Am I a Good Listener?
Anyone who has spent any time with me knows that I am passionate about learning and growing. I sometimes say I am “addicted to content”. Some of my friends call me “Mr. Podcast” and I have even been told that I should remove myself from consuming others messages and focus on building my own. Regardless, as a husband, father, professional, or even my own physical being I love to learn and improve.
Recently, I responded to a text message from a well known “Leadership” training company who was offering a discounted rate on their programs. After responding I was provided an opportunity to visit with a representative via phone call to discuss this promotion. The call took place while I was driving and after a short introduction and exchange about the weather, etc. the representative proceeded to ask me “what do you do for a living”? I responded, letting him know that I was a multi-market manager for the corporate side of a large fitness brand. Upon hearing this, the questions stopped, and the flood of information began pouring in. This training is perfect for you! It is made up of 3 phases of learning with everything being accessible online through several different platforms. You can consume it at your pace and then fly yourself to meet us in Florida for a huge gathering with other masters of the craft where you will be able to listen to the leader of the company in person and network with thousands of other leaders who have completed this same training. We have trained millions of people to do what you are doing, and we have a reputation for creating leaders across all industries. We will even offer some “Free” training to your managers (nice way to generate additional leads) to show you how good we are.
I listened to all the hype and explained that I was just curious about the offer and that if he would send me some material, I would review it and get back to him. I did not tell him that the entire time I was listening to him, I was thinking that he was doing what I have been training our sales teams NOT to do. Ramble on about all we have to offer when we have not even taken the time to get to know our prospect.
Being a “solution oriented” person who wants to help teams be successful, I must ask how can we train our sales teams to overcome this desire to spew information at our prospects instead of genuinely caring about the person and asking questions that will help us learn more about them? How can we train them to spend the time and make the effort to find out why they are inquiring about our product?
Ultimately, I believe we are too focused on educating our sales team to be experts on our products and we do not train them to be expert listeners. The old quote from Theodore Roosevelt comes to mind; “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care”. This was true in the early 1900’s and is still true today in 2019.
Recently, while listening to one of my favorite podcasts “Game Changers” with Molly Fletcher, she was interviewing a guest, Celest Headlee. Celest talked about how we, as humans, are not good listeners. She explained how it is not natural for us to listen. It takes additional effort and even burns more calories to listen than to speak. She made a comment that stuck with me; “If you walk away from a conversation and you retain nothing from what you heard; you did not have a real conversation”.
As with anything, I believe it starts with me. I am going to make it a daily practice to have meaningful conversations. Being self-aware and evaluating each daily interaction to hold myself accountable. We are going to implement “listening” training with our managers and direct them to run daily “listening” exercises with their sales teams. Through additional focus and effort on this critical skill, we will all become better listeners and ultimately better at everything we do whether at work or at play.