The Magic of Talking Less
The Secret Sauce for Successful Customer Conversations
One of the key customer conversation practices in my Ditch the Pitch methodology is called, “Say less to notice more.”
The concept is simple: When you talk less, your customer talks more, and hands you “gifts” that reveal what this customer cares about.
I was speaking recently with my friends Peter and Susan Glaser about some research from their wonderful book Be Quiet, Be Heard. (Isn’t that the best title for a book on communications?)
In this research, Peter and Susan observed people having two-person conversations in their lab at the University of Oregon, where they were professors at the time. Peter and Susan measured what percent of the time each person spoke in the conversation. After the conversation was over, they had each participant fill out a questionnaire about how they felt about the conversation.
What they found was powerful: For each pair of people, the person who spoke more than 50% of the time:
Enjoyed the conversation more
Felt better about the other person
Was more committed to the outcome of the conversation
Wow.
Is this the best customer conversation “hack” ever? Just let your customer talk more than you, and they will enjoy talking to you more, feel better about you, and be more committed to the outcome of the conversation.
Now contrast this with the way most people approach customer conversations. They go into sales calls with thick PowerPoint presentations. They go into customer update meetings laden with reports, bullet points and explanations that they force the customer to listen to.
In today’s marketplace, it is so difficult to earn customers' attention, business and loyalty. Peter and Susan Glaser are offering us a very straightforward way to address this: Let your customer talk more than you.
I teach people to say less, so they will notice more. Peter and Susan teach us that if we say less, the customer will leave the conversation feeling better about us and more committed to the next steps.
The takeaway for you is simple: Talk less.
In every conversation, monitor how much your customer is talking… and ensure that it is much more than you are talking.
That’s when the magic happens.