Best Advice: What My Wife Taught Me About Selling

This post is part of a series in which LinkedIn Influencers share the best advice they've ever received. Read all the posts here.

The best advice I have been given is to remember that you have two ears and one mouth and you should use them in that ratio. Or as the Greek Biographer Diogenes Laertius said:

We have two ears and only one tongue in order that we may hear more and speak less.”

I admire the Greeks and I appreciate this fancier way of saying the well-known bit of common sense wisdom, but I can’t attribute this lesson to my knowledge of the ancient Greeks (courtesy of Google). No, I learned this lesson from my wife, Lorraine.

When Lorraine is upset, my first impulse is to fix it and I had a tendency to interrupt her and jump right in with all my excellent ideas to solve her problems. Not surprisingly, Lorraine wasn’t thrilled with my Mr Fix It approach. These solutions were usually met by her less than ecstatic expression and she would give me some great feedback that I didn’t listen well.

We have been married for close to thirty years now. Like many couples that have been married for that long, we have learned the art of problem resolution for our partnership. My job is to listen to the whole story and her feelings about it before I even think about offering a solution.

Luckily, Lorraine and I figured this out very early on, which coincided with my career in sales. What I learned in my marriage was easily applied to my sales career. Let me explain.

When I was in sales in my early years I would try and spend as much time as I could telling the customer all about my great product. I felt I had to cram as many of my product’s features as possible into the time I had with them. Like my wife, my clients were not huge fans of this technique. I noticed over time that often this approach was met with a less than ecstatic expression and very few cries of, “Brilliant!”

Once I recognized that what worked in my marriage was applicable in sales, I had a huge “AHA!” moment. I then tried a new approach and this one truly was brilliant in its simplicity: I asked them to tell me about their problems and then I listened to what they said. By asking them to tell me about the problems and challenges they face and spending 60% of my time listening to them, I started having a lot more success for these three reasons:

1. It showed the client that I am interested in their business, not just on my goals.
2. Listening demonstrated that I care about solving their problems specifically.
3. I learned how to match the right feature to their specific need and close the business.

Stephen R. Covey, the author of “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change”, said this:

“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.”

I think this video even illustrates this concept even better:

Covey said that you should seek first to understand and then be understood.

I think that it vital. It is vital in your personal life with your wife and family by keeping your communication relevant and effective. It is vital in your business life by making sure you understand your client’s needs before launching into a pitch. And it is also vital in a customer experience exchange to listen to a customer and their feelings so you can respond appropriately and invoke the correct emotional response, using emotions that drive value.

We use this approach when we do our consultancy work. We first listen to our client, hearing what they want from their experience and what they think they are creating at the moment. We take that information and create a solution that addresses these needs that we uncovered in our consultation. As a result, we never run the same program for two clients. Sure, we have a framework that we can adapt to most organizations that covers the important parts of the customer experience. But we listen to what a customer wants, what their environment is about and then we tell them what we can do to help and customize the framework for their specific needs.

Too many times people and organizations are in broadcast mode with their customer experience. Too many sales people just start selling without understanding the customer. Too many organizations make assumptions about what customers want, or what customers think because they haven’t taken the time to ask the question and listen to the answer. They think they know what the customer wants so they don’t listen.

For example, I remember at British Telecom (BT) people would always say, “I have a phone. I am a customer. I know what they want.”’ But the reality is they didn’t. You see, they were “in the industry” and their opinion is skewed by what they know as a result of that association. That means that they are not a typical user. As a result, they often made the wrong decision about what the typical user wanted.

It isn’t just at my former organization, however. I see this happen in 30% of the clients we consult. This attitude shows itself usually when we try and convince them to do research for their organizational assessment. Many times our clients tell us that they know already what the customer experiences.

But over time, we can usually get them to see that what they think they know about their experience and what the truth is about their experience can be quite different. Once we get here, then we can get to work on making the customer experience what they want it to be. We help them have a good relationship.

Using the listening approach is good for your customer experience. If you really listen to what your customers are telling you, you can hear emotion words being used and see subconscious clues from your customers about what is driving their decisions. Once you have this information, you can design a customer experience that creates a better relationship for you both, one that has you both crying, “Brilliant!”

I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic, so why not leave your comments below.

Photo: Shutterstock

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

If you enjoyed this post, you may be interested in the following :

Organizational Assessment - The Naïve to Natural ModelUpcoming Webinar: Employee Engagement New: Live Customer Experience Online Training Courses

Colin Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world's first organizations devoted to customer experience. Colin is an international author of four best-selling books and an engaging key-note speaker. To read more from Colin on LinkedIn, connect with him by clicking the follow button above or below. If you would like to follow Beyond Philosophy click here

Follow Colin Shaw on Twitter @ColinShaw_CX

Due to popular demand we have just launched our new Customer Experience Management live webinar training program. Please view here