Telling Isn't Selling

Marketing

Telling Isn't Selling
by Robert Ayrer



All the modern forward thinking gurus of selling agree that listening is the number one skill of closing sales.  But what the gurus often fail to tell you is what to listen for, and how to listen.

All selling is communications.   Then why do so many companies spend so much time and training money on product presentations stressing, “Why our stuff is best,” rather than teaching that the secret to controlling the sales call is (a) asking good questions, (b) listening, and (c) hearing and understanding the answers you get from your prospect?  

Let’s start with the basics. You are with a prospect that is happily answering your questions but you probably aren’t listening to the answers.  No matter how attentive you appear to be, you are thinking about what you are going to say as soon as the prospect stops talking.

This is not about those times when your mind wanders slightly.  It’s when you think  you’re giving full attention – but you’re not.  To become a superior Closer, you have to learn to override the chatter inside your head and actively focus on listening.  Let’s run through six points for using listening to close the sale.

Point 1.  Beware of the “Yabut”

Everybody has a little voice inside their heads that is continuously talking to them.  It’s called the “Yabut” and it is the resident librarian of your brain.  It collects, catalogs and stores all the total data coming into your system and immediately matches the incoming information with all your pre-stored data.  That includes all of your life’s experiences, education, training – the whole nine yards!  As the Yabut matches the incoming data to your previously stored data, the Yabut tells you how you feel about this new information and whether your agree with it or not.

Your Yabut will search your data bank until it finds if there is a data match that’s acceptable.  Or, if the new information doesn’t match, it is therefore invalid, wrong, unusable, unbelievable, incorrect, a lie, etc. – all because it doesn’t match your data bank.

It’s this last point – jumping to a snap judgement that as a salesperson you  have to be aware of – and beware of – or you will be completely off course with what your prospect means.

Point 2.  Decode carefully

We are almost always dealing with people who have a different data bank, different training, different experiences and different backgrounds.  Simply put, they are not us.

Our problem in listening is really understanding  our prospect so we can establish a common frame of reference – so we can build mutual communication and not start judging and listening to our own Yabut as an instant reflex to what we think we’re hearing.

In selling, you have to be careful. Your Yabut tells you what you  would mean if you were doing the talking or generating data.  Chances are that’s not what your prospect means, even though it sounds similar.  Don’t assume!  Listen for what is “behind” the words you hear.

Point 3.  Resist the urge to “Assume”

You’re hearing feedback from the buyer.  Now, like any well-trained salesperson, you’re ready to respond by offering features and benefits relating to what you think the prospect has told you.  Here comes the critical part:  now override your Yabut, pause for a moment, look slightly puzzled and ask one more question.  That critical question is, “When you say _____, do you mean _____?”  Clarity needed.  You have to validate what you think you heard from your prospect.

Master the skill of this one “Do you mean?” question and you could raise your closing rate by 20 percent.

Point 4.  Identify the “Passion Points”

First, let’s mention something about crafting your questions for the sales interview.  All of your primary questions, the ones you must have practiced and prepared, flow from your careful analysis of your product, your systems, and your services. You don’t want to ever ask any questions you don’t have solid answers for.  But, which questions will this prospect respond to?  You don’t know!

So now, we go to the other end of it – what to listen for?   What you are listening for is the short list of issues that your prospect is emotionally invested in, what is important to the buyer – what we call “Passion Points.”   Going through the door to make this sale,  you don’t know which one or two of your  issues are currently important to this buyer – the Passion Points.  You find them by listening actively.

Point 5.  Craft your questions carefully

Make your primary questions short and simple declarative questions.  “What happens when _____ occurs?”  “What do you do about _____?”  “How do you handle the _____?”

When you ask your short question and your prospects begin to reply with a long answer, you have found their “Passion Point!”  It is within those long, sometimes boring prospect answers that you’ll find your opportunity to link your products and services with the buyer’s real interests. Until you have identified one or two “Passion Points,” you are not ready to close.  Why?  Because you don’t really know what the buyer wants.

Point 6.  Don’t Show until you Know

If you began prattling on about your products and services without really identifying the Passion Points, you are practicing the “Show up and throw up” school of selling. Average salespeople throw up a flock of features and benefits and hope something sticks to the wall.  They don’t really listen to the buyer.

Stifle the impulse to join the “throw up” style of selling.  You know the drill:  tell everything.  Like those old time road salesmen with a huge catalog, flipping page after page: “How about this one” No?  How about this one?  It’s definitely one of our best sellers.”  The perfect description of Average.  Might as well cross your fingers, rub your rabbit’s foot and hope.  Ask short questions.  Let the buyer tell you what’s wanted

Salespeople who are winners try new approaches.  If you follow these six points-- in your style—and they work, you will close more sales with less work, because the buyers will tell you what they  want to buy

Summary.   Review these quick questions before you go into your next sales call.

1. Have you practiced overriding your own Yabut habit?

2. Are you ready to decode the works the buyer means, from  his data bank?

3. Don’t assume.  Repeatedly ask the “Do you mean?” question to clarity.

4. From your short list (1, 2 or 3) of key issues, discover the Passion Points.

5. Practice those Primary Questions:  “What happens when you _____?”  “How do you measure _____?”

6. Slow down!  Resist the average salesperson’s disease to “throw it all up.”


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Bob Ayrer, President of REA Performance Consultants, is a consultant, speaker & trainer specializing in driving up revenue, increasing market share & margins. His FUTURE$ELL program is an internationally proven program for building effective sales organiz