The most important skill to develop in communicating with people is listening.

Understanding human nature is critical is selling and marketing of any product or service, whether you do it face to face or not.

People are primarily interested in themselves.  People like to be heard and made feel important.

The worst salespeople on the planet are the ones that do all the talking and never stop to listen to what their prospect says.

In my personal selling career, I’ve made a habit of when I first sit down with someone to talk about my services, I simply ask them questions, then sit back and listen.

If you listen closely enough, people will tell you EXACTLY what motivates them and what you need to do to sell them.

Asking key questions will help you uncover your prospects fears, motivations, what they like, what they don’t like, and what their primary concerns are.

If you do most of the talking you’ll never find out any of those things.

If you do your business through mail or online without an actual contact with the client, then I suggest, you contact some of your clients and customers, and do some research to find out, what really does motivate them, and what their fears are.

If you have some very happy customers find out what made them choose you over the competition, and also ask people that didn’t buy from you why they didn’t.

This isn’t about ego gratification or anything else.  This will help you in a big way to understand your buyer and what they want is.

Also, people like to listen to themselves, so let them.

Anytime you’re communicating with your prospects and customers, remember that they always have the thought of What’s In It For Me (WIIFM) going on in their head.

Don’t forget to thank them, gratitude goes a long way, and people like to reciprocate, that’s another human trait.

Lastly, always remember this, make people feel important.  People make decisions based on how they feel.  Making them feel special, appreciated, important, will create lots of positive energy and they will buy because of how they feel.

Keep these thoughts in mind every time you talk with your customer or send out a marketing campaign.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 6th, 2008 at 1:52 pm and is filed under Marketing, Sales. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.