One of the most valuable skills in sales is listening.
This is true for selling online or offline - 'belly-to-belly', or when writing copy.
Selling is communication.
We might think that good communication means being a good speaker or writer. But the most important communication skill is actually listening.
And it's a much rarer skill.
As George Bernard Shaw said, "The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
A perfectly written sales letter to a completely disinterested audience will fail.
Marketers have to be skilled at both ends of communication: sending and receiving.
Think about teenagers.
The teen years can be difficult when it comes to communication. Teens aren't as excited to talk to their parents as they were when they were younger.
On the other hand, teens are masters of non-verbal communication. The posing, pouting and attitude seem to say more than a 900-page novel.
In the book, Spy the Lie, the authors (all ex-CIA officers skilled in interrogation) observe that, in a given moment, we are either visually dominant or auditorily dominant. We don't multitask well.
A weird pimple on a person's face makes you less likely to catch the details of what they're saying. If you're engrossed in a conversation, you're less likely to notice all the shenanigans going on in the background.
In fact, we have to force ourselves to retain both verbal and visual details at the same level of focus, and can only do so in short bursts. In Spy, they call it putting your brain in "L-squared mode."
Focused listening is a useful skill.
If you're a copywriter, 'listen to' your market by observing what they post in online forums and social media.
Learn how they speak and use it in your copy. It'll be much more effective.
If you sell in person, listening carefully will tell you how to position your product to address the needs of the person in front of you. Honing your listening skills pays off in increased sales.
A word of caution: Listening to your market doesn't mean sending them surveys and then blindly doing as they say.
An example of this is when a large soft drink company changed its formula in 1985. The new formula beat a competitor's flagship product and its own flagship drink in 200,000 taste tests, but there was practically a revolution when new formula was released.
Nostalgia for the brand motivated protesters to force the company back to the original formula that same year.
In hindsight, maybe they should have tested the new formula in the market before making the change.
So, 'listen' to your market by immersing yourself in research. Meet them, talk to them. Know them. Find out what they're buying.
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