Best Advice: Shut Up and Listen

When I first started out my career as a salesperson for Radio Disney at the age of 22, I was young and foolish (well, even younger and more foolish than I am today). I thought I had a great product to sell and that people would love to listen to me talk about it. I thought I could be charming and persuasive and convince decision-makers why it made sense to use my product to solve their marketing problems. I thought I could talk my way into anything. 

 ,

I thought wrong.

Several weeks into my job, I was failing miserably, despite what I considered to be loads of charm and ability to persuade. My mentor, the Regional Sales Manager for Radio Disney at the time, Peggy Iafrate, said to me, “How well are you listening to what your prospects have to say? How many questions are you asking them to better understand them? How are you showing them that you care about them more than you care about selling them?”

"Dave," she said, "Remember this one thing: Shut up and listen." 

I hadn’t been doing a very good job of listening. In fact, by my very nature, I’m a type-A personality, full of thoughts, running a mile a minute, an impatient New Yorker who always has something to say and rarely slows down. So, it took some real dedication and practice to listen to what Peggy told me about listening and heed her advice. 

I began asking my prospects more questions. Listening to their problems, listening to their

 

interests, listening to their every word became my obsession. I thought very little about how to sell them on advertising with Radio Disney and instead focused on listening attentively to everything they had to say so that I could better understand them as people and better understand their organizational needs and challenges. Once I understood them, I could do a much better job of delivering what they wanted and needed, both in the product I was selling and in the way I sold it. 

Things quickly started to fall into place once I started listening. Within six months, I was the number-one local salesperson in the country, and a year later, Peggy awarded me the “Mickey Award” for sales success. All for shutting up and listening.

Salespeople, leaders, entrepreneurs and business people are full of ideas. Many of you have ideas all day long every day about how to make the world a better place, make money, solve problems and lots more. But the very nature of active listening requires us to put aside our ideas completely, if only for a moment, in order to focus on what someone else has to say.

As difficult as that can be, it’s through listening to customers, prospective customers, colleagues, employees and others that we can better understand what their needs and motivations are, and ultimately make our ideas better and more executable. It’s leaders like you who need to learn to listen better, even more so than the world’s followers.

J.P. McEvoy said, "When you talk, you are repeating what you already know. But if you listen, you may learn something new." 

So, as Peggy said to me years ago, please, for your own good and the good of the world, shut up and listen. 

Dave KerpenInfluencer

CEO, Likeable Local, NY Times Best-Selling Author & Keynote Speaker

The Power of “So What?”

You've gotta talk pain and pain relief when marketing to your ideal prospects. Take advantage of a sarcastic-sounding question that's actually a powerful marketing tool.

I suspect all of us have heard—and used—the phrase “So what?” many times. Delivered in a certain tone of voice (you know the one), it’s a snarky question guaranteed to fuel conflict.  Asked another way, however, it’s a powerful marketing tool.  When asked in a tone of genuine curiosity, “So what?” elevates our marketing from the realm of “I’m blah with blah blah and we offer blah blah blah” to the realm of “I know that you experience this type of pain, and here’s how I relieve that pain for you” 

Have a talk with yourself
In my opinion, it’s best to start by asking yourself  this pointed question. 

Whenever you identify a feature of your product and service, haul out the “So what?” guns.  This will force you to think from your client’s perspective and identify clearly why anyone cares about that particular feature; in other words, it will start you digging down to the benefit your product/service provides.

Once you’ve come up with an answer, ask the question again. Keep asking it until you’ve really drilled down to the essential value provided. Then move on to the next feature of the next service/product.

Going through this process is not necessarily fast or  easy. However, with determination, focus on the powerful marketing messages you’re creating, and massive amounts of chocolate, you’ll become much more clear on exactly how you provide value to your clients.

The big clue
How do you know when you’ve truly answered the question in a way that will improve your marketing results?  When your answer describes the emotional outcomes you create for your client : a feeling of financial security, or confidence, or relief, or personal power, or satisfaction...you get the idea.

The next step
That’s step one.  Step two is checking in with your clients to determine if what you  perceive as high value is the same as what they perceive.  Many times you’ll be beautifully aligned with how your clients are feeling and thinking. However, to simply assume you know what they most value is just begging to waste time, money, and effort on marketing messages that fail to address what’s important from the client’s perspective—which, after all, is the one that really matters.

How do you confirm or disprove your hypothesis about your product’s/service’s crucial value?  Ask.  Spend some time creating a survey that will genuinely take five minutes or less to complete, then send it to your customers.  You can do this at no charge by using a service like SurveyMonkey, you can ask for help with a posting on your company Facebook page, or you can tweet it.

As with any type of communication, your request for input has to answer the client’s question, “What’s in it for me to take time to do this?”  Here’s where the ethical bribe comes in.

You can arrange to put the name of everyone who responds in a drawing for a $100 gift card to the store of their choice; you can limit the drawing to the first X people to respond; you can send all respondents a $5 card to a local coffee shop.  This tangible bribe is, naturally, in addition to pointing out that getting guidance directly from your customers is going to allow you to improve your level of service and the amount of value they receive from you.

Once you’ve gathered your data, it’s crucial to acknowledge your clients’ input and to promptly start addressing any concerns that you uncovered.  Asking how you can improve and then failing to act on the information is a sure-fire way to create bad feelings—and decreased revenues.

Fer instance...
I’m launching a business called Stepping Into Big. Here’s one way to describe it:
Stepping Into Big, LLC, offers a highly collaborative, 90-day, business-building program comprising three modules. Delivery focuses on where the client is and where she wants to end up. Derailers addresses those mental and operational obstacles which have gotten her off track in the past. And Delivery looks at the challenges she faces in actually implementing her ideas. Clients finish the 90 days with a high-level Master Action Plan for moving forward as well as more detailed individual action plans in five key success areas. 

Yawn. 

Okay, maybe not a huge yawn, but, really: Why would I just list attributes of the service instead of addressing the prospect’s pain and the type of pain-relief outcomes she can expect from working with me?  Would the following description perhaps resonate more with my ideal client?

Are you so paralyzed by all the things you could do to grow your business that you struggle to decide what you will do?  Do you cringe when you think of all the great ideas that never get implemented?  Then maybe it’s time to get some help so you can start creating a bigger business as well as a bigger life.  In just 90 days, the Stepping Into Big co-creative process will get you out of overwhelm and into control. You’ll feel confident, clear, and calm after we’ve developed a strategic Master Action Plan as well as detailed, tactical individual action plans in five key success areas to get you out of neutral and moving briskly down your road to success. Stepping Into Big provides a guiding hand for your journey to genius.

Bottom Line
We owe it to ourselves, our businesses, and especially our customers to clearly and compellingly share our value.  If your product or service is the answer to a prospect’s prayers, I think you actually have an obligation to that prospect to make it clear how you move them from pain to peace.  Asking the tough question “So what?” will make it easier to connect with the people whom you can best serve—and isn’t that the point of it all?

I shook the dust of W-2 work from my feet in 2000 and never looked back. Now, as an implementation specialist, I use the Take Action Now System (tm) to create customized action plans that propel clients down the road to more clients and more money.

Kathleen Watson