4 reasons why you are not listening to your prospects.

If there's one thing I realised after years of working with sales team is how challenging active listening is. I am convinced that everyone talks about active listening. Yet nobody does it.

And it's neither a new issue not one that will ever be fixed easily in people who don't train and practice at getting better. Robert Mckloskey, US Secretary of States during the Vietnam War, said:

I know that you believe that you think you understand what I said, but I am not sure you realise what you heard is not what I meant.

There are several reasons why we are very bad at active listening. I'll outline some of the underlying reasons in this post. Fortunately, there are several approaches we can take to put things right. You probably enjoy reading long blog posts as much as I enjoy writing them (i.e. not a lot). So I'll be publishing another post shortly on how to fix active listening issues if you have identified them.

First, what are the reasons why we don't listen to others?

1- Our brain is naturally the first culprit. Our brain is a "super computer". It is capable of processing an enormous amount of information at incredible speed. The problem lies in the delta between our brain's capacity to process information and our interlocutor's capacity to send it. The figures vary from study to study, but this article mentions that our brain processes 800 words per minute. But we speak at a speed of 125 words per minute. That's why, while someone talks to us, we prepare our replies, or worse still, our brain goes in all different directions.

2- Secondly, the difference between our communication profile and that of the people we are talking to. We all communicate differently. And we all make our decisions differently. These things are well known and it's even easy to understand how we and our prospects communicate and how they make decisions through psychometric profiling. I use the Extended DISC approach that I explain in a white paper and implement the use of this approach in our transformation programmes with my clients.

3- We have biases. It's inevitable, we are the product of all our past experiences and these cognitive biases filter the information we receive. There's a whole list of biases that you can find here. One or two that I'm particularly fond of are the reinforcement bias, where we only look for information to confirm what we've already decided (don't believe me? take a look at Twitter with its echo chamber of people looking for their own opinions). Or our tendency to fill in the missing information and draw on our past experiences to arrive at conclusions.

4- Our ego: Yes, our ego leads us to judge others too quickly. Coupled with the problem of negative bias, we often become defensive.

Trouble ahead…

So yes, there is a long list of challenges that make listening to others very difficult. Of course, it's not the end of the world. People still sell. People still interact. But things could be oh so much better.

What's the impact of poor listening?

The sales profession is the one where we derive our livelihood from our ability to understand other people clearly and precisely. So poor active listening skills are costing sales professionals dearly. This typically result in longer sales cycles, poor relationships with our prospects, misunderstandings, etc…

So what do we do?

That's a very good question. There's a whole range of things you can do. I explain some possible approaches in this article. I also produce occasional notes on these topics on Linkedin if you'd like us to connect.

What are you aware of that prevents you from listening to your prospects? And what are you consciously doing about it?