By Kimberly Wade* Good Listening Tool
Here's a good tool for you, your managers, your customer service staff, and your sales people.
Are You A Good Listener? How do you rate?
Take the following quiz to find out.
1. Do you spend more time talking than listening?
2. Do you come up with a response in your head before they finish speaking?
3. Are you eager to talk about your solution?
4. Do you daydream while your prospect or client is talking?
5. Do you jump in and finish their questions?
6. Do you ask so many questions the client or prospect does not have time to think and answer them?
7. Do you make a judgment about what is said before the speaker has finished?
8. Do you answer a question with a question?
9. Do you frequently interrupt?
10. Are you quick to provide advice even when not asked?
Add up your Yes’s and No’s to review how you did.
If you have 8 or more No’s – congratulations. You are an excellent listener.
1. Do you spend more time talking than listening?
You speak the language you feel most comfortable with. It is the language in which you take in and process information. What happens if two people are speaking in different languages? Stuff is coming out of your mouth but the intent is missed. This is what miscommunication is all about. I told you this was important to my company. I never saw any of that in our meetings. I did not understand how strongly you felt about that. If your client makes one of these statements, which one would you record and which one would not even register?
We communicate to each other in different languages without realizing it. No wonder it becomes difficult to really get the intent of what is being communicated.
2. Do you come up with a response in your head before they finish speaking?
Do you talk to yourself? Do you think other people talk to themselves? Guess what? We all talk to ourselves and it is okay. Somewhere along the way, talking to yourself got to be a bad thing and, taken to an extreme, it can be. But the truth is, we all do it. The problem is that when we talk to ourselves in a sales conversation with a client, we’re missing some of the information the client is presenting, let alone giving the impression of not listening.
3. Are you eager to talk about your solution?
Many times this happens because the salesperson has been conditioned to believe that they must get their canned pitch said as quickly as possible. It happens automatically, like your brain is on cruise control as you wait for your client to take a breath so you can jump in.
4. Do you daydream while your prospect or client is talking?
This is what can happen during a conversation. We can hear words coming from the other person, but don’t catch their meaning. We might hear every other word or only bits of a sentence, because they are not using our language. So, we consider having a committee meeting. No, not with other people…the conversation in our head. Maybe we are working on deciding what we are going to have for lunch or what we need to do to get ready for that pipeline review meeting with our manager. In other words, we have a great conversation with ourselves, but are no longer listening.
5. Do you jump in and finish their questions?
We sometimes put on our magic turban and become mind readers. We finish someone’s thoughts and even interrupt them to show how good we are. We know more about what people need than they do and we give our advice freely. We hate for the other person to pause, but we have adjusted, because we will just have another committee meeting. We will mind read what others are thinking and tell them the answer. Many of us do this and never realize it is going on, but this could be the reason your prospect never calls you back.
6. Do you ask so many questions the client or prospect does not have time to think and answer them?
When doing this, the salesperson is not paying attention to what is happening with the person they are communicating with. Rapport has broken down. Salespeople fail to recognize the steps needed to get into rapport and what to do to fix it once it has broken down.
7. Do you make a judgment about what is said before the speaker has finished?
Remember the rules you have for yourself and the rules you have for others? Most of us have a MY/MY pattern, so we know what we would do if faced with the same problem . . . so we tell them.
8. Do you answer a question with a question?
Many of us have been taught that this can be an effective technique but, most times, it fails to get to us to the next step.
9. Do you frequently interrupt?
We know exactly what they should do and we are losing our patience listening to them go on and on. This type of thinking will set up the situation of not giving your client an opportunity to let you know their problem, because you are in a judgment mode. Rarely do your clients or prospects trust this type of exchange.
10. Are you quick to provide advice, even when not asked?
This leads to you offering a solution before knowing what the problem is and the type of results your client is after.
Credits
Originally posted by
KimberlyWade on 07 Nov 2008.
All contributors:
KimberlyWade,
LynnwoodBrown,
MarleneStone,
MichaelBrezin,
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