[711] Driving Sales Success with Active Listening

Welcome to the authentic persuasion show on this episode. I want to replay part of a previous show. Maybe you heard the original full length episode, and this could be a great refresher and reminder, or maybe this is your first time hearing this content. And the timing could be just right to help you leverage authentic persuasion today in your role, no matter what. Here's to your success. This is the authentic persuasion show. That's really what we're talking about here. We're talking about the fact that what you want to do is you want to become a master. At active listening and active listening is when I ask you a question or you're talking. I am not thinking about my to do list my chores. I've got to do a phone call. I've got to return the emails. I want to deal with. I'm not thinking about as you're telling me a story about the Grand Canyon. I'm thinking about how I want to tell you about my trip to the Grand Canyon last week, right? That's not active listening. That's something completely different. Active listening is you're telling me a story. You're telling me about your life. I'm listening. I'm listening the whole time. And then when you're done, I respond with a question, a comment, some idea, something like that. But throughout I am listening again, we've all had the experience where somebody is not active listening, where literally you're talking to them in this day and age, they're maybe they're looking at their phone while you're talking to them. And I know I catch myself doing that where if somebody's doing that with me, I'll say You know, let me know when you're, when you're done so that I can keep talking and be like, no, no, I'm listening. What's like, you know, you're not, you can't do both, right? That's not possible. People think they can multitask, but they can't, they can fast switch back and forth between two things, but they can't. When you're in a sales role, your number one job is to remember that it's all about them. It's all about that perspective customer. Last week we talked about it. They're afraid of change. Your job is to make them feel safe, successful at fear elimination, move them out of their comfort zone. They think they're the center of their own universe, that they're the hero of their own story. When they detect that you're full of crap with your rapport. And it's fake and phony or they detect that you're not listening and you don't actually care and you're just checking boxes and rapport because you're not actively listening or every time they make a comment, you'd spin it around and make it about yourself that will keep them at the center of their comfort zone and they won't feel safe. To feel safe. They have to know that you care about them more than you care about yourself. They have to feel that you care about their success, whether it's with your product or service. Cause we haven't even determined if they're a good fit yet, but whether it's with your product or service or something else to help them achieve a goal to get out of pain, the key is, is they have to feel like you are their guide. That's what they need. They need that. The rapport step, which maybe prior to today, now that we're 40 some odd minutes into this, you know, minus my recap of last week, you might've thought rapport is easy. I just talk about this. I talk about that, make some small talks and chit chat, talk about weather, talk about sports, don't talk about politics or religion but talk about anything else other than that. It's really easy. And then I move on. There's a lot more to it. Now, there's a lot of people in sales who intuitively have learned this or realize it or do it without even thinking about it. And it seems easy. Those again are the people we look at and we go, they are a natural born salesperson. They just built some rapport. I'm like glowing because I feel like they actually care about me. That is what they're doing again. Keep in mind. I'm a dude with a marine biology degree that chose sharks instead of people. That's how I felt about people growing up. I would rather choose sharks. I'd rather tag 18 foot great white sharks and take my chances with that than deal with people. So I had to learn all this. I had to realize. What I was good at in dealing with people, talking to people and realize I do have those skills and then reverse engineer and figure out, okay, what was I doing? How does that work? And what have I seen hundreds and hundreds of other people do well? And what have I seen countless other people do poorly and why weren't they successful, which is why I built this. And that's why we're focusing so much on this. Again, you may have thought rapport building was super easy, but there's a lot to it. When you want to be successful for the right reasons. And I think that's really the key. So that's the big thing I want you to take away from this is looking at the rapport building step in the beginning of this authentic persuasion pathway that we're building. That's the first step. Now, keep in mind as you're starting this journey and helping people get out of their comfort zone. One of the big things, and this is people ask me all the time is how long should I spend in rapport? It depends. It depends on you and it depends on how much you like spending in rapport. It depends on the other person and it depends on the interaction and what you're dealing with. If it's a very complex sale, you might need to build more rapport. If it's a one call close and you don't have a ton of time. It might be extra short, right? You're working a trade show booth and you're standing on the floor and somebody's passing by. You might want to build a rapport for 30, 60 seconds and then kind of get into the next phase, right? Other times you might actually spend five to 10 minutes, 15 minutes building rapport. Cause this can be a long term relationship and you don't want to rush into it too much, right? Like think about sales, like relationships and courtship and meeting someone, you know, you don't want to just jump into the next steps. Sometimes you just want to build rapport for awhile. And again, like I said, it also depends on the other person, some people you talk to, there's an instant connection. It's super quick. You don't need to spend a lot of time in rapport because. You can move forward. Other people are cold like ice and you've got to build rapport and you've got to spend more time warming it up or they're not going to trust you and they're not going to listen to you. So, just, it's, it's situational, it's dependent, it's also dependent on you. Some people, they can build rapport really fast and move on. Some people it takes longer. So hopefully that helps. Hopefully that helps in starting your rapport building process and the authentic persuasion pathway. Again, if you have any questions about this, you want the worksheet on the transitions I mentioned, email me, Jason at cutterconsultinggroup.com. If you don't have a copy of selling. With authentic persuasion transformed from order taker to quota breaker. Email me. I'll share the link with you. You just cover the shipping and I will send you a copy of that. Also I do from time to time get extra credits from audible for the audio book. I forget about that at times because they send it to me and I, I don't always think about it, but if you rather listen to the book, let me know. Email me. And I will share some of the credits that I have so you can check out the book if you'd rather listen to me go through the book in my voice versus reading it because everyone likes to absorb things differently. But that's it for this session. Thanks for joining authentic persuasion training session number seven next week, we're going to dive into the next step. So we talked about rapport. The next step is empathy discovery probing. That's when things get real. That's when we really dive into how to help you become effective in sales. So thank you for tuning in and I will catch you next week. Take care and have a great weekend.