Selling Skills – Productive Questioning and Active Listening (prt3)

Selling Skills – Productive Questioning and Active Listening (prt3) In call Effectiveness (ICE)

Moving on from part two in my incall effectivenss series I want to to go further and talk about the power of pausing, paraphrasing in more detail, active listening and more skills that you can start using

Power of Pausing

Here’s a simple and easy way to add some authority and control to your call.

Stop and wait for 3-5 seconds after a question or response – What this does is it breaks up the call to really hone in on a really important point so much so that you can start to really emphasize the importance of what your talking about.  the second thing it does is it get you out of your comfort zone and more used to handling a prospect or customer where your call may not be flowing.  Use it now and then to change up the call and take control!

Paraphrasing

I’ve already talked about paraphrasing but let’s look at it a little more.

What paraphrasing essentially does is it takes the edge of any direct question you may want to ask once you have received the information from a previous question.  Simply put it shows an active listening component and softens the next question and almost in a way qualify’s you to take the information and probe further.

How to paraphrase

Simply restate in your own words (using their language) what the customer means:

I’ understand that it’….

‘What yout telling me is that’…..

‘Could we say that’……..

Use their language if they say ‘I see’ or ‘I hear’ what your saying re use their language, it’s again building rapport by mirroring their language

So What I’,m hearing is…..

Hearing vs Listening

When you just hear things:

• Things just happen
• Your simply receivig words
• It’s very pasive
• There’s liitle energy needed

The result is that you have not been engaged yourself, so how can you engage your customer when you have not listened!

Now what I call listening:

• It’s a concious choice
• Requires concentration
• You Process meanings from words, body language and sound
• Leeds to learning

To help with active listening skills the following prompts will help you:

Non verbal listening skills such as:

• Pausing
• Keeping eye contact
• Taking notes
• Smiling
• Nodding

Verbal listening skills

• Say ‘Yes’, ‘ok’, ‘I see’
• Ask clarification questions
• paraphrase
• respond to body language

Look and respond to changes in body language

Signs of interest:

• Customer leans forward to  look at your sales materials or moves closer to you
• Seeks eye contact
• Looks up
• Smiles
• Takes notes
• Will actually mirror you at different stages of the call!

When a customer is not nterested this may be present:

Leans backwards

Looks away from the sales executive

Crosses arms

Clock watches

We have looked at questioning and active listening skills, as you can see there are many things you can conciously do to make sure that you get full enagagement in your sales call.  I think the hardest habbits to break are that of just passively hearing. If you start doing the above listening skills you will start making  more sense of the information that is being received by your ears and your brain!

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