All good salesmen know that asking open questions and listening to the prospect’s answers is key to a successful sales call. As a young junior sales, I trained myself for years in this basic sales technique until I thought myself being very good at it.
But then, one of my colleagues showed me that you can go even one step further in ‘listening’ to your customer. He called it the power of silence.
When he asked a question to his customer, he listened very carefully, while writing down what his customer was saying. And instead of launching the next question as soon as the customer finished his story, he kept on writing saying nothing at all. The silence was overwhelming and after 10 to 15 seconds, the customer started talking again, giving us valuable information about our competitor’s offer and how we could improve ours to increase our chances of winning the deal.
When driving back to the office, he explained to me that customers tend to give only the information you ask for (by asking open questions) but they will limit this information to what they want you to have as information. However, very few people can stand the silence when, during that conversation, no one is talking at all. After a few seconds, they will start playing with their pen or mobile, start shuffling on their chair, ending with a little cough before they finally start talking again. “That is the information he was no supposed to give to you”, my colleague said. “The first part of his answer is interesting, the last part is what you really should know. When you ask them a question, they give the information, they want you to have, as they thought about what they are going to say beforehand. When confronted with this long period of silence, they start feeling uncomfortable and they want fill up this gap of silence as soon as possible by starting to talk again. And since they already gave you all the information they wanted you to have, they start giving information they initially not wanted to give to you.“
I started using this technique as well and I can tell you, … in the beginning it is very hard to keep silent for more than 5 seconds. I literally bit on my tongue to force me to keep my mouth shut. After some time, you get used to it and you start doing it in a natural way. But still today, every time I am using this technique, I am surprised by the effectiveness of it.
Try it yourself and you will be amazed about the power of silence!