of big guys in what look like hooded sweatshirts. They’re watching you from the far side of the lot, waiting there. Do you still take the shortcut? How long does it take you to make the decision?

Chances are, sensing danger, you’d quickly turn around and head the other way. It’s a situation where your mental filters kick in, not one where you need to gather more information and weigh the pros and cons. Our brains are designed to analyze situations and people in under one second, filtering information based on our knowledge and past experiences in order to assess threats, dangers, and risk. In this way, the brain’s filtering process serves as an alarm system and “first responder.”

The brain’s filtering mechanism does an excellent job of keeping us alive and safe, but it’s less helpful when it comes to listening. Let’s say you’re on a sales call, and the prospect is openly hostile to you. He refuses to shake your hand, keeping his arms crossed on his chest. “I don’t trust salespeople,” he says, scowling. “You’re all liars.”

Chances are, your brain will immediately label the guy a jerk, a grouch, someone you don’t want to work with. And chances are, you’ll write off the sale right then or, at the very least, have a much lower expectation of success. You might even return his hostility with your own.

But what if you learned that, prior to your meeting, the prospect had to take his mother to the hospital after she fell and broke her hip? Or what if you found out he’d hardly slept for three nights because his boss was breathing down his neck? Or that he got sold something that didn’t work by the last two salespeople he dealt with?

Assigning labels based on initial impressions can prevent us from getting a person’s whole story. In a dark, empty, overgrown lot, we don’t need the whole story, but when tending relationships, we do. We can’t prevent our brains from filtering, but we can be aware of and resist our instinct to quickly assign labels during selling situations.

Our Perfect Solutions

Imagine a seller who’s worried about keeping his job. He’s been under quota and under the gun for three quarters. Now he encounters a “suspect”—not yet even a prospect— who admits a big, juicy problem for which the embattled seller has the perfect solution. How long before the seller is fantasizing about this one deal changing his life? How long before he’s calculating his commission check? How long before he stops actually listening to the buyer and interrupts to say, “We’ve solved your problem dozens of times. What you need is our xyz solution.”

The excitement of a perfect match can cause sellers to “prematurely elaborate.” They stop listening and go to their solutions too early, putting too much pressure on the buyer and inadvertently causing tension. The more excitement for the solution, the less they listen.

It’s ironic, of course. The seller’s genuine enthusiasm to rescue the buyer prevents the seller from getting the buyer to really open up. And in many cases, the seller will be right. But being right is itself a listening block, putting the buyer and seller in opposition: if someone is right, then someone else must be wrong.

Mike’s Story: Premature Elaboration

During the SPIN project at Xerox Corporation, we charted the positive behaviors of our top sellers. We made a surprising observation. Neil Rackham, the project lead, presented his findings to our executives. On an easel, he drew a graph in which the y axis represented sales performance and the x axis represented time. Neil then drew a curve that started low and rose steadily over time, peaking at 18 months and then dropping sharply. He informed the executives that this line represented the group sales performance of Xerox sellers hired straight out of college over their first 18 months with the company.

“You can almost set your watch by it,” he said.

Why were Xerox salespeople crashing and burning at 18 months? Today, when we open this question up to participants in the workshop, we hear a lot of possible reasons: maybe Xerox cut the salespeople’s territory, maybe the salespeople were getting fewer leads from marketing, maybe the salespeople tended to get new managers or new sales plans after 18 months, and so on.

Neil arrived at an altogether different and less obvious conclusion. As he saw it, the real reason was behavioral. Over their first several months with Xerox, newly hired salespeople had the opportunity to learn every combination of Xerox product applicability to a range of problems. Neil theorized that salespeople mastered this information—that they became “expert” salespeople—at about 18 months.

At that point, a Xerox salesperson was able to anticipate a prospect’s problem based on very little information. As soon as the prospect got the first few words out of her mouth, the salesperson would stop listening and respond with some version of “I know exactly why you are having this problem and how we can solve it with our product xyz.” The seller would generally be correct, accurately assessing the problem, offering exactly what the prospect needed . . . and then the seller would lose the sale.

So why was this happening? Premature elaboration. The salespeople’s behavior was off-putting, causing buyers to resist instead of receive. The sellers demonstrated a combination of classic listening blocks: impatience, mind reading, being right, advising, knowing all the answers, and so on. They were doing everything except actually listening. They were telling buyers what the buyers needed before they had earned the right, before they’d built any trust.

It’s a mistake endemic to people who are selling as “experts”—solution sellers, sellers helping their customers solve problems with their products. As Neil put it, “When you’re selling, your expertise becomes your enemy.” Your expertise may make you “right,” but your buyer still needs time to move through his or her buy cycle, processing information along the way. It’s like when Dr. Phil asks, “Would you rather be right, or would you rather be in a relationship?”

Neil’s explanation also accounts for why Xerox salespeople tended to do better before they became experts. A seller in his third or fourth month with the company wasn’t yet able to fully anticipate a prospect’s needs based on cursory information. He had no clue if he could help the buyer. So instead of interrupting the buyer and telling him what the problem was and how he was going to solve it, the seller was inclined, out of necessity, to demonstrate sincere curiosity about the buyer’s problem. Instead of saying, “I have exactly the product to meet your needs,” the inexperienced seller was more likely to say, “I’m not sure if I can help you or not. Let me summarize what I know so far.” In this way, the seller received validation from the buyer that he “got” the buyer’s problem. Instead of cramming a solution down the buyer’s throat, the seller might then say, “I’m going to share your situation with our experts at the office and get back to you.”

And so the sellers without expertise made better sales calls than the impatient experts.

Quotas

Even in the go-go business climate of the 1990s, fewer than 50 percent of salespeople in the B2B information technology market made their quotas. It’s even worse today—much worse. If quotas are the benchmark, the vast majority of salespeople are failing at their jobs every year.

The result? They’re in a constant state of worry, feeling perpetually pressured and behind. By necessity, they go into sales calls with a clear agenda: “How can I get this person to share his pain so I can sell him something to cure it?” It’s a mind-set that isn’t at all conducive to listening.

A big part of the problem is the quota system itself, which, in a misguided attempt to “motivate” sellers, is often rigged against them. Based on our research with client sales managers, there simply aren’t enough opportunities in most businesses’ pipelines for all their salespeople to have a realistic shot at making their quotas. In fact, only about 17 percent of sellers are likely to do so.

Traditional Sales Tools

We all know the playbooks: question-based selling, SPIN, 9 Boxes, Solution Prompters, diagnostic questions. The list of consultative-based selling models goes on and on. But after more than three decades of such models, nothing much has changed in the sales industry.

We now believe the lack of emphasis placed on listening is a big reason these models failed. The initial research established that the most successful sellers were asking buyers specific questions, so we developed selling models based on questions: diagnose and prescribe. In our old sales-training workshops, we used to teach sellers to ask a sequence of questions in a particular order. The goal was to diagnose the buyer’s problem with a bias toward the seller’s product or solution.

In retrospect, it’s clear why these models weren’t effective for most sellers. For starters, look up question in a thesaurus. You’ll see synonyms such as debate, conflict, controversy, doubt, examination, inquisition, interrogation, wringer, argument, challenge, dispute, objection, and protest—not words that characterize collaborative two-way communication. Questions have become formulaic.

Furthermore, all of the models more or less resembled the Socratic method, named after the Greek philosopher Socrates, in which the basic form is “a series of questions formulated as tests of logic and fact intended to debate another person.” As Wikipedia.com defines it:

The Socratic method . . . is a form of inquiry and debate between individuals with opposing viewpoints [emphasis added] based on asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking and to illuminate ideas. It is a dialectical method, often involving an oppositional discussion in which the defense of one point of view is pitted against the defense of another. . . . The Socratic method is a negative method of hypothesis elimination, in that better hypotheses are found by steadily identifying and eliminating those that lead to contradictions.

Socratic questioning is often used by attorneys to get a witness to reveal a piece of information in court. The problem is that buyers should not be “tested” like witnesses on the witness stand.

The traditional models were based on the available research of the day and had the right intention—to get buyers to open up. But they were going about it all wrong, posing questions in a way guaranteed to trigger a buyer’s left-brain barriers, skepticism, and defense mechanisms. Buyers didn’t cooperate with prescriptive questioning models because, as with Socratic questioning, they put the two parties—seller and buyer—in competition with one another.

Dr. Daniel Siegel describes the interrogate-judge-fix model as a “pathway to disconnection.” The pathway to collaborative communication, by contrast, involves a very different model: explore-understand-join.

The problem with traditional models wasn’t the questions; it was how they were being used. In training sellers to ask a sequence of questions—a script, essentially—we were inadvertently encouraging them to already be thinking about the next question while the buyer was still answering the last one. That is, we were training them not to listen.

As the French author François de La Rochefoucauld once put it, “The reason why so few people are agreeable in conversation is that each is thinking more about what he intends to say than about what others are saying, and we never listen when we are eager to speak.”

Today, we have a different understanding of the relationship between listening and questioning: listening is not part of questioning; questioning is part of listening. We now understand that questions should be used with sincere curiosity, to sincerely understand the buyer’s story. They can’t be scripted ahead of time. Our questions should be about what we hear from our buyers.

Type A Personality

As a profession, sales tends to attract “Type A” personalities, people who are ambitious, aggressive, controlling, highly competitive, impatient, time-conscious, hard driving, and tightly wound. Salespeople with Type A personalities are often workaholics who multitask, push themselves with deadlines, and have no tolerance for delays and ambiguity. They tend to have an answer for everything. Above all, they always have an eye on the finish line and are in a hurry to get there.

Now picture yourself as a customer on a car lot, in a retail store, or in a B2B sales meeting. Would you want to open up and reveal yourself to someone like this? If you have a Type A personality yourself, perhaps such a seller would have a chance with you, but otherwise, it’s a recipe for failure, particularly when a Type A seller meets up with an introverted Type B buyer.

As sellers, we must be aware of our Type A tendencies and try to rein them in—try to be patient, relaxed, easygoing, and nurturing. Otherwise, our personalities will prevent us from doing the kind of listening that leads to real emotional connections and, ultimately, to successful selling.

Empathic Listening

While we can’t realistically hope to eliminate all of our listening blocks, just being aware of them opens us up to a world of real, empathic listening. We listen empathically not only to get information from buyers but also to connect with them and get them to open up to us, which is the first step toward moving away from resistance and allowing oneself to be influenced and agreeable to new ideas.

Instead of listening with the intent to find a “pain” or problem that we can address, we must listen with the intent to understand. This is empathic listening—engaging people in order to understand their ideas and feelings, their point of view, where they’re coming from. This is how we get someone’s whole story.

During a sales call, a buyer sizes up a seller, imagining what it would be like to work with that person: Who is this person? Is she only out for her own good, or does she have my interests in mind as well? Does she “get” me? If a buyer feels that a seller is trying to persuade him—that is, to push an agenda—the buyer will instinctively resist. By contrast, if a buyer feels cared about and tended to by the seller, the buyer will instinctively move toward cooperation.

The psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion says, “The purest form of listening is to listen without memory or desire.” When we listen with memory, we push an old agenda. When we listen with desire, we push a new agenda. When we listen without memory or desire, we let go of our agendas in a way that allows buyers to open up.

Dr. Edwin Shneidman, the noted suicidologist and thanatologist, makes a similar point: “When you listen for the pain, hurt, and fear in people, it is always there. And when people sense you doing that with no other motive than to alleviate all of those, they will lower their walls and reveal them to you.”

To listen without an agenda is hard, of course, because on some level, we always have one—to succeed at our jobs as salespeople. Ironically, we are most likely to advance our agendas during a sales call when we forget about them and focus on understanding the buyer instead.

Empathic listening involves much more than just hearing a buyer’s words. As we showed in Figure 7.1, the majority of human communication (93 percent) involves things other than spoken words (7 percent). To listen empathically, we need to be in tune with a buyer’s body language, because that’s how the buyer will primarily communicate his feelings and truest intentions. Are the buyer’s words in harmony with his tone of voice and nonverbal cues? Is the buyer trying to tell you something that he isn’t actually saying? Is the buyer telling you something that he doesn’t mean to reveal? Recall that our fastest and most evolved cognitive transmissions are from mind to body, not mind to mouth. Words can be misleading, but the body doesn’t lie. At the same time, body language doesn’t always give us the full story. If a buyer’s arms are crossed, he may be feeling guarded; then again, he may just be cold. To get a buyer’s full story, we must synthesize what we’re hearing and seeing and use whole-brain listening—emotional receptivity plus cognitive analysis. Whole-brain listening involves:

What are we listening to? What is said, how it’s said, what’s not said.

What are we listening with? Our ears and eyes, as well as our heads and hearts.

Any questions we ask a buyer should come not from a sales script but from what we learn through empathic listening; they should pertain not to a sales agenda but to a sincere curiosity about where the buyer is coming from. If we pay attention to the clues a buyer gives us, they will lead us to a deeper understanding of that person and his or her needs.

Ben’s Story: Follow the Bread Crumbs

Shortly after reading Dr. Mark Goulston’s story about listening into people’s eyes, I had the good fortune of meeting Dr. Daniel Siegel and listening to him speak to a group of parents at a conference in Los Angeles. In his bestselling book, Parenting from the Inside Out, Siegel discusses how to achieve a deeper level of understanding your children by learning to focus on more than just the surface level of their behavior.

That same night, I got a firsthand lesson from my daughter, Zoe, in how misleading the “surface level” can be. After my wife and I left Dr. Siegel’s talk, we took our two girls to the mall. As we were passing the store Forever 21, Zoe, who was 10 years old at the time, said she wanted to go in because there was a pair of pants she wanted.

“How much?” I said.

“Seventy dollars.”

“No way,” I said.

She turned to her mom and started negotiating with her instead. Recognizing that I was now irrelevant to the conversation, I said I’d meet them in front of the store in 20 minutes and went for a walk. When I got back 20 minutes later, Zoe had not one but two pairs of pants.

Fast-forward to three-thirty the following afternoon. I was working from my home office when I heard my wife and Zoe having an argument. It sounded more heated than usual, so I went into Zoe’s room to see what was going on. She was yelling at her mom.

“Why did you make me wear these pants?” she said. “I hate you. I hate these pants.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Zoe,” I said, “what are you talking about? No one made you wear these pants. You begged us to buy them.”

“No, I didn’t,” she said. “I hate you guys. You made me wear them.” At which point she took off the pants and threw them against the wall.

That did it. We really lit into her, calling her spoiled and ungrateful, reminding her again that she was the one who’d wanted the pants in the first place. Zoe was shouting back at us the whole time. Finally my wife had had enough. She stormed out of the room and slammed the door. I did the same, going the other way and slamming Zoe’s other door, and went back to my office, steaming. Zoe was still yelling at us from her room.

The first thing I saw when I got back to my office was Siegel’s book, Parenting from the Inside Out, right there on my desk. I was trying to calm down. “Okay,” I thought. “What was it Siegel said during his talk?”

He’d said that our children will tell us their stories, but not necessarily with their words. He encouraged us to “scratch beneath the surface” and listen with our hearts. He talked about being aware, looking for clues—often visual clues. I likened the idea of clues to the bread crumbs in the fairy tale Hansel and Gretel. “Follow the bread crumbs and they’ll lead you home.”

So I asked myself, could the pants alone really be the cause of so much hostility? Of course not. I started going over the visual clues from our argument, looking for a bread crumb. Then I took a deep breath, headed back to Zoe’s room, and knocked on her door.

“What do you want?” she yelled.

“Just to listen.” I came in and sat on her bed. “Zoe,” I said. “I noticed you threw your pants against the wall.”

She was still worked up. She ignored me and starting pulling papers from her backpack, crumpling them and throwing them into the trashcan.

“Did you have a test today?” I said, grasping for another clue.

“I hate school,” she said.

“Sounds like you had a frustrating day.”

“Frustrating?” She looked at me like I was an idiot.

“Worse than frustrating?” I said.

She stared down at the ball of crumpled paper in her fist. The anger drained out of her. Her eyes welled up.

“What happened?” I said.

That’s when she told me her story. In the cafeteria that day, she’d taken her lunch over to a table where her friends Jennifer and Sara were sitting.

“But when I sat down, Jennifer wouldn’t even look at me,” she said, barely able to get the words out. “She just turned to Sara and said, ‘Let’s sit at another table.’ Then they got up and moved.”

Seeing her so brokenhearted, my eyes welled up too. I felt so helpless.

“Come here,” I said, making room on the bed. She sat down and I put my arm around her shoulder. “I’m sorry, honey,” I said. “Kids can be so cruel. That totally sucks. I love you so much.” I didn’t know what else to say or do, so I just held her.

And then a surprising thing happened. Once Zoe calmed down, she got up, picked her pants up off the floor, and folded them neatly. Then she went into the kitchen where her mom was. I couldn’t hear what they said to each other, but I saw them embrace.

Back in my office, I remember feeling so relieved that she’d opened up to me, and it was all because I’d scratched beneath the surface and followed the bread crumbs. How lucky I was. If this would have happened only 24 hours earlier, before I had listened to Dr. Siegel’s talk, I would have never scratched beneath the surface and would have written her off as acting like a brat.

Feeling Felt and the Mirror Neuron Receptor Deficit

Before a buyer will allow herself to be influenced—before she will open up to a seller and begin the “buy-in” cycle— she must first “feel felt.” Empathic listening is the key to making someone feel felt.

In his book Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone, Dr. Mark Goulston describes what happens when someone doesn’t feel felt. He calls it the “mirror neuron receptor deficit (MNRD).” As discussed in Chapter 2, mirror neurons are brain cells that fire both when we act and when we observe the same action performed by another person. They essentially “mirror” the behavior of the other person, as though we ourselves were acting. When we watch another person laugh, for instance, the same neurons fire in our brain as when we ourselves laugh.

Neuroscientists have discovered that when a caregiver “tends” a child and makes that child feel felt, neurons are stimulated in the child, and the development of neuron mirroring occurs. Moreover, the circuitry of the brain is altered in such a way that new ideas can be formed with greater clarity. Conversely, when a caregiver is unresponsive or confusing, or when he or she lacks attunement with a child, that child experiences an unsettled emotional state.

Mirror neurons are a big part of what make emotions contagious. We have a biological need to be mirrored. When our feelings are mirrored, we feel felt, and we reciprocate, instinctively trying to satisfy the other person’s emotional needs. When our feelings aren’t mirrored—when we experience MNRD—we feel underwhelmed and unsatisfied, and may even subconsciously act out, attempting to provoke in others the emotions we’re feeling. More often, though, we just clam up.

Ben’s Story: Talking to a Machine

When Mike and I decided to write this book, I had no idea where to start. I’d never done much writing. I didn’t consider myself a writer. I certainly didn’t enjoy writing. So how was I supposed to get everything in my head down on paper?

I tried everything I could think of. I locked myself in my office for hours at a time. I gave myself deadlines and ultimatums. I recorded and transcribed my workshops. Nothing worked.

Finally, a friend suggested I try transcription dictation software. All I’d have to do was talk into the computer, and the software would do the rest, transcribing my speech into written words. It seemed like a great idea. After all, as a workshop leader, I talk for a living. I could do what I do best, orally sharing my stories, and they would magically appear onscreen. Why should I kill myself trying to write a book when I could talk one instead?

I purchased the most expensive dictation software I could find, downloaded it, bought a good microphone, and began talking into the computer. I was excited and confident. I had hopes of cranking out the book in a matter of weeks.

But it wasn’t as easy as I’d imagined. I found myself starting and stopping every two seconds. I couldn’t get a whole story out, not even a little three-minute story I’d told scores of times. I was too self-conscious. Everything I said sounded contrived and robotic.

After a week or so, I just gave up. In fact, I was starting to worry I’d somehow lost the ability to communicate my stories at all. But of course I hadn’t. As soon as I was back in the workshop, telling stories to real people who mirrored my feelings and emoted with me, the stories flowed just like they always had.

The whole experience made me all the more aware of the reciprocal, collaborative nature of conversation and storytelling. Without a human being there to listen empathically and tend my story, talking to a machine had made me sound like a machine, too.

People really do want to tell their stories. It’s just hard to get them out if we don’t have empathic listeners. And talking to a bad listener—someone who just wants the facts, someone who is emotionless, someone with an agenda— isn’t much better than talking to a computer.

Listening Model

Listening empathically is difficult, but it’s an invaluable skill, both in professional and private life. What makes an empathic listener? Consider the Chinese character for listening—it tells us a lot about what listening really is (see Figure 8.1).

The first thing to note is that the symbol comprises much more than just hearing words (ear). Listening also involves the eyes, the heart, and undivided attention. The last feature of the symbol—king—connotes the idea that when truly listening to someone, we treat that person like royalty.

To embody such a comprehensive model of listening, a listener must demonstrate three qualities:

Awareness

Encouragement

Reflection

Figure 8.1 The Chinese Symbol for Listening

Awareness

Empathic listening requires an awareness of a buyer’s nonverbal cues. Traditional consultative question-based sales models (the scripted lists of questions from the playbook) involve left-brain thinking, listening with your ears. By contrast, awareness requires right-brain thinking, listening with your ears, eyes, and heart.

In order to tune in to buyers, we must stop thinking about the next question we’re going to ask and be fully “present” in order to absorb what they’re communicating to us, both verbally and nonverbally.

A buyer with his chin down may be feeling skeptical. A buyer with his chin out may be defensive or even defiant. A nod from the neck up often connotes reserved agreement—you’re not in yet, but you’ve got a foot in the door. A truly relaxed nod through the neck and shoulders tells you that the buyer is “with” you.

Is a buyer saying what he really thinks and feels? If he touches his face, that’s a cue that he might be withholding something. Children instinctively cover their mouths before they lie. As adults, we’ve learned not to do that, so our brains curb the impulse and send our hands elsewhere—sometimes a scratch of the head or nose. Most nonverbal cues you will understand intuitively. The key is being fully present so that you’re aware of the cues in the first place.

Awareness is particularly challenging when you’re on the phone and can’t see your buyer’s body language. All you have to go on is what you can hear—words, tone of voice, speech rhythms (e.g., hesitations), and so forth. But with experience, it can be done. We actually role-play phone calls in our workshops by having participants sit back-to-back. During these exercises, the listener guesses the speaker’s body language gestures and facial expressions, writing them down. Participants who are focused on being aware typically guess correctly.

Ben’s Story: Meeting Senator Obama

In 2006, I made a business trip to Chicago, taking the last flight of the day from LAX to O’Hare. The plane arrived at midnight. By then, the baggage area was almost deserted, but the luggage from our flight was delayed. I was just standing there, killing time, when I recognized a familiar face on the other side of the carousel. It was the senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, with his wife, Michelle—no entourage, just the two of them sitting there waiting for their suitcases.

Obama wouldn’t announce his candidacy for president until a few months later, in 2007, but he was already expected to run for office. Just a couple of weeks earlier, I’d heard him on the radio and remembered sharing his frustration that the Democratic Party wasn’t able to tell its story as clearly as the Republicans told theirs. “We don’t have a clear narrative that the American public is buying,” he’d said. “The Republicans do.”

Standing there at baggage claim, I wanted to meet him, but I didn’t have the nerve. Go on, I told myself. What do you have to lose? And when are you going to get another chance to meet a possible future president of the United States?

I had one of our old books, CustomerCentric Selling, in my briefcase. I pulled it out, worked up my courage, and walked over to Obama. I was so nervous, I don’t remember exactly what I said, but it was something along the lines of, “Mr. Senator, I’m sorry to bother you. I’m sure you’re exhausted, but I just heard an interview where you talked about your frustration that our party can’t seem to tell its story clearly. I’m in the business of helping companies tell their stories, and I thought you might be interested in our book.”

Actually, I doubt I was that coherent. As I held out the book, I hoped he didn’t notice my hand shaking. The only other time I’d been that nervous was when I’d met Magic Johnson when I was 14.

“Thank you,” Obama said, taking the book. “That is so kind of you.” Then he handed the book back to me, pulled a pen from his coat pocket, and said, “Will you sign this for me?”

I took the pen, but I didn’t know if I’d be able to write anything legible. I’m sure I must have seemed like a freak. Obama wasn’t put off, though. Instead, much to my surprise, he calmly began telling me how to spell his name.

“It’s B – A – R – A – C – K,” he said.

I knew what he was doing—he’d sensed how nervous I was, so he was trying to put me at ease, give me a moment to collect myself. And it worked. When I was done inscribing the book, I handed it back to him, and we struck up a conversation.

“Are you coming in from L.A.?” he said.

It turns out we were on the same flight. I asked him what he’d been doing in Los Angeles, and we ended up chatting for about 15 minutes, until the luggage arrived.

The point of the story is not that Obama read our book, ran for president, and got elected because of that fateful midnight meeting at O’Hare. The point is that he was attuned to my nonverbal cues—that he “listened” with more than just his ears—and was therefore able to calm me. If he’d been a salesperson, I’d have been happy to buy anything he was selling.

Encouragement

When we encourage someone in conversation, we help that person feel that it’s safe to reveal whatever it is she wants to say. Often this encouragement involves questions, but for a question to be encouraging, it must not make the speaker feel like she’s on the witness stand. Encouraging questions are based on what we’re learning, in real time, through empathic listening.

Recall Dr. Daniel Siegel’s advice: “Scratch beneath the surface.” Follow the bread crumbs and they’ll lead you home. When a person communicates something to us, spoken or unspoken, we can use that piece of information, a bread crumb, to encourage them to communicate more to us. A scratch of the head, a shift in tone of voice, a change in eye contact—they’re all bread crumbs.

Encouragement can be verbal or nonverbal. Nonverbal “questions”—questions you ask not with words but with facial expressions and body language—include the following:

“Hmm.” We say this with our bodies when we nod along to what a speaker is saying and express attentiveness and focus through our facial expressions. Steady eye contact also lets a speaker know that you’re focused on what he’s saying, fully present.

“Tell me more.” Leaning in toward a speaker expresses strong engagement with what is being said.

Pauses. People tend to fill a pause by talking. Coupled with relaxed body language, a pause creates an opening in conversation for the speaker to continue a train of thought or start a new one. Too often in conversation, we jump in and cut other people off before they’ve finished what they have to say. Pauses convey to a speaker that you are processing what they are saying and that their thoughts and feelings are important to you.

Likewise, verbal questions can also communicate interest and engagement, and help your buyers keep going until they’ve told their whole stories. The shorter the question, the more natural it feels. The longer the question, the more rehearsed and proscribed it feels. Try to keep your questions brief, such as:

“Then what?” This is the most basic question to keep a narrative moving forward, conveying a desire to know what happens next. “Tell me more about . . .” works, too.

“Why?” On the surface, this question asks the speaker to clarify something, but it’s also a great way to nudge a speaker to more fully develop a part of his or her story.

“I don’t get what you meant by xyz. Can you help me understand it better?” (Or, “Can you go back to that?”). This is a more direct way to ask for clarification.

Having your story tended—having a listener attuned to your emotions and encouraging you—can be unsettling if you’re not used to it, especially (1) in a business setting; (2) if, like many of us, you lack a real language of emotion; and (3) if the listener starts asking you pointed questions about how you feel.

A subtle yet effective way to encourage a speaker to share more, especially feelings, is with sincere questions that seek to clarify your understanding or your own feeling. “Nonquestions” provide a less off-putting way of encouraging a speaker to talk about her or his feelings. A nonquestion is an implied question—a remark or observation not framed as an interrogative (i.e., not using a question mark) that still provides the speaker a chance to “answer.” This is an approach to encourage a speaker to share his or her feelings using both nonquestions and clarifying questions. Try using these in the order they appear:

“It sounds like you were feeling _________ [name an emotion]. Is that correct, or is it something else?” Give the speaker the authority to name his or her emotion.

“Could you tell me how much you’re feeling _________ [restate that emotion]?” Give the speaker an opportunity to indicate the degree of feeling.

“And, why is it that you’re feeling that way? If it’s okay with you, I’d like to know where that is coming from.” Give the speaker a chance to clarify or elaborate. Help the speaker acknowledge why he or she feels that way. That person will appreciate that you care enough to explore the source of those feelings with him or her.

Reflection

How do you know whether you’ve really gotten a buyer’s whole story? How does the buyer know if you “get” him?

Once you’ve tended a buyer’s story by being aware and offering encouragement, it’s necessary to demonstrate reflection, to synthesize everything the buyer has communicated to you, both verbally and nonverbally, and reflect it back by paraphrasing it. A person will be grateful to have his story reflected back for two reasons: (1) to make sure you really understand what he’s trying to convey, and (2) to let him know you “get” him. Here’s what you can reflect it back with:

“Let me put this all together. It sounded like you said . . .”

“Let me see if I got you right. You said . . .”

As you paraphrase the buyer’s story, make sure you reflect not just the facts of what happened but also the emotions involved—coherence plus context. In doing so, you’ll be helping your buyer think in story, helping him make his information “storiable.”

At the conclusion of your reflection, how can you know that you truly “get” the person? Consider what is unconsciously on the mind of a speaker:

“Does she get it?” = Implies situational awareness

“Does she get us?” = Implies company awareness

“Does she get me?” = Implies personal awareness

Personal awareness can have a much greater impact on a meeting than situational or company awareness. A powerful question to confirm that you get the other person is to end your reflection this way:

“Do I get you?”

When a buyer hears his story from someone else, has it played back to him, and is then asked, “Do I get you?” it can have a profound impact: Wow, this person really gets me. The buyer will feel further validated if you’re able to articulate how you personally connected with the story:

“That makes sense to me because . . .”

“I think I understand how you feel because . . .”

“I felt _________ [name an emotion] when you told me the part about . . .”

“I imagine you must have felt _________ [name an emotion] . . .”

In his book Mindsight, Dr. Daniel Siegel discusses the importance of attunement and reflection in the relationship between parent and child. A child’s ability to experience meaningful connection is shaped at an early age by a parent’s level of attunement. When a parent can reflect back to a child what the child is experiencing, the child will have greater clarity about how he feels. Empathic listening and reflection similarly allow you to help a buyer have greater clarity about his own feelings and stories—past, present, and future. Once you’ve listened empathically to a buyer’s story, demonstrating awareness, encouragement, and reflection, you’re ready for a new story as you continue up the rungs of the ladder toward the resolution of the buyer’s story in which the buyer is influenced to believe what you believe and take a chance on you.

But What About the Buyer’s Challenges?

After we talk about empathic listening in the workshop, a lot of participants still have the same concern. “I get why stories are important,” they tell us. “I get the listening model. But what about the buyer’s challenges, pains, and issues? Don’t I need to ask about those, too?”

The answer, of course, is right there in the question. When you “get” a buyer’s whole story, you’re guaranteed to get all of his challenges, plus a lot more:

1. You’ll circumvent the buyer’s instinctive left-brain resistance to persuasion and change.

2. You’ll establish an emotional connection and get the buyer to open up, the first step in influencing someone to believe what you believe.

3. You’ll likely get stuff you didn’t even know you needed, contextual information that will inform both your relationship with the buyer and your understanding of how to proceed up the story ladder.

From a buyer’s perspective, having the torch passed to you so you can tell your story feels very different from being asked to “share your pains.” Let’s face it. Buyers don’t view salespeople as doctors: “Thanks for coming to see me, Ms. Salesperson. Let me tell you about my pains!” On the contrary, buyers view salespeople as . . . salespeople. They’re people who want to sell them something—people with agendas. And buyers are very familiar with other salespeople who’ve already tried to “diagnose their problem.”

By approaching buyers through story and then passing the torch, you’ll distinguish yourself from all those other salespeople and gain a fuller understanding of your buyers, including but not limited to their challenges, which will come to you in the form of complications in the arc of their stories. Remember, the brain responds positively in story mode, whether you’re listening to a story or being given the opportunity to tell one.

The ultimate goal is to use your storytelling and story-tending skills to move buyers up the ladder, helping them build their own stories along the way. The only part of their story they won’t yet be able to share is the resolution—the future time in which their problems have been addressed. Your goal is to help them build a vision of that future that includes you.

Ben’s Story: Getting the Whole Story

In 2010, I had a sales call on the phone with an IBM executive. It was a big opportunity for Story Leaders. Mike and I were hoping IBM would make our workshops an important part of their sales training.

The prospect, Gary, started by giving me his point of view on sales enablement, sales training, and what sales effectiveness meant to him. His definition of selling was completely different from mine, and from the way he was describing his beliefs, I began to think he was someone I could never sell to, someone who would never be an ally of ours within the corporation. Also, the way he was addressing me sounded almost confrontational; the more he talked, the more defensive I became. This guy just doesn’t get it, I thought.

That’s when I started to get anxious, which in turn made me want to cut to the chase, rush to the finish line, and get the sales call over and done with. I lost sight of caring about him as a person; all I cared about was his business.

In other words, I basically forgot everything that’s in this book.

Fortunately, Gary is a very extroverted guy, and he ended up talking for so long that I had time to cool down. I happened to glance up at the bulletin board next to my computer and saw the words story tending posted there. I recalled the things I teach in the workshop. Do it, I told myself. Tend to his story.

When Gary finally finished making his points, he turned the floor over to me. “So how can Story Leaders help?” he said.

Instead of diving into how I could solve his problem— as I’d been tempted to do only moments earlier—I said, “I think we might be able to help, Gary, but I also think I’d understand where you’re coming from better if you told me your whole story.”

The invitation to tell a story can be just as powerful as the offer of hearing one, and sure enough, Gary launched right in. “Sure,” he said. “Let me go back. I started at IBM 24 years ago. I was actually an intern in college, got an opportunity to go into sales, and took my lumps . . .” He talked for several more minutes as I focused on staying tuned in and encouraging him with an occasional question about what I was hearing. The amazing thing was, when Gary got the chance to share his whole story, he told me so much more than he had during his lecture at the beginning of our call. By the time he was done, not only had he detailed the challenges he was facing with his sales force, but he also let down his guard and revealed some things he’d been holding back earlier.

“Actually, Ben,” he said, “our people hardly ever get customers to share their real pains. A very small percentage. I do have one rep who really gets customers to open up. If you talked to her, you’d think she’s more of a storyteller than a salesperson. . . .” And so his story kept building, with more color, more frankness, and more emotion.

When he was done, I didn’t start telling Gary about Story Leaders, and he didn’t ask again. Instead, he asked about me: “How about you, Ben? What’s your story?”

By the end of the conversation, I had no doubt that we “got” each other, that our mirror neurons were doing their job, that we’d established an emotional connection. I’d also gotten everything I needed to know to make the sale, and I’d done it by forgetting about my agenda altogether and focusing instead on listening and tending to Gary’s story.