Listening Skills - Pay Attention

By Jeffery Combs

Only one-third of the speaker’s meaning is conveyed by words. Two-thirds is conveyed by body language, indicating emotional tone. Listening will directly impact your potential for sales and prospecting for new associates or distributors. Becoming a good listener requires practice, patience, and a genuine interest in other people.

Here are three ways to enhance your listening skills:

Make the speaker feel comfortable and important by being courteous and respectful; Show your attentiveness to the speaker by nodding your head or saying, “yes” or “I see” from time to time; Listen between the lines to detect when someone is being dishonest or evasive with you.

By honing your listening skills, you can catch hints in your speaker’s voice, attitude, or body language that indicate a lack of interest or enthusiasm for your product or company.

Many clients aren’t selling or recruiting because they are not listening for the truth when they hear it. They simply hope that what they are hearing isn’t what it sounds like. Our distributors or associates may miss the “not interested” message completely because they either don’t want to hear it or really don’t hear it because they are so focused on what they intend to say next.

Listening Types

Reflective and paraphrase listening will assist you to communicate to your prospects that you are, in fact, listening to them and are aware of their concerns and points of view.

Reflective listening is repeating some words your prospects or customers use as you listen to them speak. Reflective listening builds rapport in three ways:

It shows that you are paying attention and understand what the speaker is telling you; It keeps someone else talking long enough for you to evaluate whether they are a prospect who is serious or just curios; and Paying attention and listening is a good investment of a few minutes of your time in the interviewing stages.

In paraphrase listening, you paraphrase what your prospect says. I teach my clients how to interview their prospects to see if they are people they would like to work with. Many people confuse “interview” with “interrogate.”

By practicing the shared listening technique, you will find that all of your questions get answered without your prospects feeling they are under a microscope. Shared listening allows you to turn a questioning process into a conversation.

Developing a conversation, rather than asking one question after another, is a great way to get a person to open up. Your prospects will feel more comfortable revealing information to you if they feel you have something in common, and lets them see you as a real person.

Listen closely and make brief notes as your prospects share in your conversation. You will soon discover your prospects’ motivators – or lack thereof – as well as their “hot buttons,” which you can repeat back to them when it’s time to as for a decision or close.

Continue listening even after your new distributor or associate has signed their application. Much of my success as a prospector, recruiter, retailer, trainer, and now personal coach has been achieved because of my willingness to listen. I’m able to recall names, places, and other information with little or no effort, because when it was first given out, I paid attention.

Jeffery Combs is an internationally recognized speaker, trainer, and author committed to assisting people with personal growth and development. He can be contacted online at http://www.GoldenMastermind.com or toll free 800-595-6632.

Read the additional Listening Skills Articles below:

Paying Attention Without Resistance

Have you ever paid attention to the ringing of church bells on Sunday morning? If so, what do you listen to? Do you listen to the notes or to the silence between the notes? If you listened to the silence, wouldn’t the notes have a different sound and quality? Listening to the silence is called listening below the surface and this is a technique I have been perfecting for the last few years. I have found that very few people know how to pay attention; therefore very few people know how to listen. It is very important in the game of life, entrepreneurship, sales, and marketing to hear what is really being said - the real meaning and what messages are being sent.

Read more of Paying Attention Without Resistance

Master The Art of Listening

It is my opinion that listening is one of the most underdeveloped skills in sales and entrepreneurship. When I say listening, I mean really listening. It is a skill that I have taught myself in the last 13 years. Most people in America are what I call average listeners. They hear most of what people are saying or they sort through the fluff. The master prospectors, however, teach themselves to hear at a different level. They hear what people are really telling them. I teach that 20% of your time in conversation should be spent asking and answering questions; the other 80% should be spent listening to what the other person is saying and not saying.

Read More of Master The Art of Listening

Motivational Article Index

Jeffery & Erica Combs host The More Heart Than Mindset Conference each and every January to assist you to create quantum leaps to success in your enterprise by bringing world-class speakers and personal development experts together in an inspiring and empowering 3 day forum EVERYONE can afford to attend!

Just watch these live video testimonials, recorded at The More Heart Than Talent Mindset Conference in 2007 for a taste of what you will experience at this event in 2011!