"You’re Not Listening to a Word I Said!" Shut Up and Sell More
Tom Boogher, CPSM, and Richard Cilley, CPSM
As professionals in business development, the one skill we all tend to be weakest in is listening. We tend to be great talkers and lousy listeners.

“One of the best ways to persuade others
is with your ears—by listening to them.”
—Former U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk

Too many of us spend our conversational lives like a Jeopardy! contestant, anxiously pounding our response button so we can slam Alex Trebek with our question before the other guy can get in. The problem with focusing on what we are going to say next is that it leaves little room for thinking about our clients, the people who desperately need our attention.

Part of the problem is our training. Nobody in high school or college takes a course in listening. There was no programmatic approach to listening and internalizing the quality of attention given, even at the university level, though there should have been. Why is it some of the most important things in life are never taught in school?

Listening Well Is Incredibly Important to Our Success with Clients
A little while ago, a series of presentations were made by teams for A/E services to design a large educational facility. During the question-and-answer portion at the end of each presentation, the chairman of the selection panel asked each firm the same two pre-selected questions: The first question concerned community involvement in the planning process and the second was about meeting the budget. Nothing up the chairman’s sleeve, nothing any thoughtful, competent professional couldn’t hit for a home run even in such a stressful situation.

During the Q&A period, the first two teams each replied by reiterating partially relevant portions of their presentations. The third team’s project designer listened carefully and made good, thoughtful answers to both questions. The fourth team’s project manager took each question and launched into a series of hypotheticals that were so convoluted no one on the panel could follow him.

There was a short adjournment after the presentations, then the panel got out its formal evaluation paperwork and started making small talk. The chairman gaveled the meeting to order and opened the evaluation by saying, “Well, we’re not going to have to think hard about this one because it’s sure obvious that ONLY ONE OF THOSE GROUPS LISTENED TO A D--N WORD I SAID!” Guess who got the project?

Why Aren’t You Paying Attention?
The world is a busy place making huge demands daily on our attention. We are constantly bombarded with media messages and distracting noises. It seems that, as our world advances, those distractions become more numerous and more intrusive, from pagers to cell phones to BlackBerries; we are moving closer and closer to being The Constantly Interrupted Society.

We are also occasionally prey to our own personal version of Attention Deficit Disorder. How many times recently has your spouse or one of your children said something to you and your reply was, “What?” or “Hunh?” or “I didn’t hear you”? Hasn’t one of your co-workers recently startled you with, “Did you hear what I said!?!”

It isn’t that you were physically incapable of hearing them, it’s that you were distracted, or listening to something else, or preoccupied with the past or the future, or you were taking the speaker for granted, or you were consciously or unconsciously blocking them out. And we do this all the time. It’s a reflective defense mechanism against the hailstorm of intrusions we face every day. Our failure as business professionals lies in our inability to turn off these filters when we should be sincerely listening to and thinking about how to help our clients.

There are also a lot of situations where we willfully don’t pay attention. We’re focused somewhere else: tomorrow’s report deadline, what Great-Aunt Myrtle said about your sister on the phone yesterday, picking up the laundry from the cleaner’s, remembering to make a doctor’s appointment, etc. So when a client calls, we are still preoccupied with some other mundane concern and only half our brain (or less!) is working on listening and understanding the dilemma we should be learning about.

Sometimes we don’t listen because we’ve already prejudged the person. We think we know what the person is going to say anyway, so why waste time listening when we could be thinking about the office football pool? Sometimes the person speaking irritates us so much that we try to block out what they have to say. When we carry these behaviors over into our work lives we do our clients a disservice by not focusing on learning from what they have to say. Clients deserve better, and if they don’t get attention from us, they’ll find someone who will pay them heed.

Listening Effectively Is Crucial to Selling Your Firm
It’s phenomenal how much you can learn from a client just by letting them talk. You can never know enough about your client’s clients or customers, their business model, their marketing strategy, how they make their money, what threats and opportunities they face, their likes and dislikes, or what their fears are.

The day after an intense schematic design session with your firm, you run into a client on the street. After exchanging greetings, you ask him how the schematics are coming along. “Oh, it’s going along well, mostly,” he says. At that moment, with your cell phone ringing, you say, “Great, I’m glad things are working out. Gotta run. See you later.”

If you were really focusing your attention on him your response should have been something like: “Mostly? Then it sounds like something isn’t going so well. What’s not going as it should?” And so you give him the opportunity to tell you what he is upset about, and then you can start thinking about how you can help him and your firm.

Remember, if you’re talking, you’re not learning, and if you’re not learning about your client’s problems, then you’re not going to provide the best solutions. Ask yourself these questions:

• Are you interrupting the speaker before she’s finished?
• Do you listen for the speaker’s “hot buttons,” the topics that excite and concern them?
• When the client is speaking, are you looking around the room, wondering about lunch, scuffling your feet?
• When the speaker is a jerk you can’t stand, do you block out what he’s saying so you don’t have to deal with his unpleasant manner?
• Do you just blurt out what you think the answer should be before the speaker has finished giving you all the information?
• Are you thinking about what hasn’t been said that you might have expected?

If you’re like the majority of us, you’re a poor listener most of the time. We all can improve the amount of energy and attention we devote to the people we want to hear. The difficult part is convincing yourself to listen when you’re tired, distracted, or upset.

10 Things You Can Do to Become a Better Listener for Your Clients
There are a wide variety of things you can do to improve and develop your skills in listening. Here are 10 things to help you become a better listener:

1) Look the speaker right in the eyes. Nothing shows commitment to listening like direct eye contact. This will help you to focus on them instead of yourself.

2) Be patient. Don’t interrupt the speaker, even if you know the answer to their question and are dying to get it out. Stop yourself and KEEP LISTENING until they are through. Your evaluation may change by the time they finish.

3) Sift what you hear for content. Try to clearly grasp the main points made. Don’t be distracted by style, accent, grammatical errors, or minor digressions.

4) Ask questions to clarify the situation before throwing out any ideas or solutions. You may or may not understand the client’s needs after the first burst of information. Ask open-ended questions like “How do you feel…” or “What do you think about…” to get more information. If you are confused, paraphrase and restate what you are getting, “So, what I hear you saying is… Is that right?”

5) If the subject matter is complex, take notes that will allow you to reconstruct the client’s statements later. Remember the Fourth Rule of Business Development: Always, always, always have business, pocket, or notecards to write on and a pen.

6) Make typical Listening Noises, like “umhmm,” “oh,” “really,” “gee,” and “that’s too bad.” It reassures the speaker that you’re following along and that you empathize.

7) When you start to listen, turn off your cell phone, take a deep breath, and then concentrate on what they have to say. Like the waggle before a golf swing, a deep breath will help you concentrate to listen more attentively. Turning off the cell phone helps minimize interruptions and implicitly tells the client he is important enough that you don’t want to be interrupted.

8) Try to control your own emotions and feelings. The only person in the world you can control is yourself so make sure you are doing everything you can to keep your emotional state from sabotaging communications. This is especially difficult when someone is making racist/sexist/politically incorrect remarks and even more essential if you are going to help them.

9) Listen respectfully. Don’t fidget or fume or snort. People are very sensitive to when others are being disrespectful. Professionals who don’t respect their clients usually lose them.

10) Listening is an opportunity to explore others’ paths. Listening and learning are wonderful opportunities to see your world through other people’s eyes and to have your own opened up, if you will just listen to how they see the world and what they consider important.

The Golden Rule of Attention
“Whatsoever listening that ye would that men should do unto you, do ye so to them.” As in so many things in life, you can use your own desires to gauge what others would like. Everyone wants to be listened to. You should pay attention to others at the same level that you would like them to pay attention to your ideas and desires. Listen, learn, and help your firm succeed.

About the Authors Richard Cilley, CPSM, is CEO of Transcendent Consultants (www.transcendentconsultants.com), and Tom Boogher, CPSM, is Executive Vice President of Professional Service Industries, Inc. (www.psiusa.com). Richard and Tom have a combined 50-plus years of experience in marketing and sales within the A/E/C industry.

Hosted by SMPS' Business Development Institute, this column provides tips, best practices, and suggestions on how to excel at sales and client development. Remember that nothing happens in business until you make a sale! The Business Development Institute is a Specific Interest Group of SMPS with the goal to promote, inform, and educate the A/E/C industry on the importance of sales and the necessity for business development best practices.

Your comments, feedback, suggestions and questions are encouraged. Please drop either editor an e-mail with any input. You can reach Tom Boogher at tom.boogher@psiusa.com or Richard Cilley at rcc@transcendentconsultants.com. [ return to top ]