"If you really listen to your prospects, this is what you'll hear: they're tired of salespeople telling them what they need," writes Josiane Feigon in Smart Selling on the Phone and Online: Inside Sales That Gets Results. "It is only by actively listening that you'll discover what their pain is."

In this excerpt from Smart Selling on the Phone and Online, Feigon explains how and why listening has changed and how to adjust and improve your listening skills as a result:

Why has everyone stopped listening?

Customers are tired of salespeople telling them what they need, and angry at being misunderstood by quota-pressured salespeople who need to set appointments or close a deal. They are annoyed with salespeople who ask for a few minutes of their time and then abuse that time with their own agenda and never acknowledge them. Can you blame customers for rebelling by refusing to answer generic qualifying questions, or by simply refusing to take your call?

The nearly lost art of listening sits at the core of this entire book. It is the only skill that provides a doorway to selling from the inside out. In my trainings and in this book I take an aggressive and active approach to listening, encouraging salespeople to think intuitively and listen strategically for new opportunities.

Listening begins after we've asked some well-formulated questions. But this means really listening—not hearing what you want to believe, or thinking about your agenda and waiting for your turn to talk. It means actively listening to what your prospects are telling you, trying to take in what they are saying, and diving deeper into your questioning efforts.

Stop, stand still, look around, and listen up. In this chapter, I'm asking you to ask yourself the tough questions: What does your sales intuition say? Are you too busy listening for what you wish you could hear versus what is really said? Are you aware of the barriers that keep you from listening thoughtfully and trap you into reacting without thinking? What is keeping you from listening to yourself? What listening gift can you offer those close to you? What does it mean to focus on someone else's agenda versus your own for once? 

Listening in Sales 2.0: I Can't Hear You Now

By now you've got the Sales 2.0 picture: information overload, distractions, paralysis, getting noticed in a noisy market, an uncertain economy creating risk-adverse buyers. This environment does not set the stage for building a foundation of trust with solid interpersonal skills such as listening. Companies have stopped listening, customers have stopped listening, and salespeople have stopped listening. It's not surprising. When panic is pervasive and uncertainty is the norm, how can anyone take the time to listen, to believe, or to feel heard?

In the last chapter, we saw that poor listening tops the list of items that customers hate about salespeople. Customers do not feel heard from a sales and service perspective.

Salespeople continue to poorly qualify and make false sales assumptions, and in so doing they lose the possibility of really understanding their prospects.

Margaret Young's recent white paper titled "You're Not Listening to Me!" states, "In today's technology-driven market, companies are increasingly using sophisticated technologies to target and talk with high value customers and prospects. However, they may fail to implement the business practices that demonstrate that they can both listen and respond to customer needs. . . .Listening to customers means that we not only understand what they want, but that we can deliver what they want."

The impact of poor listening is costing organizations serious revenue dollars. As Janelle Barlow notes in her book A Complaint Is a Gift, when a customer is unhappy because they don't feel heard, they can spread the word within minutes through viral marketing—and bad news travels faster than good news.

Why Customers Sometimes Can't Hear You

The Sales 2.0 environment actually puts obstacles in place that prevent customers from listening.

Noise. Your customers' world is so crammed with information that they just don't have the bandwidth. Taking the time to listen to you means learning something new, and they're maxed out already. Like some salespeople, they may be conditioned to move fast and make quick decisions. Listening means they have to slow down or even stop, which just feels like wasting time. Listening also requires them to shut down the input—turn off their cell phone, stop texting on their Blackberry, and control interruptions. They just may not be able to do that.

Workplace Stress. Your customer may not look forward to going to work on Mondays. General workplace morale is looking pretty shaky—those who have survived layoffs and downsizing are overworked, exhausted, and panicked most of the time. 

Privacy. Finally, there could be privacy issues. Customers want personalized service, but they don't want anyone to intrude on their space. Your call is just another unwelcome intrusion.

Why Salespeople Stop Listening

Customers are not the only ones. Many salespeople have also stopped listening, and for some of the same Sales 2.0 reasons.

Workplace Stress. Job stress has become a common and costly problem in the workplace. In today's economy, salespeople today are not just worried about making enough appointments and making quota, they are worried about losing the ability to ensure their family's survival.

Poor Preparation, Documentation, and Note-Taking Skills. The need for speed can cause salespeople to overlook some of the basics in their rush to make calls. Reps must learn to integrate all their information to demonstrate a stronger understanding of the prospects so they can help them feel heard and listened to. Then they must document what they've learned in their notes so they don't forget it!

Ego. A healthy ego is a necessary personality trait for a good salesperson, as is the need to conquer and be competitive. But the downside of ego is that it can lead salespeople to get defensive, reactive, and shut down their listening.

Lack of Conversational Expertise. The majority of inside salespeople are Millennials, raised with the web. They often lack expertise in building and sustaining conversations, which ultimately is how a prospect feels heard.

Tools and Assumptions. The abundance of tools at our disposal can cause us to make more assumptions, quickly categorizing prospects without checking them out. We form opinions about titles, press release announcements, previously documented notes, and so on, and we come in equipped with our preconceived notions. We'll discuss the trap of listening with false assumptions in depth later in this chapter.

Metrics. If the focus is on quantity, quality suffers. When you think you have to make a certain number of calls or fall off the chart, you don't have time to listen.

The Listening Model Has Changed

In the last decade, selling styles have gone through the biggest changes in their history. Markets have become more diverse. Products and services never before available are being introduced each and every day. The pace is staggering. Your customers are demanding relationships with their vendors and place a higher priority on service rendered. It's a brand new sales model.

In the past, we sold in a traditional sales model that looked something like this:

• Ten percent of selling time was establishing rapport: "Don't waste time with the customer. Get down to business."
• Twenty percent of selling time was qualification: "Find out if they have any money before you spend time on them."
• Thirty percent of the selling was presenting: "You won't be successful if you don't have 'the Gift of Gab.'"
• Forty percent of the selling time was closing technique: "Buyers are liars. Close early and often."

Today's sales approach has been transformed completely:

• Ten percent of the selling time is confirming, closing the sale, or gaining agreement to proceed. The better you handle the first part of the sale, the easier it will be to gain agreement to proceed.
• Twenty percent of the selling is presentation and demonstration of solutions that have been mutually identified as having potential to address the customer's needs.
• Thirty percent of selling time is spent in understanding and identifying needs and problems and initiating relationships.
• Forty percent of selling time is spent listening, communicating, and building rapport. Listening builds trust and credibility. The more you listen, the more the person trusts you and will open up to you. Listening increases the prospect's confidence and lowers the perception of risk.

Get Out of Your Self-Selling Utopia

Salespeople are in the doghouse. They've blown it and have been selling from what I call "self-selling utopia." It's a very comfortable, familiar, and safe place to sell from. Comfortable because you don't have to risk rejection, familiar because you mostly do all the talking, and safe because no one is going to reject you—you'll take care of that yourself! It's like telling versus selling: when the salesperson launches into "pitching" mode without taking the time to probe, listen, and present, then they are telling the prospect about a solution too soon without probing deep enough to actually sell it. When they pitch so prematurely, they risk losing their prospect because their presentation isn't aligned to the prospect's needs.

Here's how this self-selling utopia works:

The salesperson engages the prospect with an introduction, then initiates discussion by asking a strong probing question that encourages the prospect to respond. Just as the prospect begins to formulate their response, however, the salesperson interrupts by volunteering the answer, formulating another question, and attaching a quick explanation of that question. The prospect is still attempting to answer the original question before tackling the latest question, but gets sideswiped once again with a new question from the salesperson.

Surprise! The prospect stops listening and starts to look for an easy exit. But the salesperson misinterprets the silence as interest and begins to push for an appointment. By this time, the prospect is mentally exhausted and  accepts an appointment simply to get the salesperson off the phone. Overjoyed, the salesperson confirms the appointment, explains what it will include, provides more information on preparing for the appointment, and asks the prospect if they have any questions. The prospect says no, in an attempt to get off the phone. The salesperson puts this appointment on the calendar and adds the prospect to a forecast that only exists in self-selling utopia.

Here's what a typical self-selling conversation sounds like:

Rep: "I'm calling to discuss your current networking needs. Can you tell me more about what you have in place?"

Prospect: "Our LAN environment is overdue for a reconfiguration. Files and data are getting lost and our end users are not happy . . ."

Rep: "Are you familiar with the Unified Solution? Let me tell you about how it works. We are the only product in the market that works on the following platforms. Our reach is broad and some of the biggest financial verticals have the same challenges as you do. Our team of developers has put together the best suite of products and the configuration is easy to install and maintain. I assume your department is overwhelmed with requests from your end users and we have found this to be the case, right?"

Prospect: "Well, this sounds familiar . . ."

Rep: "I'm so excited about this new product release because it is more secure than ever before. I realize that quality and reliability are critical success factors for you and that's what we deliver at our company, a name you can trust. It sounds like there are a lot of people on your network and this creates slow speed of delivery. "

Prospect: "Someone has just walked into my office to remind me of a meeting, can we continue our discussion next week?"

Clearly, the rep in this dialogue lacks the questioning and listening skills required for trust and rapport to develop. Don't let this happen to you!

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About the Author: Josiane Feigon, is president of TeleSmart and author of Smart Selling on the Phone and Online. Her Cubicle Chronicles blog is one of the top 25 sales blogs.

This excerpt is featured in Chapter 5 of the Smart Selling on the Phone and Online book published by Amacom Books ISBN 978-081441465. All Rights Reserved, 2009.