The wise old owl lived in an oak;
The more he saw the less he spoke;
The less he spoke the more he heard:
Why can't we all be like that bird?
- Edward H. Richards

We Can't Help Ourselves

In How Clients Buy: The Benchmark Report on Professional Services Marketing and Selling from the Client Perspective, 42% of 200 decision makers surveyed reported that they encountered potential service providers who “did not listen” to them while the service providers were selling their services.

Active listening is perhaps one of the most important characteristics a rainmaker can exhibit. With active listening, you can:

• Establish real rapport with a potential client by demonstrating sincerity. If you don't listen, your potential client won't feel connected to you (and they shouldn't).

• Understand the potential clients' aspirations (where they want to go) and afflictions (problems they need to solve). If you don't listen, then you won't be able to help your clients solve problems and reach their desired future state.

• Ask the questions that will help potential clients see ways they can reach their goals.

• Give the best pieces of data and advice to help them move forward and solve problems.

• Sense the potential client's underlying needs and concerns by hearing what he's really saying and perceiving his body language.

• Bring latent concerns and needs to the surface, making them a topic of active discussion.
Often times the technical training and development of service providers hinders their ability to be good listeners. Due to the nature of their work, engineers, lawyers, accountants, and consultants of all types are extremely knowledgeable in their particular area of expertise. In order to get their jobs done and done well, they often need to be directive and tell people what to do to complete the tasks on which they are working. However, when it comes to active listening they are required to sit back and resist the urge to chime in with presumed solutions to problems that have not yet been fully explained. Balancing this can be a difficult task for many professionals faced with the challenge of both selling and delivering services.

Developing Active Listening Skills

Consider the following five points to help you develop better active listening skills:

• Plan to listen: Once your chance to listen is gone, it's gone. There's no Tivo rewind button for a live conversation. Before you enter any rainmaking conversation you should always know what your goals are for the meeting. Until it comes naturally every time, make listening a pre-planned goal. After the meeting, rate yourself on how well you did.

• Watch your talking: If you are in play mode, then you are not in recording. If you find yourself talking too much, take a breather and start listening.

• Rephrase: “Just so I understand” are four very powerful words. When someone else is describing something to you, they often take a long time to make relatively few points. They may go on for 10 minutes without a breath. When they're done, you can say, “Just so I understand, it seems that A and B are happening, and that's creating the problems of X, Y, and Z. Is that correct?”

When you rephrase a 10 minute soliloquy into 30 seconds of summary, clients are impressed…partly by how smart you are (and you didn't even say much), but mostly by how well you listen.

• Explore: After you rephrase what your partner-in-conversation has said, asking follow up questions becomes much easier. For example, you might open with the sentence noted above, “Just so I understand, it seems that A and B are happening, and that's creating the problems of X, Y, and Z. Is that correct?”

You can follow up your rephrase question with an:

o Aspiration question, “If that's the case, where do you think you can be if you were to add new capabilities in the C and D areas?”

o Affliction question, “With X and Y happening, is that causing a lot of downtime for your staff?”

o Impact question, “Really? How many hours per month do you think each person is losing?”

• Concentrate! My Jujitsu Sensei, Master Daniel Cohen, is one of the most perceptive people I have ever met. He can sense from 50 feet away the best way to help someone improve their skills or learn a new technique. Sometimes he asks questions, sometimes he makes adjustments, and, every once in a while, he will just yell out “Concentrate!” And I can tell you, it gets attention.

You don't always need a tip or technique to help you get better at something, sometimes you simply need to break out of your pattern and apply a bit more intensity. If you are finding active listening difficult (or you are simply not listening), go past active and force yourself to listen intensely. Dare I say, “Concentrate!”

However, this is only half the story. We then asked these decision makers the following question, “Assuming you did not encounter this problem with the service providers, how much more likely would you have been to consider purchasing their services?” Indeed, 74% of these buyers indicated they would be “much more likely” to consider purchasing services if the provider actually listened to them during the business development process.

How does this play out in reality? Just like the study: the more actively you listen to potential clients during the business development process, the more likely you will be to win more new clients.
Take a lesson from the wise old owl - why can't we all be like that bird?

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