I recently listened to a presentation about listening skills, and found what I heard to be a disturbing. In general, it’s my sense that listening to your prospects is the best way to learn about their interests, so that you can speak to them in a manner that is relevant – which is a much quicker route to a sale (or learning that you would be wasting your time trying to get there) than bludgeoning prospects with random claims and hoping they will discover the way in which your offering is relevant. But what I heard seemed utterly misguided.
Specifically, the presentation was an assemblage of random tips that will enable you to deceive someone else into believing that you are actually listening to them. I’d be upset if I thought that was the speaker’s intention, and it is true that each of the things she spoke of is in fact a cue that suggests to another person that you are actually listening to them – but you can do each of these things without paying any amount of attention to what they happen to be saying. Consider this:
- Allow the speaker to finish their point before offering your own
- Maintain intermittent eye contact with the speaker, being careful not to glare at them or allow your gaze to wander
- Do not check your phone or glance at your watch while they are speaking.
- Make facial reactions that indicate you are reacting to what they say
It’s been my own experience in conversing with people, especially with salesmen, that they often give off these cues without actually listening: the next thing they say does not follow in the conversation, or they ask a question that did not need to be asked based upon what I had just finished saying, or riff off of a few words I have said in a way that shows no context to the thread of the conversation.
Perhaps I’m a boring person – or at least that’s what’s suggested by fake-listening behavior – and I find it all the more offensive for a person to pretend to be listening when they actually are not, as it adds deception to the insult, which is likely much worse.
It’s likely understandable in salesmen, because their motive is ultimately to turn the conversation around to communicating to their prospect about the product they wish to sell. But the few good manuals on sales that I have found tend to agree this is the wrong approach: it is not how much you say to a prospect, but how relevant your message is to their own interests – and without listening, it’s impossible to know what those interests are and speak appropriately.
Neither do I think that fake-listening is a small step on a road to recovery, such that a person who is not at all interested in listening to others can “fake it” until they learn to be interested. More likely, it’s something they can do so that they can carry on not listening while giving the appearance that they are, which likely works with unobservant and gullible prospects.
And again, I don’t expect that it was this speaker’s intent to teach people to be false and disingenuous – but neither did she have anything of particular value to say that could lead a person who is already false and disingenuous to learn it is at all possible to be otherwise.
In the end, I think this has been more of a reaction to an unfortunate presentation and the connection to customer experience hasn’t been particularly overt, but it should be clear that companies can be just as guilty of fake-listening as their salesman (and in many instances, they are one and the same).
There are likely other ways that companies can fake-listen, particularly in the online channel – where a firm can offer a suggestion box where customer complaints can be conveniently ignored, or barge into private conversations in social media to hawk their wares, or to otherwise seek to be one-sided, ignoring what is said except as a foil by which they can find an excuse to blather on about their own interests.
But that’s likely too long and diverse a topic to explore in a meditation that has already blathered on overmuch.
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