Don’t read this post and believe that it the message is to do a thorough needs analysis or better discovery work. Don’t read this and believe it means anything about working vertically through your client or dream client’s organizational chart or discovering the ground truth.

This post isn’t about ensuring that you get the outcome that you need; it’s about ensuring that your client or dream client gets an outcome that they need.

Broadcasting On All Channels

As salespeople, marketers, and business people, we spend a lot of time working on how to create value for our dream clients and clients. We spend more time and energy working on our message, positioning and differentiating ourselves in what is a crowded and competitive marketplace of ideas and offerings.

Our messages take a lot of bandwidth, and we broadcast on all channels, leaving little room for anything else.

We spend far less time giving our dream clients what they sometimes want more than anything else—to be heard.

The Most Effective Way to Prove That You Care

Because it is critical that you share the ideas that will help your dream clients and clients succeed and close the gaps that prevent them from achieving their business objectives, it’s easy to broadcast more than you listen.

But sometimes the most important thing you can do to create an opportunity (or to move an opportunity forward) it to simple listen.

Your dream client wants to share their issues with you, so that you will understand why they are dissatisfied and how they found themselves so.

Your dream clients want to share how the difference between their desired state and their present performance impacts their business—and how it impacts them personally.

Your dream clients want to share with you all of the ideas that they have for how their performance might be improved.

The way that you prove that you care about your dream client enough to earn the right to be their partner in improved performance is to listen. You prove that you care by ensuring that your dream client knows that they have been heard.

Make Ensuring That Your Dream Client Is Heard Is Your Outcome

To make sure that your dream client is heard, make it an outcome of every sales interaction. Be conscience of the fact that your dream client has a desire to be heard, and put forth the effort to ask questions with the intention of listening so that your dream client will know that their thoughts, ideas, and opinions are important, that you care.

The act of listening is the greatest evidence of caring. If you want a real personal differentiator as a salesperson, marketer, or leader, learn to listen with the intention of ensuring that person you are listening to knows that they are being heard.

Questions

When you spend time with your dream clients, even when it is a discovery sales call, is your intention to make sure they know that they are heard, or is it to simply gather the information that you need?

How do you listen with the intention of ensuring that the person to whom you are listening knows that they were heard?

How do you listen in way that proves that you care? How would someone listening to you give you evidence that you were heard and that they cared?

For more on increasing your sales effectiveness, subscribe to the RSS Feed for The Sales Blog and my Email Newsletter. Follow me on Twitter, connect to me on LinkedIn, or friend me on Facebook. If I can help you or your sales organization, check out my coaching and consulting firm, B2B Sales Coach & Consultancy, email me, or call me at (614) 212-4729.

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