Listening

The tough bit of sales calls is you have 0 control over what someone else says, only what you say, your tone and how you react. 

This is why the most important thing is to listen carefully, which is also the thing salespeople do the worst. The biggest impact I typically have is helping sellers become better listeners. Some said the main benefit of sales training is having better relationships with their wife or husband who say they’ve become better listeners!

So let’s imagine I ask someone, “how are you training your sales team at the moment?”

They reply, “we have an internal sales enablement team who do the training.”

Sellers are then typically split into 2 camps. Camp 1 fold and give up, but Camp 2 go into “fighting” mode and trash talk. There is a better 3rd way, which is this framework:

Accept, Probe and Understand

Accepting is to acknowledge and recap what was said:

“You mentioned your sales enablement team does the training.”

90% of salespeople move onto their next agenda item without acknowledging what the customer just said. Starting with “you mentioned...” is a good way to make sure you recap.

Once you’ve done that you probe with an open-ended question like:

“Tell me more about the enablement team and what they’re doing with your sellers?”

The goal here is to purely understand their process better. They then say:

“They actually work in revenue operations but they build a lot of playbooks and do one training session a month.” Just because I’ve asked one additional question here I’ve been able to uncover more info.

So remember, accept, probe and understand as a framework on every call.

Cheers,

Michael Hanson

CEO GrowthGenie