Attitude Challenges
Everyone has heard the term attitude adjustment. One important aspect of our degree of willingness to listen is the value we place on time; another is the value we place on what the other person has to say relative to what we want to say. These two factors are attitude issues and are dealt with next.
Impatience—Time Perception
A much-quoted study by the American Medical Association showed that American doctors give patients about twenty-three seconds to relate their symptoms and concerns before jumping in. That same study, though, found that most patients, when allowed to finish, speak for an average of only twenty-nine seconds. The difficulty is an impatient person’s perception of time. The doctors thought they would fall behind with their appointments if they let patients rattle on endlessly. Apparently, their worries were unwarranted.
Also, those of us with really high-speed thinking may be less aware of exactly how much time has passed during our conversations with customers. Try the exercise below to see how your impression of time passage compares with actual duration.
Exercise: Gauging the passage of time—one minute
Results?
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As long as the customer is talking, your chances of getting the sale go up. The reverse is true, also. As long as you are talking, the customer’s interest is probably down. Although one of our greatest assets as sales professionals is our willingness to communicate, sadly, one of our detriments is that we tend to talk too much. This liability is exaggerated on the phone, because we are not able to read if the customer is “with us” or not. So, we often keep talking in hopes of keeping the customer engaged. In fact, the customer probably has a short attention span as well and is probably not engaged when we are going on and on and on. To the customer we sound like we talk too much.
Self-Management Solution
Use the “tongue trick.” When you are tempted to interrupt, take your tongue and place it behind your teeth. That is a gentle physical reminder to be quiet until the customer is finished. (You can use this technique in face-to-face interactions, as well, and no one is the wiser.) This will help you to abide by our 80/20 rule: The customer should be talking 80 percent of the time. While the customer is talking, remember that you should be really listening, not just waiting for your turn to talk. You should be speaking only 20 percent. So, with this guideline, do you talk too much?
You are probably not timed on how long you are on the phone. That could be disastrous to your selling credibility. If you are, then you’ll want to best organize your call to still adhere to the 80/20 rule, which is especially effective for Es and As, who really want to run the conversation. Ps and Ks are better listeners, so you may alter those proportions for them, but be careful. Ps and Ks need better conversational questioning to follow this rule.
Steamrolling—Features Enthusiasm
As salespeople representing products or services we believe in, we sometimes get wrapped around our knowledge. We are so excited about what we sell and so intent on what we want to say, that we feel like we have to throw out every neat feature and include a cherry on top! Let’s face it, we begin to enjoy our captive audience because we all like people to listen to us.
For example, a sales rep who has just come through a lengthy new product training course would want to share her knowledge, especially if it is truly a super innovation. Any good salesperson is a subject matter expert, and it makes sense that you are eager to convey all you’ve learned. Unfortunately, the customer may need only a tiny piece of what you know. The customer only wants his or her problem solution—not an encyclopedia of all you know.
As a sales presentation trainer, I constantly hear justifications from salespeople for the fifty-two-slide PowerPoint presentation. Their argument for these mind-numbing ordeals is “But I have to cover all this material.” No offense to college classes, but does anyone out of school want to sit through that? Even if the customer is interested at the beginning, the fatigue of looking at a screen for that long would kill any interest. Our verbal flood on the phone can have the same numbing effect on our customers.
Now, ask yourself this tough question: Is talking more helping you close more sales? If it is, you are in the minority.
Let’s take a look at this example to emphasize the point: You are calling a decision maker about purchasing replacement cartridges for printers. Your immediate goal might be selling a gross of printer cartridges. If you are so focused on getting out all you had to say, you may miss a casual comment from the customer about replacing all the copiers. In your zeal to “tell,” you missed an opportunity to sell.
Self-Management Solution
Remember the doctors who interrupted in the previous section? Your customers are no different. When you have talked longer than thirty seconds at a stretch, they think you have talked too much—unless you are specifically addressing their needs, which you will only discover by listening!
Put a silent timer near the phone. (One of those minute timers that looks like a small hourglass is great; you can sometimes find them at yard sales in old board games that people are getting rid of, or at a dollar store.) Just for fun, you can time your customer as he or she talks. For self-management development, time yourself and let the timer help you regulate your talk time. When the sand runs low, ask the customer a check-in question, such as: “How does that sound to you, Fred?” or a closing question, such as: “Tell me your thoughts on that feature for your business.”
Disinterest in Other People
Another attitude element is our own disinterest in other people. If customers on the other end are boring or don’t talk openly, we may feel the need to talk more to keep the conversation going. Why, then, are they boring to us? We may think that what we have to say is much more interesting than what they have to say. It could be because we have not asked enough pertinent questions. The prospect may have even said no earlier, and because we didn’t listen and kept going, has zoned out, is multitasking, or is waiting for a pause to break in and hang up.
Some of us are genuinely curious about people and their individual story. Others see people as merely a means to an end. Whatever your own basic attitude is, it probably comes through in your phone manner.
Self-Management Solution
First of all, using personality matching to help you strategize should make every customer interaction more interesting. A prospect becomes a puzzle that you complete by uncovering clues within the conversations that you engineer. It is your job to find what is interesting about the customer. Take the three most boring customers or prospects you have and apply the personality matching techniques to your next conversation. You might find that the issue is a personality-style difference between you two and that by using the strategies in this book, you can turn boredom into bucks!